The Australian XI for Friday’s Boxing Day Test will be confirmed later in the afternoon after the team’s final training session.<\/p>\n
Australia<\/a>‘s top-seven was confirmed by stand-in captain Steve Smith<\/a> at a press conference on Thursday morning, with a middle order of Usman Khawaja<\/a> (five), Alex Carey<\/a> (six) and Cameron Green<\/a> (seven) to complement an unchanged top order.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mitchell Starc<\/a> and Scott Boland<\/a> will lead an all-pace attack to be joined by two more seamers out of the trio of Brendan Doggett<\/a>, Michael Neser<\/a> and Jhye Richardson<\/a>.<\/p>\n Richardson has been firming throughout the week as one of the two selections, having missed the start of the Perth Scorchers’ BBL campaign to prepare for a return to Test cricket after missing the entirety of last season with a shoulder reconstruction.\u00a0<\/p>\n Along with Murphy and Inglis, the Aussies also cut unlucky all-rounder Beau Webster from the 15-man squad announced on Monday.<\/p>\n Australia traditionally announce their Boxing Day XI on the afternoon of Christmas Day, though have previously in this series reserved their right to wait until the coin toss to confirm their team.<\/p>\n Australia 12-man 4th Test squad:<\/p>\n Steve Smith (c), Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Brendan Doggett, Cameron Green, Travis Head, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Michael Neser, Jhye Richardson, Mitchell Starc, Jake Weatherald<\/p>\n England confirmed 4th Test XI:<\/p>\n 1 Zak Crawley, 2 Ben Duckett, 3 Jacob Bethell, 4 Joe Root, 5 Harry Brook, 6 Ben Stokes (c), 7 Jamie Smith (wk), 8 Will Jacks, 9 Gus Atkinson, 10 Brydon Carse, 11 Josh Tongue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Australian XI for Friday’s Boxing Day Test will be confirmed later in the afternoon after the team’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-367056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}