England have selected off-spinner Shoaib Bashir in a 12-man squad for the fifth Ashes Test against Australia in Sydney.<\/p>\n
Bashir has not played in the first four matches despite starting the series as England’s first-choice spinner.<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old missed out on the first Test after being named in a 12-man squad in Perth and has since been overlooked in favour of all-rounder Will Jacks.<\/p>\n
Seamer Matthew Potts is also in the England XII, with the tourists guaranteed to make at least one change from the side that won the fourth Test in Melbourne after Gus Atkinson was ruled out with a hamstring injury.<\/p>\n
Under captain Ben Stokes and head coach Brendon McCullum, England usually name their XI two days out from a Test.<\/p>\n
However, the tourists have opted to wait longer before the final match, which starts on Sunday (23:30 GMT Saturday), in order to assess conditions at the Sydney Cricket Ground.<\/p>\n
On Thursday the pitch looked to have a thick covering of grass, but by Friday it was losing its green tinge.<\/p>\n
Sydney usually offers assistance to slow bowlers. Three of the four leading Test wicket-takers at the venue are Australian spinners \u2013 Shane Warne, Stuart MacGill and Nathan Lyon.<\/p>\n
But this Ashes has been dominated by seam bowling. So far only nine wickets have been taken by spinners, leaving it on track for the fewest taken by slow bowlers in an Ashes series of at least four Tests.<\/p>\n
Australia omitted a spinner from their line-up for the fourth Test, which England won by four wickets in Melbourne to cut the series deficit to 3-1.<\/p>\n
Now the hosts could include off-spinner Todd Murphy, while all-rounder Beau Webster may replace Cameron Green and also offers a spin option.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England have selected off-spinner Shoaib Bashir in a 12-man squad for the fifth Ashes Test against Australia in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-212882","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}