{"id":216988,"date":"2025-10-22T03:59:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T03:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/216988\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T03:59:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T03:59:11","slug":"the-ashes-joe-root-or-steve-smith-michael-vaughan-and-glenn-mcgrath-pick-combined-xi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/216988\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ashes: Joe Root or Steve Smith &#8211; Michael Vaughan and Glenn McGrath pick combined XI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Missing out: Travis Head<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Vaughan: Travis Head has probably been Australia&#8217;s best player in the past couple of years. The Bazball way is the Travis Head way. He scores so quickly. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In Harry Brook England have a very special player. Because I am right on the fence I am going to pick the England player. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">You could make a case that whoever has the better series could save the series for their team.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">McGrath: It&#8217;s an incredibly tough one. I went for Harry Brook because he is such a special player but the more I think about it I am nearly drifting back to Travis Head, only because of the bigger boundaries in Australia. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Brook takes bowlers on but the extra distance in the field, he will have to navigate and adapt to that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Tufnell: They are two powerhouses in that middle order. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The one perceived weakness with Harry Brook is the short ball just outside off stump and whether he wants to try taking on the hooks and pulls with the size of the grounds. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">I went for Harry Brook &#8211; a once in a generation type player.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Missing out: Travis Head Vaughan: Travis Head has probably been Australia&#8217;s best player in the past couple of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-216988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}