Mitchell Johnson says “alarm bells” are ringing for Australia’s ageing team after Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood were ruled out of the first Ashes Test.<\/p>\n
Captain Cummins, 32, has a back injury and fellow pace bowler Hazlewood, 34, has a hamstring problem.<\/p>\n
From Australia’s likely XI for Friday’s first Test in Perth, only all-rounder Cameron Green is under the age of 30.<\/p>\n
“When your leaders are all in their mid-to-late 30s and have heavy workloads banked, the odds eventually turn on you,” former Australia pace bowler Johnson wrote in the West Australian newspaper.<\/p>\n
“While losing Pat Cummins to injury was already a blow, one injury to a frontline quick is manageable. Losing two out of the big three starts to rewrite the whole script for the Ashes.<\/p>\n
“It narrows Australia’s margin for error and it forces selectors into decisions they’d hoped they wouldn’t have to make this early. It’s the sort of scenario that exposes the age profile of the squad.<\/p>\n
“The alarm bells are now ringing loud and clear regarding the future. That attack of Lyon, Boland, Starc and Hazlewood are all older than I was when I retired from international cricket.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mitchell Johnson says “alarm bells” are ringing for Australia’s ageing team after Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-267097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267097","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=267097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}