🔗 Share this article The Australian Team Enter The Ashes Campaign with Change Abruptly Forced Upon an Older Team The Ashes could provide one cause for celebration, but this series will also witness the Australian team host more birthday parties than Timezone in the nineties. Recent addition Jake Weatherald celebrated his thirty-first birthday a day before the squad was named. Nathan Lyon turns 38 the day before the Perth Test. Beau Webster reaches 32 just ahead of the Brisbane match, Usman Khawaja will be 39 on the second day in Adelaide, Josh Hazlewood becomes 35 on the fifth day in Sydney, and Mitchell Starc will be 36 before January is over. Ageing Squad Interest Grows For two or three years there has been growing curiosity with the age of this team and particularly the bowling attack. It is unusual to have nearly all player near a Test team being over 30, except for novelty-sized mascot Cameron Green and occasional visitor Sam Konstas. But it didn’t logically follow that older age was a disadvantage: a Test team featuring a four-bowler lineup with 1,568 wickets between them is hardly a disadvantage, and it stands to reason that all of those bowlers are well into their careers. I can’t remember ever being so confident at the start of an away Ashes series | a former player Perhaps what really highlighted the discussion is that the reserve players over that time, Scott Boland and Michael Neser, are also well into their thirties. Emerging pacemen have floated into squads – Lance Morris, Jhye Richardson – before vanishing for years with injuries, meaning there has been no obvious replacement plan. Change Imposed by Injuries So far, that hasn’t mattered, as the Big Four plus Boland have kept on backing up. Any team knows that having a batch of similarly-aged players might mean a group of simultaneous departures, but so far transition has remained hypothetical: a process that would certainly be arriving the bend when she comes, but one that hadn’t yet steamed into view. Now, suddenly, transition is upon them, forced upon this Australian squad in the span of a short period. The back injury to Pat Cummins was greeted with equanimity: he would probably only miss the first Test, was the team management assessment, and as the first bowling change behind Starc and Hazlewood, he could comfortably be covered for by Boland. Brendan Doggett (left) and Mitchell Starc during a net session in Perth in the preparation to the first Test. Image: AAP But now that Hazlewood has been sidelined with a hamstring strain, the balance experiences a far greater change with two key bowlers absent rather than one. Cummins and Hazlewood as the two accurate right-arm bowlers give the stability and precision that enables Starc’s left-arm speed and movement to be used more as a attacking option. Missing both of them means a fundamental shift in the composition of the side. Boland taking the new ball is not unusual in his domestic career, but he has been so successful in Tests coming on after seven or eight overs of early pressure. Now he’ll probably have to be the man up front. Debutant Faces Pressure Behind him will come Brendan Doggett, who at thirty-one years of age himself isn't an intimidated youngster, but he might become an nervous thirty-one-year-old. A packed stadium, partly English, for the first Test of a eagerly awaited Ashes series will not make for an simple first match, no matter how many newspaper profiles describe him as relaxed. He could be wheeled onto the field on a sun lounger and still be nervous. Sign up to our cricket newsletter Who knows, it might all go smoothly for this revamped bowling lineup. It might not. What is notable is how rapidly Australia have moved from the surety of Starc, Lyon, Cummins, Hazlewood to the unknown of Starc, Lyon, mumble mumble. It's unclear what further injuries the first Test may bring. Who knows whether Cummins will be fit for the Brisbane Test, and able to continue after Brisbane, given how tricky stress injuries can be. Who knows how long Hazlewood might be sidelined, with a history of getting injured early in tournaments and a pattern of initially small injuries turning into longer layoffs. Outlook Uncertain The latter part of the series may see the main four bowlers reunited and all performing well. Or it might see transition setting in much earlier than the long-term aim of 2027 in the UK. Not through Neser, who is seemingly next in line and could be a excellent day-night Brisbane option, but after that with options unclear. Sean Abbott was in the original team, though he’s now also injured and has never played a Test. Richardson has just had his crash-test-dummy arm put back on, and this format is no place for easing into one’s work. After them lies the real unknown, and throughout it opportunity for the opposing side. You can hear that change approaching, rolling round the corner, and the English team ain’t seen the success since they can't recall when.