Hazlewood on the right path to make it to Australia’s T20 World Cup squad as he speaks of his road back to match fitness.
Hazlewood ‘on track’ to be part of Australia’s T20 World Cup campaign.
Josh Hazlewood, who saw his Ashes destroyed by injury, is certain that he will be prepared for the start of Australia’s T20 World Cup campaign in Sri Lanka next month.
Due to a hamstring strain, Hazlewood was unable to play in the England series in the beginning. While recovering, he developed an Achilles injury. He is aiming for a warm-up match before the World Cup early next month, but he won’t play in the T20Is against Pakistan in late January or the later stages of the BBL, where he is on the Sydney Sixers’ supplementary list.
Hazlewood also benefits from the tournament calendar, since Australia’s opening game against Ireland is scheduled for February 11. Australia wouldn’t be able to carry more than one player who wasn’t able to feature from the beginning, although chair of selectors George Bailey has already mentioned the possibility of holding Pat Cummins back to give him extra time if necessary.
“Everything’s going to plan,” Hazlewood told. “We took a few extra weeks once we couldn’t make the Test matches. I had a couple of bowls off the half-run last week. Running’s going well, all the strength stuff’s going well so, yeah, on track.”
Hazlewood has previously discussed collaborating with medical professionals to look into any common causes of his injuries, especially side issues. However, he has attributed the recent hamstring strain to misfortune and added that the Achilles issue was more related to more general ankle aches he had been dealing with.
“Sometimes, when one thing goes and the other thing resurfaces,” Hazlewood said of the back-to-back injuries this season. “But it [the ankle] was probably another thing I’d been just managing over the last few years, and then it just creeps up. I guess when you start back up, sometimes your body doesn’t like that stopping and getting it going [again]. So probably not as much of a dive into these two little niggles.
“But we’re still working on implementing training a different way a little bit. My gym and everything is still mostly the same, but I think purely from a bowling workload, leading into the next red-ball game, do as much as we can in terms of just dicing it up a little bit differently. Potentially bowling two or three days in a row and then having four or five days off and then doing that again, rather than Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.”