McDonald refrains from making any sort of judgements from Test series because of nature of surfaces at West Indies.
Australia’s coach Andrew McDonald feels that because of the frequently dangerous conditions the squad saw during the West Indies tour—especially at Sabina Park, which at times “didn’t even look like cricket”—it is hard to make too many long-term inferences about their batting performance.
As he returns to the group of opening candidates before the Ashes, McDonald, who questioned the future of the pink Dukes ball in Test cricket, was certain that Sam Konstas wouldn’t suffer any detrimental effects from the tour. Additionally, he does not anticipate Marnus Labuschagne to be sidelined for very long because he has already shown promising results during his training after being dropped in Barbados.
“It’s really difficult to make accurate judgments on both batting units based upon the surfaces that we played on,” McDonald told The New Ball on SEN Radio. “And you take that into the third Test, which is a pink-ball Dukes on that surface, that game just moved way too fast and at times, it didn’t even look like cricket.
“…That cricket was borderline impossible to play at certain stages. Some of those deliveries from Mitchell Starc, the way that ball behaved under lights. So it’s a bigger question for what the pink Dukes looks like for Test match cricket, really.”
He conceded, though, that the series had left questions rather than answering them. “It feels as though we’ll still be a little bit unsettled in terms of what our combinations look like at the top of the order with the way that the performances have gone here,” he said. “In saying that, there’s a lot of cricket still to come to be able to gather that information.”