Under-pressure Australia coach Mickey Arthur tried to focus on cricket and the threat posed by Sri Lanka’s Lasith Malinga as the fall-out from the David Warner affair continued on Saturday.
Title-holders Australia must beat Sri Lanka at The Oval on Monday to have any chance of qualifying for the semi-finals of the Champions Trophy. But they go into the key fixture still facing questions about their team culture after Australia opening batsman Warner’s attack on England’s Joe Root in a Birmingham bar in the early hours of Sunday morning. Their chances will in part be dependent on the outcome of Sunday’s Group A match between England and New Zealand in Cardiff. If New Zealand win, Australia face a straight ‘quarter-final’ with Sri Lanka but if England triumph, they must beat Sri Lanka by a sufficiently large margin to surpass Kiwis’s net run-rate, the best in the group.
Australia do at least have some recent experience of facing Malinga, having played 10 one-dayers against Sri Lanka during the past 18 months. “Malinga is a phenomenon. He’s the best death bowler in the world without a doubt at the moment,” Arthur said Saturday.
“We’re very fortunate to have played Sri Lanka a lot over the last 15 months. We’ve had two one-day series against them. Our players have faced quite a bit of Malinga and we’ll have our plans,” he said.