Wednesday’s squad news was relatively vanilla but there were some big developments about Afghan trio Rashid Khan, Mujeeb Ur Rahman and Mohammad Nabi hanging around longer in BBL|10.
SQUAD NEWS
The Scorchers and Sixers both named extended and unchanged squads for Wednesday’s match at Optus Stadium. It remains to be seen if the Sixers rotate their bowlers again.
Scorchers squad: Fawad Ahmed, Bancroft, Behrendorff, Hardie, Inglis, Kelly, Livingstone, Marsh, Munro, Paris, Patterson, Richardson, Rocchiccioli, Roy, Turner, Tye, Whiteman
Sixers squad: Avendano, Ball, Bertus, Bird, Brathwaite, Christian, Dwarshuis, J.Edwards, Hughes, Kerr, Manenti, O’Keefe, Philippe, Pope, Rogers, Sandhu, Silk, Vince
UPDATES
It looks like Afghanistan trio Rashid Khan ($210k BWL), Mohammad Nabi ($139k BAT/BWL) and Mujeeb Ur Rahman ($168k BWL) may play a few more BBL games than expected.
The trio have been called up for Afghanistan’s ODI series against Ireland in UAE from January 18-23 and were expected to leave on January 9 although that date had never been confirmed.
The Afghanistan Cricket Board confirmed on Tuesday that there’d been some “hurdles” in organizing the series, regarding visa issues and uncertainty around the host country with Oman floated before UAE was confirmed.
The ACB wrote as a result, “the hurdles may result in the series being postponed by three to four days than originally scheduled”, which explains the uncertainty around the BBL trio’s departure date.
Renegades coach Michael Klinger spoke to Fox Cricket before their Tuesday game and explained: “At the moment it looks like he’ll play one extra game than we thought. He’s going to play the next two then the game on the 14th at Marvel.
“After that it looks like he’ll leave us unless that schedule changes. There’s been quite a few changing dates. We’ll wait and see.”
It’s anticipated all three BBL Afghans would travel together so this would impact Rashid and Mujeeb as well.
Strikers stand-in captain Alex Carey ($174k BAT/WKP) was none the wiser earlier in the day, when he said: “Nah, I’m not sure (when he departs for Afghanistan duty). We love Rash at the Adelaide Strikers… It’d be great to have him (for the whole of the tournament).”
Klinger also provided an update on Shaun Marsh ($137k BAT). He said: “He’ll likely miss these two Adelaide games. He’s having a baby in the next couple of days and he’ll join us in Melbourne for the game on the 14th.”
For what it’s worth, Hurricanes batsman Ben McDermott ($132k WKP/BAT) backed D’Arcy Short ($187k BAT/BWL) to turn around his form.
McDermott said: “He’s normally pretty quiet (around the group). I think he’s going OK. He’s a world class player so he’ll bounce back. Everyone goes through these patches. We’re backing him in 100%.”
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FORM LINES
Haris Rauf’s ($213k BWL) commitments with the Pakistan Shaheens side finished on Tuesday as he took 0-27 from two overs and made 0* in a loss to a NZ XI in a T20 match.
Rauf played five T20s against various local sides, taking three wickets in five games and going fairly uneconomically in general. He’s free to travel to Australia now to link with the Stars. Their next game is Thursday 7 January.
TOMORROW
Round 7 will conclude with the Scorchers-Sixers game, while we’ll learn the squads for Thursday’s double-header between the Hurricanes-Thunder and Heat-Stars.
