Green asked to focus on red ball cricket

All-rounder Cameron Green may be spared white ball duties for Australia to focus on his red ball game ahead of the Test series against India in the next home summer, coach Andrew McDonald said.
Green played Sheffield Shield cricket with Western Australia in the run-up to the ongoing New Zealand Test series and said the red ball preparation had helped set him up for his match-winning 174 not out in the Wellington opener.
McDonald said Green may be given a similar lead-in to the five-Test series against India and be rested from scheduled ODIs and T20Is against Pakistan that start the home summer.
“I’d like to probably err on the side of preparing him through red ball. We know how good a white-ball player he is so you put a priority on what it looks like next summer,” McDonald told reporters.
“The white-ball cricket’s important, but that Test summer’s important, so I think with the results he’s had (at Wellington) he’ll probably come to us and say, ‘Can you give us a couple of Shield games before the first Test against India? “We’ll use Shield cricket to get ready for the Test summer on an individual’s needs basis,” McDonald said. “There won’t be any (prescription that) this is what we’re doing with every player. But we’ll pick and choose what that looks like, based around international cricket.
“It’s a big decision to leave anyone out of international cricket when they’re actually potentially in the best XI.
“I was glad that (Green) embraced that when we had that conversation with him. And the return on it was pretty immediate. It’s not always going to be like that. So even if he failed here, we felt like that was his best preparation. So don’t always judge a result as making it right or wrong,” McDonald said.
“We think he can be a long-term option there and I think this is a big step towards that,” McDonald said on Monday.
“The conversations are always that he’s obviously a quality player and probably the statistics that everyone was looking at early on in his career probably didn’t reflect the player that’s in front of us.
“And I think we’ve seen a snapshot of that now. And I think the public’s been able to see what we’ve been able to see over a period of time in Western Australian cricket and the changeroom as a whole. So (it’s) a really impressive step forward.
“The way that he worked through batting with Josh Hazlewood as well, we’ve probably had a little bit of an issue batting lower down the order. We’ve seen opponents do it to us. But he was able to navigate five balls, give Josh one, work through that tricky situation, but then to find the boundary at the right time as well to get the total to where it was. It was really impressive.” Australia beat the Black Caps by 172 runs at the Basin Reserve, the margin of victory almost matching Green’s first innings knock, which was the second hundred of his test career. Green followed up his century with a vital 34 as Australia were skittled for 164 in their second innings.
Wellington cemented Green’s ownership of the number four slot long held by one of the nation’s greatest batters in Steve Smith, who now opens the batting with Usman Khawaja following the retirement of David Warner from the format.
Green’s stocks have risen as teammate Marnus Labuschagne’s have plummeted, the number three’s struggles laid bare in Wellington where he managed a total of three runs.
Once scoring centuries for fun, Labuschagne has not surpassed 10 runs in his past six Test innings.
Ahead of the second and final New Zealand Test starting in Christchurch on Friday, McDonald said there was no great concern with Labuschagne’s form so long as his teammates were pulling the weight.
“We want the top six, seven batters to be performing as a collective,” he said.
“Can he perform better? No doubt about that. Does he know that? He knows that.
“Over time there’s going to be ebbs and flows in your career,” the Australian coach said.