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After the ODI World Cup, Australia’s coach Andrew
McDonald will return home to recuperate and get ready for the Test season.
Assistant coach Andre Borovec will lead the senior team for the first time in
the five-match T20I series against India, which gets underway in Visakhapatnam
on Thursday.
Five senior players from the series, Pat Cummins,
Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Marsh, and Cameron Green, have already
returned home, and Australia is resting them. Matthew Wade will be the team’s
captain.
In addition, McDonald is having a rest before the
summer Test series begins on December 14 in Perth against Pakistan. In late
August, he took a break from the T20I series against South Africa, handing the
reins to assistant Michael Di Venuto. After a demanding year of travelling, Di
Venuto will also be granted a spell, and Borovec will receive his first
opportunity to lead the national team.
Despite not having played first-class cricket,
Borovec, 45, underwent a lengthy coaching apprenticeship and is well-liked by
the Australian side. He started his coaching career as a wicketkeeper-batter
for Geelong, a team he played 330 games for over 23 years. At the end of his
playing career, he was McDonald’s club coach.
After that, Borovec joined McDonald’s coaching team at
Victoria and the Melbourne Renegades, where he played a significant role in
their strategy and helped lead them to the 2018–19 BBL championship.
He was originally assigned to Australia in 2021 to
serve as an assistant coach for the country’s white-ball trips of Bangladesh
and the Caribbean. He went to Pakistan in 2022 as part of Australia’s trip.
When McDonald assumed the position of head coach in May 2022, he was
subsequently appointed to Australia’s coaching team as a full-time assistant.
In order to prevent burnout from the demanding
schedule, Australia has been using coaching secondments on a regular basis
lately. Prior to taking over as head coach full-time in 2018, former coach
Justin Langer managed a few white-ball series under Darren Lehmann, and
McDonald managed a few white-ball series under Langer.
Lachlan Stevens, the head of development for Cricket
Australia and a former coach for Victoria and Western Australia, will also go
to India to help Borovec.