Ashes 2021-22: Slight tear in the ribs keeping Josh Hazlewood away from action

Australia and England are playing the Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The Australian bowlers again dominated the batters after Pat Cummins won the toss and elected to bowl. England was bundled up for only 185 runs in the first innings and Root was the highest scorer for the team. However, Australia missed the services of Josh Hazlewood for this game as well and Scott Boland made his Test debut.

England made a total of four changes to the playing XI. Rory Burns, Ollie Pope, Chris Woakes, and Stuart Broad were left out. The new pair of Haseeb Hameed and Zak Crawley opened the innings for the English team, but that didn’t change their fortunes.

Australia left out both Jhye Richardson and Michael Neser, who did well in the last match. Cummins who missed the second Test also made his comeback. Hazlewood who suffered a side strain in the ribs cage during the first Test couldn’t recover on time for the Boxing Day Test.

Josh Hazlewood has a “slight tear” in his rib muscles

On Sunday, Hazlewood mentioned that the third Test was a week early, and revealed that he has not bowled since the first Test ended. “I’m still a little bit away, (this Test) is probably a week early. We’re still not sure, we’re going to take this week as it comes and likely have a bowl on Day 3 or Day 5, see how that goes and then build up from there,” Hazlewood said as quoted by sen.com.au.

“The workloads are still there from the first Test, but obviously I haven’t had a bowl in 10-12 days and we’ll see how it goes on Day 3,” he added.

Hazlewood said that a slight tear in his rib muscles is keeping him away from taking part and he was disappointed at missing the action.

“It’s probably more on feel this one, it’s a bit of an interesting one, it’s the intercostals in between the ribs, there’s a slight tear. I’ve never had it before, I’ve had the normal oblique side strain, which is the common one, but we’re taking each day as it comes and we’ll make the decisions on basically how I feel.”

“I guess once your down here, you see the ground and the crowd starting to roll in, it’s pretty disappointing and the same thing with last week at Adelaide, I love being there and not being able to go and watching it on TV, it was disappointing,” he further added.