Matthew Wade admitted Australia’s performances were simply not good enough, after their winter tour finished with a drubbing by Bangladesh that included Australia’s lowest ever total in a T20 International.
Australia were set a target of 128 for victory but, in a pattern that has dogged them throughout the series, the batting line-up collapsed chasing the small target to be all out for 62, well below the previous lowest total of 79 made against England in 2005.
The 4-1 series loss to Bangladesh follows the 4-1 series loss to West Indies and Australia’s two victories of the tour came in dead rubbers.
It caps off a miserable run of five consecutive series defeats at a time Australia was hoping to settle on a squad and find some form ahead of the T20 World Cup in October.
“There's not a lot of positives to take out of it, obviously,” said Wade, who filled in as captain in Finch’s absence.
“To get beaten in the fashion we did, especially tonight, it’s not good enough from Australian cricket team regardless of the personnel that we've got here.
“I mean, the biggest positive I think is probably the way that our bowlers bowled and especially our spinners bowled on these wickets in these conditions it's something you know over a long period of time that we've asked the spinners to be really good in these conditions and I thought over the five games and in the West Indies, they were terrific in conditions that suited the spinners so I think that was a real positive.
“The exposure that some of our younger players got to these conditions is obviously a positive going forward and something that over their career I'm sure they can look back on and say they learned a hell of a lot over, especially this week in Bangladesh."
Conditions at the Shere Bangla National Stadium were fiendishly challenging for batters on both sides; the highest total in the series was the 131 scored by Bangladesh in the first game of the five-match series.
And while Wade described conditions as the most difficult he had faced in T20 Internationals, he also pointed to the way Bangladesh had been able to survive difficult spells and scrape together sufficient scores throughout the series, and placed the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the senior players in the squad.
Mitchell Marsh was the only batter to have performed consistently throughout the entire tour; apart from a few supporting cameos, the Australians weaknesses when batting against spin, in particular, have been clearly exposed.
“I do not blame the younger players one bit,” said Wade.
“Myself, Moises Henriques, Dan Christian, we're all experienced players and we needed to do better in this series.
“I'm certainly not hiding behind that, I needed to be better as well.
“The reality is we know that we need to get better at spin, myself included, and there's a lot of players in this team that we need to find a way to score runs in these conditions.
“We're not asking for big margins. We need to find 15 or 20 more runs an innings with the bat and if we can bring them down another five or ten with the ball as well then we'll get ourselves in most of the games in these conditions.”
Australia made several changes to their approach in the final match, playing three specialised spinners for the first time on this tour, with Mitchell Swepson joining Adam Zampa and Ashton Agar in the attack.
Dan Christian, following on from his match-winning 39 off 15 balls in the fourth match, was promoted to open the batting with Wade, but made just three runs before he was bowled when attempting to pull Nasum Ahmed.
Christian’s elevation to open was, perhaps, the latest sign of Australia’s scattergun approach with a squad that will likely bear little resemblance to the one that heads to the UAE and Oman in two months.
“That was always a plan coming to the game,” said Wade, when asked about Christian opening the batting.
“We’ve had to find some runs somewhere because we've found it so challenging to score at the back end of the innings.
“Their quicks were terrific at the back end of the innings and we found it really hard to go at even 5, 6, 7 an over at the back end.
“So we're looking for some runs with two fielders out, some quick runs out that is and we thought Dan was the best man to do that after what he did last game so we've got him up there to cash in the powerplay.
"It just didn't quite work out for us, but that was certainly something that we had, ready to go before we saw the total.”
The ten T20Is were scheduled as part of Australia’s build up to the T20 World Cup but, with seven players opting out of the tour citing bubble fatigue and Aaron Finch missing the Bangladesh leg with a knee injury, Australia’s preparations for the tournament appear to be in tatters.
There have been unconfirmed reports that CA will schedule more T20 matches for Australia before the World Cup but Wade maintained it wasn’t necessary for the eventual squad to play together and players may have to work on their individual games while playing in the Marsh Cup or the IPL.
“I'm not 100% sure what's happening in terms of our preparation for the World Cup, to be honest,” said Wade.
“It's hard to answer that question.
“But, if you're talking about Finch and Warner and Maxwell and those guys, it's not vital that we play games together before the World Cup, we've all played plenty of cricket together.
“They've grown up together, Finchy, Warner, myself, Maxwell, we've all all grown up in the same kind of team. Steve Smith, guys like that and our bowling unit evolved together, numerous amount of times, so I don't think the difference between playing well in the World Cup or not is that we have to play games together to know what each other's doing.
“We all know what we're doing. We've played together for a long, long periods of time now so whatever happens with our preparation going forward that won't be an excuse by the time we get to the World Cup.”
