Australian all-rounder Ashton Agar has admitted that despite a strong performance against Sri Lanka on Tuesday night, he doesn't believe he'll be picked to go again against England on Friday.
The Western Australian was selected last night in place of Adam Zampa, who tested positive for COVID after the Aussies lost their first match against New Zealand to retain the T20 World Cup.
Agar made the most of his chance, conceding only one boundary on his way to figures of 1/25 - coming out to Australia's third-best economy overall at 6.25.
But the Australian T20 Player of the Year for 2020 has accepted his role of being rotated in and out of the side and believes Zampa will resume his duties as Australia's chief spinner in the upcoming match against England.
“I assume Zamps will pull up well, he was starting to feel better already so I'm sure he'll play against England and I'll just have to see what happens with me,” Agar told The West Australian.
“I've sort of become used to that, I'm pretty good at dealing with that now.
“As much as I'd love to play every game, everyone wants to play every game and we've got a really good squad so I'll just keep moving forwards. I'll be fine.
“It is hard, definitely. You want to play as much as you can and it's really hard when you have gaps and you come back in and it's like a whole new experience again.
“Just the feeling of the moment and the occasion, you sort of forget what that feels like after a while and you don't want to get out of that competitive mind frame.
“And you also love it out there. That rush, that feeling of doing something really cool on the big stage is pretty addictive.”
The win over Sri Lanka was only Agar's second match back from a side strain injury that could have seen him miss the tournament.
In his first match back against India in a World Cup warmup, he bowled 1/36 and was one of the disappointing four wickets in a row to fall in the final over of the failed run-chase, so Tuesday's effort was a good sign of his recovery.
“I've had a couple of side strains, obviously a bad one in Sri Lanka which was probably the sorest I've been out on the cricket field, I couldn't even run,” Agar said.
“That was a good eight weeks before I was back from that and then I ended up niggling my other side in India as well.
“For me, using my sides as much as possible to spin the ball hard is really important and it stops me bowling around myself.
“But when you have sore sides and not a lot of confidence in your body coming back from that, you can fall into bad movement patterns so it was about trying to groove those patterns again.
“I was feeling pretty average up until about two weeks ago and then it all just started to click into gear.”
