Josh Inglis may have been born and raised in England at the age of 14, but the 26-year-old says there will be no divisions if he gets a chance to keep wickets for Australia in the upcoming Ashes series .
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The fallout of captain Tim Paine’s blistering resignation has left the hosts without a specialist wicketkeeper in the team after just over a week from the start of the series.
The more experienced Alex Carey is also in frame and Inglis will find out over the next few days whether he will make his Test debut on 8 December in Brisbane, the team he used to support.
“Growing up in England, I obviously supported England, but now everything has changed in Australia,” Inglis told reporters on Monday.
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“Once you start making your way into professional cricket, it is quite difficult to try to play for a team and not support them. That changed very quickly.”
Inglis has a first-class average of 34.03 in 45 matches, but hasn’t played any red ball cricket since September, joining Australia’s squad for the Twenty20 World Cup.
He failed to take the field at the World Cup, so his candidacy to replace Penn was supported by his three centuries for Western Australia last season, as well as training for next week’s “A” match against the England Lions. will be in
“My focus is really clear, I am going to either play the ‘A’ game or play a Test match next week,” he said.
“My focus is really on my red ball preparation… I’m really happy with my game at the moment. I’m ready to go.”
While Carey, also uncapped but a veteran of 83 short format internationals, pressed his case with a one-day century for South Australia over the weekend, Inglis spoke to Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Shane Warne.
“You don’t want to read too much into this, because at the end of the day, they are not the people making the decisions,” Inglis said.
“But it’s nice to hear them say some really nice things about me.”
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