Australia, insurance, car, home, live, holidays

Travis Head and Marnus Labuschagne pose with the World Cup Trophy.Credit:Getty

“It’s only for the last two games I’ve been in the team with a fully fit squad,” he said.

Even the night before the final Labuschagne thought he was out of the team.

“Last night at 10 o’clock the team hadn’t been announced. I was sitting on my bed actually thinking about how can I add value if I was not playing,” Labuschagne said. “Maybe fielding or on the bench,what can I do to help,and then at quarter past ten the message came through,and it just said ‘same team,good luck guys’. So that was a bit of relief.”

Long before he put India to the sword with his bat,Head had changed the game in the field,running back from cover to take a diving catch to dismiss India captain Rohit Sharma. The home team’s skipper was running rampant,having scored 47 in 31 balls.

“I don’t know what I can’t believe more,what happened with the hundred and winning a World Cup,or taking that catch,” Head said. “It was an important wicket,but I didn’t think I was going to get there at first.

“It started to spin back to me a little bit and yeah,one of those things,I held on to it. Thank God I did because Rohit is obviously an unbelievable player,and he is very threatening in that situation.”

Captain Pat Cummins described Head’s performance as “phenomenal”.

“A lot of credit should also go to[coach] Andrew McDonald and[chairman of selectors] George Bailey and the selectors to take a punt. He had a broken hand for the half of the tournament,but to keep him in the squad was a huge risk.

“And the medical team were fantastic,obviously,to get him into a place where he could perform. So that was a big risk. I think we could have been made to look really silly if that didn’t pay off,but you got to take those risks to win a tournament.

“And Trav,the player we’ve seen in Test cricket,he just epitomises everything I want out of a cricket team. He takes the game on,he plays with a smile,he just puts the pressure right back onto the opposition,and he’s just great fun to be around. So,I couldn’t be happier for Trav.”

Cummins confirmed that Labuschagne was originally the victim of the team’s more attacking approach when he was left out of the initial World Cup squad.

“We wanted to be pretty brave this World Cup,we didn’t want to kind of limp into the semi-finals,we wanted to be the team that could score 400,” Cummins said,pointing to heavy hitters Head,David Warner and Mitchell Marsh in the top three.

“We wanted to be really aggressive and then a couple of our all-rounders are obviously aggressive to finish up the innings,so we would rather fail that way,but then Marnus just showed his class,and we had to pick him.”

Sports news,results and expert commentary.Sign up for our Sport newsletter.

License this article