Australia want 17-player squads for 2027 as the World Cup winner’s road stretches to 13 matches

Andrew McDonald has a straightforward trade in mind. If the ICC wants teams to play more cricket at the 2027 World Cup, it should let them take more cricketers.

Speaking to SEN radio in Australia on Wednesday, the coach who won the 2023 tournament said squads should go from 15 players to 17 for the expanded event in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia. His argument is less about comfort than arithmetic.

Eleven matches in 2023, at least 13 in 2027

Australia’s title run in India involved 11 games: nine in the group, then the semi-final and the final. The new structure the ICC signed off a fortnight ago works out differently. A 14-team event now runs through a Super Series round, a 12-team group phase, and a Super 7 before the semis, which means the eventual champion plays a minimum of 13 matches. Five group games, six in the Super 7, then the last two.

It could stretch to 15. If one of the three lowest-ranked sides comes through the opening Super Series and then goes all the way, it would need two more wins’ worth of cricket than anyone else to lift the trophy. All of it compressed into roughly the same window the 2023 edition occupied.

“Any time you’re playing more games in the same period of time, you don’t want it to be attritional,” McDonald said. “You want the best players to be available.”

The Travis Head precedent

Australia have been lobbying on this for years, and they have a case study they can recite from memory.

Head broke a bone in his hand in the build-up to the 2023 World Cup. Australia decided not to replace him, because ICC rules do not let a player be dropped from the 15 and brought back mid-tournament unless he returns as an approved injury replacement. So they carried him. For five matches Australia effectively picked from 14 fit players, and to make the maths work they left out a second specialist spinner and hoped Adam Zampa stayed healthy.

The gamble came off in a way that has probably made it harder to argue the point since. Head scored a century in his first match back, then took the match award in both knockouts: 62 and 2 for 21 against South Africa in the semi-final, and 137 in the final that broke Indian hearts in Ahmedabad. McDonald noted New Zealand were in a similar bind that year with Kane Williamson.

The version of that story where the gamble fails is the one McDonald is actually arguing about. Zampa gets injured, or Head does not recover, and a side is navigating a World Cup two players light.

Why Australia are nervous about 2027 specifically

The squad they take to southern Africa will arrive off an unusually brutal 14 months. Australia are down to play 20 Tests, possibly 21, in the period before the tournament, including five-Test tours of both India and England between January and August 2027.

Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc, Cameron Green, Marnus Labuschagne and Alex Carey are all likely to feature in most of that red-ball load and then front up at the World Cup. Green is the only one of them under 30. The three quicks have all had injury trouble over the past two years, and none of them played at either the 2025 Champions Trophy or the 2026 T20 World Cup.

McDonald’s comparison is football. The FIFA World Cup lets squads run to 26 for a sport that puts 11 on the field, and Spain needed only eight matches to win it this month.

“Give us larger squads to be able to navigate through the early part,” he said, “and then hopefully the pinnacle event has the best players playing, rather than being ruled out early on due to injury and the attritional nature of a World Cup.”

The ICC looks unlikely to move

For now the governing body is expected to hold at 15-player squads, and to manage the load through the calendar instead by guaranteeing every team a minimum two-day break between matches. That is a different fix to the one McDonald wants, and it does nothing about the player who arrives at the tournament carrying a niggle.

India have as much riding on this as anyone. Any side building towards 2027 has to decide whether to take a bowler who is 50-50 or leave him home, and a 15-man limit makes that call sharper than it needs to be.

McDonald had one more complaint, about who is in the tournament rather than how many each team can bring. He thinks the Associate nations have been squeezed, with only 14 places available and three teams left scrapping over a single group spot in the opening round, after years of the T20 game widening its door. The final structure and fixtures are due to be confirmed at an ICC meeting in October, which gives the argument about two extra players roughly ten weeks to land.

Stay across the road to the 2027 World Cup