Australia captain Aaron Finch won the toss and elected to bat in the second Twenty20 international against England at Southampton on Sunday.
Both sides were unchanged from Friday’s opening fixture at the Ageas Bowl when England beat Australia by just two runs in a last-ball thriller.
Australia, the world’s top-ranked T20 side, were cruising to a victory target of 163 at 124-1 but lost four wickets for nine runs in 14 deliveries as England fought back to go 1-0 up in a three-match series.
Over the last two years, Glenn Maxwell has been Australia’s most prolific run-scorer from positions between number four to number seven, scoring 349 runs at 38.77.
But no other Australia batsman has aggregated even a hundred runs when batting in those positions.
Finch, asked if Australia might alter their batting order, told Sky Sports at the toss: “It is something we’ve talked about, we can be flexible but we’ve been pretty consistent over the last 12 or 18 months so it’s one of those things, based on conditions you can look to change it around as much as you want.”
Meanwhile England captain Eoin Morgan said his 50-over world champions were looking to improve on Friday’s display.
“When you can win a game in that fashion, it says a lot about the character of the team,” he insisted.
“Equally, we need to improve in a lot of areas to be contenders today so hopefully we can do that today.
“There were certain elements to our batting where we could have established more partnerships to post a more substantial total than we did.
“In the first 10 overs of our bowling we needed a little bit of improvement but having had another game under our belt, we feel better for it. Hopefully, today can be our day.”
Before play, it was announced the England team had been fined 20% of their match fees for maintaining a slow over-rate in Friday’s thrilling match.
The punishment was imposed by International Cricket Council match referee Chris Broad, the former England batsman, after Morgan’s men were ruled to have been one over short of the target after time allowances were taken into consideration in a behind closed doors match.
The series concludes at Southampton on Tuesday.
Teams: England vs Australia
England: Jos Buttler (wkt), Jonny Bairstow, Dawid Malan, Tom Banton, Eoin Morgan (capt), Moeen Ali, Chris Jordan, Tom Curran, Adil Rashid, Jofra Archer, Mark Wood
Australia: Aaron Finch (capt), David Warner, Steve Smith, Glenn Maxwell, Alex Carey (wkt), Marcus Stoinis, Ashton Agar, Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Kane Richardson, Adam Zampa.
Umpires: Mike Burns (ENG), David Millns (ENG)
TV umpire: Martin Saggers (ENG)
Match referee: Chris Broad (ENG)
© Agence France-Presse by Julian Guyer
