SYD­NEY – Aus­tralia’s tal­is­man Steve Smith has been ruled out of the open­ing Test match against West In­dies next week due to in­jury, while Mar­nus Labuschagne will not fea­ture in the three-match Test se­ries af­ter be­ing dropped.

The con­fir­ma­tion was made on Fri­day by chair­man of se­lec­tors George Bai­ley, who re­vealed that Smith’s fin­ger in­jury sus­tained in the World Test Cham­pi­onship Fi­nal against South Africa would keep him out of the team for the first match which bowls off on June 25, though there are hopes of a re­turn for the sec­ond Test in Grena­da from Ju­ly 3.

How­ev­er, af­ter a lean run of form over the past two years, the 30-year-old Labuschagne, who av­er­ages 46.19 in 58 Test match­es, has lost his place in the team.

Labuschagne was moved up to open in the Lord’s fi­nal but made just 17 and 22 in the de­feat to South Africa.

The pair will be re­placed by Josh In­glis and Sam Kon­stas, which means Aus­tralia will have a sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent bat­ting line-up to the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed World Test Cham­pi­onship fi­nal.

Bai­ley said while Smith need­ed ad­di­tion­al time to re­cov­er, Labuschagne had not been play­ing at his usu­al high lev­el.

“Steve needs more time for the wound to heal so we’ll give him an­oth­er week’s rest and as­sess his func­tion­al­i­ty af­ter that.

“We have made the de­ci­sion to give Josh and Sam the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­place Steve and Mar­nus. We are ex­cit­ed to see them get the chance to fur­ther their fledg­ling Test ca­reers,” Bai­ley said.

“Mar­nus at his best can be a re­al­ly im­por­tant mem­ber of this team. He un­der­stands his out­put hasn’t been at the lev­el we, or he, ex­pects.

“We will con­tin­ue work­ing with him on the ar­eas of his game we feel he needs to re­dis­cov­er. We con­tin­ue to val­ue his skill and ex­pect him to work through the chal­lenge pos­i­tive­ly,” he al­so added.

The in­com­ing pair have im­pressed in their ear­ly out­ings, with Kon­stas turn­ing heads in tak­ing on World No.1 Test bowler Jasprit Bum­rah and com­pil­ing a half-cen­tu­ry on Box­ing Day in Mel­bourne, and In­glis scor­ing a cen­tu­ry on Test de­but in Sri Lan­ka ear­li­er this year.

Aus­tralia Test squad: Pat Cum­mins (cap­tain), Sam Kon­stas, Us­man Khawa­ja, Mar­nus Labuschagne, Cameron Green, Steve Smith, Josh In­glis, Travis Head, Alex Carey, Beau Web­ster, Mitchell Starc, Sean Ab­bott, Scott Boland, Josh Ha­zle­wood, Nathan Ly­on, Matt Kuh­ne­mann.

CMC