Andrew Symonds faces an uphill battle to get to the World Cup despite having a successful operation on a ruptured biceps tendon in his right shoulder. Alex Kountouris, the Australia team physio, said Symonds' recovery time was unclear but with Australia's first World Cup match only five weeks away it would be hard for him to make it.

"It's going to be tough for the World Cup, they tend to take a little bit of time to recover," Kountouris said on Nine. "But we're not really looking at that right now, we just want to see how he goes over the next couple of weeks. There's no fixed time for any sort of surgery you do - you can't say he'll be right definitely in four weeks or five weeks or ten weeks.

"So we're just going to look at it, take it week by week at a time. We're still aiming for him to get to the World Cup but we're still just looking at where he's going to be in the next one or two weeks."

Symonds injured his shoulder in Australia's 92-run loss to England at Sydney on Friday. He made 39 in the unsuccessful chase and tried to bat on but was forced to retire hurt at the insistence of Kountouris and Ricky Ponting.

"His tendon was actually probably a bit worse than we expected it," Kountouris said. "The surgery went really well by the looks of it. The surgeon was really happy.

"The tendon is basically the thick part of the muscle and allows that to anchor onto the bone and what's happened to Andrew's is it's ripped off at the shoulder. They've re-attached it to a slightly different part of the bone by using a screw."