It’s easy to adore bowler Pat Cummins, but it’s easy to admire him. Maybe even exalted in all its glory. And there is no shortage of special moments he creates with the ball. He gives two examples from this recently completed summer test in Australia.
There was a delivery to Perth’s Craig Brathwaite, where he beat a well-placed West Indies captain in a clean bowl to take his 200th Test wicket. Open the middle and knock off, Patrick Perfection. Then a few days ago, Yorker came to SCG’s Kayazondo from around the turnstile. The setup was great, as was the execution of the knockout punches.Patrick’s perfection again.
But captain Pat Cummins grows as fast as he grows as a captain himself. After all, it’s been just over a year since he was handed the reins in the dramatic circumstances that followed Tim Payne’s retirement.
With England performing so poorly in the first series, Cummins says he probably never learned more about the captaincy of the Ashes than when Australia went abroad. demonstrated its worth. But in this month and a half, the 29-year-old has started carving out his own niche. And while neither the West Indies nor South Africa tested him enough, it was this summer that captain Pat Cummins really began to be appreciated and admired. It’s safe to say that worship is not far behind.
As for Captain Cummins, there’s a bit of Bowler Cummins. Definitely matchless. But there is also perseverance and confidence that his best plans will come to fruition. And what he often displayed on the field during his tenure as head of the Australian Test team was composure. Add to that the belief that the strategies and tactics he’s committed to in each tournament will work, even if he has to wait sometimes.
It is this belief that is pervasive among Australian camps, especially among bowlers, who feel that the state of the game is telling you to do so, so you can be derailed by your opponent’s tactics, or you can throw away your own plans. There is an urge to not waver from.We have already seen that whenever there was a partnership, even on flat pitches, there was no panic in the ranks.
Cummins has also shown a tendency to relax and offer a little extra for those visiting the site for the first time or returning after a long hiatus. Like how he handed Mitch Swepson the final test of his debut test in Karachi when the odds of victory seemed gone, or how he got Ashton Agger back for one last time in Sydney last week. To.
There’s a bit of minimalism, not just in his view of society and the world, but also in the way Cummins approaches both bowling and captaining. He wasn’t the type of bowler to rely on. But he handles the ball so well that Plan A turns out to be good enough literally every time. Ask Zond or Brathwaite.
As he matures into the role, it’s the captain side of him that we see a lot more, especially when it comes to his spinner. Mitchell Swepson, for example, was encouraged to fall back on his strongest weapon, a sharply twisted broken leg and a surprising mistake, just by slipping into a raging Turner on goal…and it worked.
Cummins has been very honest about how little he knew about spin bowling after starting Gabba last summer and has been working to improve that aspect of cricket’s academics ever since. Nathan Lyon had great success under Payne. But despite 100 tests before Cummins took over in late 2021, his confidence as a top-flight spinner appears to have reached an unprecedented level in the past year.
Of course, there’s a lot to love about the way he reads games. But what has stood out most this season is the humble honesty he shows when supporting his decisions. So all the more so. It’s like putting a South African on a pitch that seems good for his first batting at the MCG. It was a move to take advantage of the opposition’s weaknesses, and it worked. Opening he had a partnership following his 65 deliveries and Australia’s first drink in his break even though he had only one wicket to improve the captain’s reputation. A late innings win on Day 4 was ample evidence that Cummins had called correctly.
Or even that at the SCG he only played four bowlers. It’s not his fault that the sun didn’t shine until the last day of testing. As the fifth day progressed, the effects were already beginning to appear on the surface. Matt Renshaw’s hitter in his sixth was a safety blanket that Cummins and his coaching staff thought would be needed if it didn’t rain.
Bowler He Cummins is where you most expect relentless ball-in-hand intensity. And it’s the same from the first ball to the last ball of his spell. The game never drifts when Cummins is the bowler. What we’ve already seen is that Captain Cummins doesn’t drift the game either.
In his final half hour on the final day of summer, he let the ball do what he could. Cummins thought he could still play a match out of it… so Australia believed. Until he decided he had nothing left to play and shook hands with the South Africans.
Cummins does nothing because the captain seems to have no strategy help. Whether it’s his ball every short he throws or the way DRS decides his calls, that’s not to say his team never makes mistakes. But it’s very rare that Cummins looks rushed or stressed when he’s considering a review. The health he brings to his role as captain isn’t just on and off the field. In the way he received the adoration of the Pakistani public and their cricket fans, and returned it in the same way.
In his delicacy, he showed how the terrible economic crisis that has paralyzed daily life in Sri Lanka is affecting millions of Sri Lankans who are on the brink of total collapse.
Also, this team will be more in line with how the public wants it. There have certainly been successful efforts to make Australia fall in love with the Australian team all over again through the careers of Justin Langer and Tim Payne.
But Cummins, with coach Andrew Macdonald, took a step further as a leader by playing a style of cricket that was truly based on “playing cricket hard without playing hard like a cricketer”. rice field.
They aren’t written all over your face, but at the same time, you know they’re always coming against you as enemies. And once you put your hand on the lead, you won’t let go.
It’s now clear that this is Pat Cummins’ Australian team. That belief is at great risk as Cummins and his team travel to India to correct Australia’s record of not winning a series since 2004. And if he can get a prominent side across the line in what will be the last attempt by many of his prominent players to do so, it’s safe to call it the Pat Cummins era.