Treated like adults, Australia’s cricketers now play like them

Birmingham: A little over an hour before play began on the final day, as ground staff worked frantically to dry off the few remaining wet spots in the outfield, Pat Cummins walked over to the indoor nets at Edgbaston.

He spent nearly the whole of that last hour batting, honing a method that he had also spent plenty of his own time working on in the preceding few months between tours of India and England.

Pat Cummins’ Edgbaston batting was the fruit of months of extra work.Credit: Getty

Cummins did not do this because he was instructed to by any of the coaching staff, but because he knew the extra work was needed, as there was the distinct possibility that in England he would have to bat as high as No.8 in the order.

The thrilling conclusion to Australia’s victory in the opening Ashes Test was vindication for that work, and also for an environment in which a seasoned group of players have been granted the room to make such choices for themselves.

Since Cummins and Andrew McDonald were placed together as captain and coach of the Australian men’s side in February last year, they have concentrated on building an atmosphere of empowerment and adult decisions among their players.

Often, this has been couched in joking terms by Usman Khawaja and others, as optional warm-ups and training sessions are a world away from some of the more stentorian moments of past teams, whether coached by Mickey Arthur, Darren Lehmann or Justin Langer.

But for a group largely composed of well-travelled players, it has extracted that little bit extra to allow for performances like Edgbaston, those at the back end of the India tour or the attritional triumph in Pakistan last year.

“It’s hard to quantify it, but I think everything around what’s been done with the team, with Pat and Andrew McDonald in terms of just cutting out the fluff,” Khawaja said. “Cutting out the box-ticking stuff. Just really stripping down the game to its bare nakedness and saying what’s important. What do we think is important? How are we going to do it?

“People joke about it all the time and I joked about it when we played the Ahmedabad game, but even warm-ups every morning, they’re optional now, do whatever you need to do to warm up. [I] think that kind of stuff empowers players. It’s empowered us. We take onus on ourselves. Who wants to train today? OK, you don’t want to train, fine.

“I think it’s the first time for a long time that we’re actually really getting treated like adults and think that’s made a big difference.”

Usman Khawaja

“At the end of the day you are responsible for your own performance because that in itself impacts the team. If you are letting the team down in any way, that’s on you. But we’re all professionals and adults here and I think it’s the first time for a long time that we’re actually really getting treated like adults and think that’s made a big difference.”

For Khawaja, that meant the freedom to play the Edgbaston conditions and scenario as he saw fit. “I just wanted to take it deep,” he said. “‘Little Uzzie’ inside of me was saying ‘you can expand now, you can get into second or third gear now’ but I was like ‘no, no, take it deep, take it as far deep as you can.’

“Because I knew if we could get into that last hour and had less than 100 runs we could get it, but if we lost too many wickets early that was game over for us. So I actually wanted to go a lot harder than I did in the last hour-and-a-half I was in, I wanted to start playing more shots. But I kept fighting with myself, it was just about building partnerships.”

The player-driven elements of the team include strategy meetings where senior players have as much say as coaches, and selection discussions that blur the old distinctions between selectors and players.

This was all part of the vision that Cummins brought to the captaincy in late 2021, following a fractious period in which the more prescriptive methods of Langer and also the former team manager Gavin Dovey rankled many.

As he said shortly before taking on the job, Cummins believes that players will perform at their best if trusted to use the methods they have already honed, rather than being made to feel as though Test and international cricket requires a complete rethink.

“I love the guys who I play alongside; it isn’t just a hobby or even a job,” Cummins said in 2021. “We spend more time with this group than we do with our partners at home. So I don’t like problems festering. I don’t want to spend 70 per cent of my life on tour in an environment I’m not totally comfortable with.

Self-driven: Australian batsman Usman Khawaja.Credit: Getty Images

“If we’ve got a young guy who’s come into the side, I don’t think senior players or coaches changing his technique and telling him exactly how to bowl or bat are going to have as much of a positive impact as if he feels welcome, and he’s encouraged to do all the things that got him there.

“If we can relieve a little bit of that pressure everyone feels playing professional sport in front of millions of people, that’s where the biggest value is to be had.”

Another manifestation of the environment Cummins and McDonald have fostered is the calmer, less caustic air to the way Australia play their cricket. While this was partly forced by the ramifications of the Newlands scandal in 2018, Cummins genuinely believes it is the best way for this group of players to succeed.

The sight of Khawaja being goaded by Ollie Robinson was certainly a role reversal from many past Ashes series.

Ollie Robinson and Usman Khawaja during the tense final day.Credit: Getty

“It’s not just about winning,” Khawaja said. “It’s about how we win, which has changed a lot from past years I played cricket.”

That change in tone was discernible even in the way the team sang their victory song, Under The Southern Cross, on the Edgbaston balcony about four hours after Cummins had struck the winning runs. For some years, it had been a hyper-aggressive, yelled exhortation; now it still sounded raucous, but more joyous, and a little less desperate.

Calm, composed and the winners of a close Ashes classic; this is indeed a different team, and a happier one, too.

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