How Pat Cummins became the Australian cricket captain that even the English like
It spoke volumes that amid the outrage around Jonny Bairstow’s Ashes stumping, there was minimal backlash towards Pat Cummins. STEVE JAMES examines the Australian captain’s unusual standing in England.
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The bespectacled man has returned to the sanctuary of his hotel room, making himself a cup of tea before settling down in front of his laptop to do a little work. “A bit of prep, just throwing out a few notes,” he says to the camera, which, if you were stumbling across this clip in isolation, makes him sound like some businessman readying himself for a meeting the next day.
But as the computer screen comes closer into view, you very quickly realise that these are not spreadsheets that he is studying, they are fielding positions on a cricket field.
This is season two of the Amazon documentary, The Test, and the man wearing the glasses is Australia’s captain, Pat Cummins. The intimate access is extraordinary, but so is the near absurdity of the scene that is swiftly revealed.
Cummins is in the team’s Brisbane hotel the night before the first Ashes Test in December 2021. This is the first time he will captain Australia in a Test, becoming the 46th man to do a job once jokingly described by former prime minister John Howard as the most important in the country.
But Cummins does not really know what he is doing, or at least that is the impression he proffers. “Throwing out a few fields,” he says. “I’ve never captained spinners before.”
There is a chuckle as he expresses the hope that experienced off spinner Nathan Lyon will know how to set his own fields, but it is a startling admission by a man who has been suddenly thrown into the role after Tim Paine had sensationally resigned a week before. Then again, at the time his professional captaincy experience was limited to four one-day matches for New South Wales that season, and it was almost as though he was some schoolboy captain given a few fields to look at and learn by his cricket master.
Cummins is not even sure of how to give the review signal to the umpires, experimenting with a couple of different versions for the camera.
There is then a particularly humble and homely moment, as he goes into the wardrobe to hang up his cricket shirts, with Cummins and his No 30 emblazoned on the back. You’d think someone else would look after such matters for him, with his kit laundered, ironed and ready for him at the ground, but seeing the creased state of Todd Murphy’s shirt on the last day at Headingley recently, that is clearly not the case for the Australian cricketers.
The 22-year-old off spinner looked so dishevelled that even Michael Atherton was moved to comment upon it, which, if I may say so, is rather rich, given that, having spent time with him at university, scruffiness was as close a friend to him as it was to me.
It does seem odd that Cummins should have permitted such insight and searing honesty the night before such a momentous day in his life, but he had agreed to the filming before being made captain and it certainly makes for absorbing viewing.
Cummins, now 30, has certainly come a long way since then, but these last two Tests at Emirates Old Trafford and the Kia Oval will now undoubtedly define his Test captaincy career, all the more so because Australia have not won a series here since 2001, and as Cummins said before this one began: “These big series are where you look back at cricket teams and judge their performances.”
In particular his marshalling of Murphy, the replacement for the injured Lyon, could be critical. Cummins captained him in India this year, but did he really trust him at Headingley? Or was it just that the conditions suited the seamers better?
There has been much talk about Cummins’s captaincy since the first ball of the series, when there appeared to be as many men on the boundary as in the slip cordon, immediately lending the impression that Australia were a little spooked by “Bazball”. And, though it worked in winning the first two Tests, at Headingley the singles seemed just too easy and too frequent for England’s top order again.
The battle between the skippers, the more conservative Cummins and the more funky Ben Stokes, has been intriguing and indeed unusual, because historically those traits have been reversed, with Australian captains aggressive and England’s more traditional. Just as compelling has been the duel between Cummins and England’s best batsman, Joe Root, whom he has now dismissed 11 times in Test cricket (no one has dismissed Root more). So, it goes without saying that both those clashes will be vital in these final two matches.
Cummins’s reign as captain has been thoroughly fascinating to watch. That first Ashes Test in 2021 and that series were duly won, and Cummins has won 11 of the 19 Tests in which he has been in charge, with a winning percentage of 57.89 per cent – making him the seventh best of all Test captains to have led their side at least 19 times.
He is, though, the most successful fast bowler to have captained that many times, above South Africa’s Shaun Pollock, who won 14 of 26 Tests, and Pakistan’s Wasim Akram, with 12 from 25.
Cummins is Australia’s first fast-bowling captain since Ray Lindwall in 1956, and even then, that was a one-off because of injury, providing evidence of how hard it has been for Cummins in working against the common wisdom that fast bowlers simply should not be captains.
Indeed, such a sage as Mike Brearley argued in his Art of Captaincy book that only “as a last resort” should fast bowlers be appointed as captain.
“It takes an exceptional character to know when to bowl, to keep bowling with all his energy screwed up into a ball of aggression, and to be sensitive to the needs of the team, tactically and psychologically,” he said.
But by all accounts, Cummins is an exceptional character. Not everyone in England might agree, after the controversial stumping of Jonny Bairstow in the second Test at Lord’s, with Cummins having it within his power to withdraw the appeal – but he was having none of it, which was probably crystal-clear from the moment he was the first to congratulate wicketkeeper Alex Carey with a jubilant high-five.
“For what I think is a pretty common non-event, it does seem like everyone has a pretty strong opinion about it,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any discussion; it’s out. If the shoe was on the other foot, I wouldn’t be looking at the opposition, I’d probably be thinking about our own batter and would be thinking it’s pretty silly.”
Indeed, Bairstow was dozy, but it is a measure of Cummins’s reputation that the backlash towards him has been minimal. When the captain changed ends to bowl in the dramatic denouement at Leeds, as he stood at the end of his mark, positioning the field and, probably thinking about a thousand other things, a chorus of boos rang around the ground. Had the spotlight of animosity suddenly turned on the skipper? Nope, it was just Steve Smith trotting out to his fielding position in front of the Western Terrace.
Cummins faced considerable flak when Justin Langer departed as Australia’s head coach, particularly from Langer’s former teammates in the Australia side, but even then, Cummins was remarkably calm, articulate and open, with this one line in a statement about the issue neatly summing up his measured response.
“To all past players, I want to say this: just as you have always stuck up for your mates, I’m sticking up for mine,” he said.
And that comradeship is what had attracted Cummins to the captaincy in the first place. He had been unsure about taking it on. “There was a really strong sense of, ‘I’ve got enough going on, I love just going out and bowling,’ ” he said. “What tipped it over was the bunch of boys I am captaining are all really good mates. I love them to death.”
But the truth is that Cummins is a very different beast from the macho stereotype of an Australian cricketer that Langer’s colleagues were always keen to promulgate. He is clean-cut, smiling and genial, and does not even “sledge”. He is so concerned about climate change that he has set up a group called Cricket for Climate to try to reduce the sport’s carbon footprint. Little wonder he was dubbed “Saint Patrick” by Atherton in these pages.
Asking a few people who know Cummins well whether he really is that saintly, the answer, sadly for English fans, was that he is: “As nice a bloke as you could meet”; “You would go a long way to find someone who doesn’t like him.” Others described him as “well mannered, down to earth, generous, intelligent, thoughtful and good fun to be around”. Athers, not exactly for the first time, was right.
Cummins is known to ensure that he takes the time to get to know all his players, but he is also confident enough to speak up in front of them. He has formed a powerful combination with head coach Andrew McDonald – a calmer, more measured and analytical operator than Langer – and it is clear that this team is much more grounded than it once was, much less arrogant.
Colleagues say that Cummins never loses his temper, and you could see a hint of why on the final day at Headingley when Harry Brook skyed a catch off Mitchell Starc that Cummins, at extra cover, immediately called for. Cummins eventually caught it, but only after Starc had tried to do so as well, the pair momentarily colliding, which, for most players would have produced some astonishment and anger. Starc looked shocked for sure, but Cummins just smiled immediately and congratulated his bowler.
On the third evening at Headingley, when England batted for five overs, Cummins struck the left-handed opener Ben Duckett a nasty blow on the bottom hand. As the players left the field at the close, Cummins, despite having bowled two uncharacteristically expensive overs for 17, made a point of asking after Duckett’s health. It was a classy gesture.
He may once have been part of two WhatsApp chat groups flippantly called “The Legends” – one with his fellow Australian quicks, Starc and Josh Hazlewood, and the other with former prime minister Scott Morrison and Langer – but there is an obvious modesty to Cummins that is appealing.
When meeting his now wife, Becky, for the first time in Sydney in 2013 he just told her he was a student, which was not untrue because he was then studying at the University of Technology, Sydney, where he later obtained a business degree. A few weeks later Becky, an English girl from Harrogate on a working holiday visa, walked past a KFC and saw a picture of Cummins on the front of it wearing a bucket hat. It took a conversation with some of her work colleagues for her to realise who he was.
Cummins grew up in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney. His father, Peter, once an accountant who then ran a quarry, was at the Edgbaston Test when his son made a stunning 44 not out to win the game. They were seen hugging on the players’ balcony afterwards and went to watch Peter’s beloved Bruce Springsteen at Villa Park that week. His mother, Maria, a maths teacher, died this year of cancer, the reason why Cummins missed the last two Tests of Australia’s tour to India.
He has two older brothers, Matt and Tim, and two sisters, Laura and Kara. When he was four years old, he suffered a nasty accident after bursting into the family’s bathroom to hand Laura some sweets, resulting in the tip of his middle right finger being severed. “I still get my sister in tears … she slammed the door on it,” he once told the Cricket Australia website.
It did not affect his bowling, though. His career began in 2000 at the Glenbrook-Blaxland Cricket Club in the lower Blue Mountains, where he soon gained a reputation as a fast bowler capable of causing havoc. “There was this one guy in junior cricket – every time I played him, I hit him, and he retired hurt three times in three years,” Cummins told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2021. “His mum came up to me, pleading, ‘Please stop hurting my little boy.’ And I was like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not meaning to hit him.’ ”
Cummins moved to Penrith, the club of Trevor Bayliss, the former England head coach, and went on to make a sensational Test debut against South Africa in Johannesburg, aged just 18, taking six for 79 in the second innings to bring a two-wicket victory and with it the man-of-the-match award. But a sequence of injuries, mainly to the back, then delayed a second appearance for 5 and a half years.
It is a testament to his new-found durability that he expects to play six Tests here in such a short period of time. While it looked at times as though Starc was blowing at Headingley, Cummins appeared indefatigable. His average speed in the World Test Championship final against India at the Oval was 85.63 mph. At Headingley it was 85.49 mph. He is certainly not slowing up.
He is a wonderful bowler, relentlessly accurate and constantly creating just enough movement and bounce, the undisputed No 1 seamer in the world, with only India’s off spinner Ravi Ashwin ahead of him in the rankings. He has taken 236 Test wickets at 22.07.
His wickets may have been a little more costly than usual in this series – 15 at 27, with an economy rate of 3.79 against a career figure of 2.82 being a reflection of England’s positivity – but only Stuart Broad has taken more.
It was Cummins whom Stokes cut for four for that famous win at Headingley in 2019, but this time at Edgbaston he became the first player to be hit for four from the first ball of a Test and then to hit the winning boundary from the final ball of that same match.
Cummins is a cricketer who is always at the heart of the battle and he will surely remain there in these next two much-anticipated weeks.
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