Pat Cummins is back home watching Sydney Swans while Australia play England, how it helps his career
The irresistible money available to players outside of playing for their country is literally tearing New Zealand and South Africa apart. Here’s how Australia is managing to avoid a similar crisis.
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This is the picture that sums up international cricket’s complex struggle to stay relevant in the modern age.
In a bygone era, photos of Test captain Pat Cummins watching the Sydney Swans from an AFL corporate box would have caused plenty of consternation at a time when Australia is playing England in white ball matches on the other side of the world.
And particularly when Australia’s fast bowling stocks have been ravaged by injury and illness.
In 2007, captain Ricky Ponting copped plenty of heat for strategically resting from an ODI series in New Zealand as Australia slumped to a 3-0 loss to the Blackcaps.
But times have changed and when you consider the fact Cummins is lucky to spend 30 nights in his own bed over the course of any given year, you can start to appreciate why it might be in Australian cricket’s best interests for the skipper to be tactically picking his moments.
Like it or lump it, franchise T20 competitions have reshaped the cricketing landscape forever, and Cricket Australia has opted to embrace the new world order rather than fight against it.
CA bosses essentially have two options. They could prohibit Cummins and their other superstars from playing in competitions like the Indian Premier League and America’s Major League Cricket – and risk earning their wrath – so that players are theoretically always fresh and available to play for Australia in the random white ball series that are jammed into the international schedule.
Or, CA can foster a give-and-take relationship, where they allow players the opportunity to maximise their earnings and extend their wings in other leagues where possible, and by doing so, make a long-term investment in ensuring the trust, buy-in and longevity of the playing group for the future of Australian cricket.
The latter is the route CA have chosen to take, and it appears a smart and pragmatic strategy when you consider the irresistible money now available to players outside of playing for their country which is literally tearing smaller nations like New Zealand and South Africa apart.
A decade ago Australia’s high performance boss Pat Howard declared, ‘We don’t own the players’, and that is even more true now in the age of his successor, Ben Oliver, who admits CA is navigating their way through a schedule which is overwhelmed by the amount of cricket being played.
Oliver explains how CA are trying to turn a challenge into a win.
“I think we’re certainly fortunate that our very best players love playing cricket for Australia and really I guess thrive competing at the highest international level and really challenging themselves to be the best in the world,” Oliver told this masthead.
“But with the advent of T20 cricket generally … and the T20 leagues that now exist around the world, there’s no doubt it’s created some challenges and increases the overall load within the schedule.
“You can look at that from a number of different perspectives. From our perspective we see opportunity.
“There’s some great opportunities for players clearly … and you try and take a pretty pragmatic approach to how we do that.
“That’s why the collaboration, the longer term view, working back from priorities is really important, and the players have been very good engaging in those discussions and really working out what are the priorities and how do we best work together to best prepare players for that and get them to perform at their best when it matters the most.”
CA genuinely believe that the IPL in particular makes their players better, particularly this year, when the premier league in India served as the direct lead-in for the T20 World Cup.
“How do we embrace that as a game and get the benefit of that for cricket,” Oliver asks.
However, the one, undeniable consequence of this pragmatic approach is that limited overs international cricket has officially lost blue chip status outside of World Cups and other ICC events.
We’ve probably known this for a long time anyway, but when superstars like Cummins are routinely rested from bilateral series, these matches taken on a different purpose as becoming a breeding ground for blooding new talent, rather than necessarily being a contest between the best of the best.
On that count, selectors have played a blinder in leaving Cummins home to prepare for the all-important five Test series against India to come this summer, and instead take the chance to expose their next generational fast bowling talent, 19-year-old Mahli Beardman, to the experience of an international tour.
It’s exactly what Australia did when they took a 19-year-old Cummins to South Africa in 2011, and that inspired selection has certainly paid dividends down the track.
Fans can’t be expected to care about ODI and T20 bilateral series anymore from a results perspective, but there is at least meaning given in nurturing the depth of Australian cricket and blooding generation next.
Cricket Australia is unapologetic about making Test cricket its overriding No. 1 priority – and that is the sole reason why Cummins was put on ice for this series in England.
“The way we try to approach it is to take a forward-looking view, typically a six-12 month view. And when you do that you get a feel for the full picture for the team, but also for individual players as they navigate three formats,” Oliver says.
“It’s a collaborative approach that kind of looks into the future and we then work back from where are the real priority events and series, and ultimately what we’re trying to all od is enable the players to be in a position where they can perform at their best when it matters most, and we want to sustain that over time to try and increase the longevity of players to continue to represent Australia for as long as they can.”
If Cummins’ staying home during footy finals can translate into him leading the Test attack for several years to come, then it’s hard to argue Australia isn’t pulling the right rein.
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