Pat Cummins shares a bond with Ash Barty and the similarities between them are so striking they’ve been described as “like brother and sister”.

Certainly as champions they’re the King and Queen of Australian sport, they met through the same mind coach and two months ago ranked almost side-by-side as the two most popular athletes in the country.

They play good, clean sport. They play with a smile. They’re humble. They have life in perspective. And they’re the best at what they do.

“I’ve met Ash a couple of times and I really like her outlook on life and sport. It’s quite similar to mine I think,” says Cummins.

“We are lucky to play tennis and cricket, but being a sportsperson doesn’t define us.

“You’re a person first. I think Ash sees the world quite similarly.”

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She does. And the respect is mutual.

“We have spoken about both our journeys. He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a legend. I love the way he goes about it. I love his attitude,” Barty says.

“He is your typical hardworking Aussie. He goes in and works hard all day long for the team and now he has the role of captaincy, it is really exciting for him.”

In his debut summer as the first Australian fast bowling Test captain in 70 years, a time when he’s just become a new father as well, Cummins conquered all before him as he led the side to a 4-0 Ashes domination of England and finished top wicket-taker to boot.

But that’s where the similarities ended, at least for a while.

Unlike Barty, he has also had to discover “the courage to be disliked”.

CUMMINS COPS HEAT AFTER LANGER’S EXIT

Following the highly emotional resignation of former Test great Justin Langer as Australian coach, research showed that negative sentiment towards Cummins suddenly quadrupled on social media.

The Australian team had just won a World Cup and an Ashes, yet the players wanted a new coach and Cummins, as captain, became the face of a move that was met with condemnation by an army of former legends of the game – including the late Shane Warne.

It was a new experience.

Suddenly the golden boy of Australian cricket, who had stepped into the breach so impressively in the wake of the Tim Paine scandal and hadn’t been criticised for anything in a decade playing for his country, had polarised national opinion.

He was savagely labelled “gutless” by former World Cup-winning teammate Mitchell Johnson, one of the first mentors he looked up to in the Australian team, as a conga line of Langer’s former teammates lined up to criticise the decision.

Cummins found the backlash difficult – particularly because the decision to oust Langer was Cricket Australia’s to make – but says the experience has reinforced in his mind the captain and leader he wants to be.

“I don’t think it was a pleasant situation for anyone to be honest, but in terms of what I could have done differently – I’m not quite sure,” Cummins says.

“I’m not a decision-maker. I think I was probably perceived to have a bigger part in that as a captain than (the reality of) just giving feedback (from his players).

“I hadn’t copped too much bad press before, so I think it was a really good learning experience.

“If you try and spend your life looking to please everyone, you please no one.

“It gave me clarity on what my role is and that is to try and do what’s best for our team and our environment, but also what I think is best for Australian cricket.

“It really strengthened my beliefs in what I think is right and who I should listen to and it made me think of where my responsibilities lie.”

Ben Crowe is the highly regarded mind coach who has helped guide Cummins and Barty respectively, and first introduced them in London in 2019, when the Ashes and Wimbledon schedules intersected.

“They’re extraordinary. Like brother and sister in terms of their philosophies and their approaches to their sport and their lives,” Crowe says.

“They don’t get distracted by the things that can typically distract many athletes. And, because of that, they don’t take themselves seriously and they have an enormous amount of fun.

“They might achieve Grand Slams or cricketing series, but it doesn’t define their self-worth at all.

“So while they get disappointed … and opinions and judgments from others can hurt … they don’t crave recognition from others. They realise that a lot of the sports industry is not real.”

They’re also both mentally strong and resilient.

Cummins won back many fans, and the respect of some of his harshest critics, in one of his closing comments on the Langer saga, which were both respectful and unapologetic, and addressed the outpouring of emotion: “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.”

THE MAKING OF A CHAMPION

Hailing from a humble upbringing, Cummins is oneoffive children (brothers Matt and Tim, sisters Laura and Kara) to Maria, a teacher, and Peter, an accountant, and grew up in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. The now 28-year-old father to five-month-old son, Albie Boston Cummins, with fiance Becky Boston, 31, Cummins has harnessed the “superpowers” as Crowe calls them, of vulnerability and being entirely at peace with who he is and what matters in his life.

That’s not to say Cummins dismisses those who called him into question over his role in Langer’s demise. In fact the opposite is true.

“You can’t have it both ways being able to play a sport and be entertainment, but then not allowing other people to have different opinions,” Cummins says.

“When there’s millions of people who care about Australian cricket and not everyone agrees, even if it’s a minority – it’s still quite a big minority that might not agree with you.

“It’s that conjecture, it’s those conversations people have while watching it play out which is what makes cricket and sport entertainment, and I was totally OK with that.

“It showed me that not everyone has a total understanding of what goes on (behind closed doors) and that’s OK.

“But the noise and the scrutiny and I guess the anger and misunderstanding from some sections, I can’t let it get to me (because) it’s irrelevant.”

What the infamous Sandpapergate scandal of 2018 exposed about Australia’s cricketers more than anything else was the fact that life “in the bubble” can be a suffocating existence unless you do something about it.

Barty took two years off professional tennis to overcome that same syndrome, and Cummins has benefited greatly from an outlook on life which takes himself out of his comfort zone.

Two of the people Cummins confided in with his inner-thoughts about taking on the Australian captaincy were close friends and comedians Andy Lee and Hamish Blake.

“I think you naturally gravitate to people you click with — who are just good fun and have really similar values,” Cummins says.

“They’re great. They’re guys I really respect and admire and they’re just good people … I think you learn pretty quickly, you can’t live inside the cricket bubble.”

Cummins first met Lee during the 2015 World Cup when he and George Bailey – then teammate and now national selector – couldn’t make the Australian XI.

“Neither of them were getting a game so I ended up drinking with them … a lot,” Lee says. “They were very available for a drink and they took me under their wing as a quasi-14th man so to speak. I even got given one of the VB blood orange water boy vests by the end of it.”

Lee first bonded with Cummins because he could see he embraced the fun and frivolity of life, but as their friendship has deepened, he’s also witnessed maturity and integrity.

“What I love about Patty is while it was going to be a great honour to be the Australian captain, it wasn’t going to change him or he wasn’t going to be defined by it,” Lee says.

“He said to me at the time, ‘look if it’s not me, it won’t be the end of the world’.

“I found that was a really interesting take. So it wasn’t a guy who was yearning for the power, but it was obvious he was a natural leader and very equipped to do it.”

LEGEND’S ADVICE HELPS KEEP CUMMINS COOL IN CRISIS

During the Langer saga, Cummins again used Lee as a sounding board.

“It was a really funny time. Him and I talked a lot during the period because there was a lot of heat coming on him specifically,” Lee says.

“But his integrity is the highest. He will always do what he thinks is right. And that’s again why it’s such a great choice (that he is captain).”

Crowe started working with Cummins when he took on a broader role with the Australian cricket team in the wake of Sandpapergate, and as a result he also shares a close relationship with the fallen Langer, who he describes as “a beautiful human”.

While he doesn’t want to be drawn on the delicate situation specifically, Crowe marvels at what Cummins’ handling of it says about his growth as a leader.

“You don’t want to be disliked, but you’ve got to have the courage to be disliked,” Crowe says.

“Everyone is going to have their opinions and judgments of others and if you let criticism distract you from doing the right thing and what you stand for, then that’s going to sabotage your performance as an athlete and a leader … success as a leader is not about being liked, it’s about being respected.”

Barty is famous for saying “we” not “I” in interviews about her career and, again, the same is true of Cummins. On the morning of the second Ashes Test in Adelaide this summer, he was sensationally ruled out of the match after he was deemed a close contact of a Covid case, who the previous night at a restaurant had innocently greeted the Test captain at his table before discovering he was positive.

The acquaintance happened to be a fellow cricketer, Eastern Suburbs grade fast bowler Ryan O’Beirne, who only came over to the table because he knew the player Cummins was dining with – Harry Conway.

O’Beirne was distraught at inadvertently jeopardising Cummins’ place in the Test.

He needn’t have worried.

“He was more worried about the bloke sitting in the stands than he was about himself and the Australian team,” says Conway, NSW fast bowler and Cummins’ former housemate.

“It was pretty amazing actually.

“I’ve opened the bowling in club cricket with Ryan and I’m pretty tight with him. Pat was actually his favourite cricketer. That’s why he was so down because Pat was his idol.

“Pat helped Ryan go through it from a mental point of view and just supported him as best he could.”

To be selfless even in a time of such great personal stress and consequence, is who Cummins is.

“I reached out to him. I think he felt terrible and I just felt really sorry for him, more than myself really,” Cummins says.

“Poor guy had just flown himself down really excited to watch a Test match … and did absolutely nothing wrong.

“It wasn’t his fault. It’s a crazy time we’re living in and I was just trying to make sure he was OK, because it’s people like that who have such a passion for cricket which makes it so special.”

A NEW STYLE OF LEADERSHIP DAWNS

Cummins played junior cricket for the Glenbrook-Blaxland Cricket Club in the Blue Mountains before playing first-grade for Penrith in 2010. He made his first-class debut against Tasmania in March 2011, and his first Test match was at Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, that same year, at just 18 years old.

He was Man of the Match on debut and the next big thing, but repeated injuries including a recurring stress fracture in his back, left him waiting seven years to play his second Test match.

The No. 1 fast bowler was thrust into the Australian captaincy at a moment nobody expected, but his background, education and time off field as much as on, has prepared him for the role. Cummins, who attended St Paul’s Grammar School, Sydney, and has a Bachelor of Business from the University of Technology Sydney, is an avid reader, (another shared trait with Barty). A recent post to his 958,000 Instagram followers reveals a reading list than spans books on climate and Indigenous Australia to leadership with The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe.

Cummins says he had spent more than two years thinking about the kind of leader he wanted to be if he ever was summonsed.

The inspiration he seeks from outside the cricketing sphere has been as significant to him as the counsel he pursues from legends of the game like Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor.

Traditionally, Australian cricket has been defined by hard-nosed, uncompromising characters, but Cummins is unashamedly a new age leader.

“Cricket has always been quite an alpha sport,” Cummins says.

“I think it’s a different world now than it was and people need different things that make them tick.

“The best captains I’ve seen aren’t the ones that dictate exactly how everything should be done. The best leaders I’ve seen really empower the individuals in a team.

“Cricket is a funny sport. We’ve got batters, pace bowlers, spin bowlers and wicketkeepers and they’re all totally different skill sets.

“You might have someone who is twice the age of someone else in the team.

“Everyone has individual needs. I’ve found over 10 years of playing professionally, that’s what gets the best out of me as a player and I just try to make sure everyone feels empowered to do it their way but are brought together well in a really cohesive unit.

“That’s my philosophy.”

The Pat Cummins’ school of captaincy is perhaps best summed up by the Australian team’s new mantra of “calm and relentless”.

They’re two words which could not define Cummins’ own make-up as a cricketer any more precisely and it illustrates how unified the team is behind him.

“You can come up with buzz words and values that have empty meaning and aren’t actually coming from us players,” Cummins says.

“We felt the time was right to sit down and nut out exactly what our team identity is and, more than anything else, when the pressure comes on, what do we go back to?”

Several players were on the verge of pulling out of the current Test tour of Pakistan due to security concerns.

But Cummins calmly digested the information provided by his superiors, made a decision that he was comfortable leaving his young family at home to fly to the troubled region Australia had not visited in 24 years … and his teammates duly followed.

They say the “calm and relentless” mantra works because of Cummins’ authenticity as a leader.

“Obviously a fair amount of stuff has happened since the Ashes (Langer’s departure) and the way he’s led the charge off the field, in a really calm manner, I think it’s been absolutely incredible,” says 100-Test spinner, Nathan Lyon.

“I’ve been impressed with the way he’s been able to handle different situations and he’s turned into a pretty exceptional leader so early in his Test captaincy.”

Given the tumultuous circumstances surrounding Paine’s exit as Test skipper, there is no question Australia needed Cummins more than he needed them.

The player-driven direction the team has taken in the wake of Langer’s resignation has only reinforced a theory that Cummins is one of the most influential captains Australia has ever had.

He might be one of the genuine nice guys of Australian sport, but there is nothing passive about his approach to leadership. This was evidenced in his interview for the captaincy, when he told Cricket Australia in no uncertain terms who he wanted as his deputy should he be offered the job.

If doubts still lingered about returning Steve Smith to a leadership position, any scars from Sandpapergate were instantly remedied by the faith and conviction of Cummins.

“Yeah, that’s spot on … I wanted him as vice-captain and probably needed him,” Cummins says.

“My deficiencies or inexperience, I think he complements that really well.

“I’m glad he’s there.”

Cummins’ ascension to the captaincy happened so suddenly, barely a week out from the first Test, that he admits there were times during the Ashes when he actually forgot he was captain.

“There’s plenty of thinking time in a Test match but still, before you know it, there can be a couple of overs to go and you think, ‘oh actually, nothing’s changed because I’m that guy that if anything needs to change, I have to do something’,” Cummins says.

“There were a couple of those moments, but it wasn’t a bad thing either.

“I think it all happened so quickly there was a bit of a sit back and see how it plays out and by doing that, it really showed me that it’s not a bad mentality to have a lot of the time. Just let the players and the coaches shine.”

His unwavering leadership was also writ large in the wake of the shocking death of Warne, who was reported to have been watching the Australian v Pakistan Test match when he died of a massive heart attack.

Cummins spoke on behalf of the team with great fondness and emotion about Warne who, despite being a fearless critic over the years, was still loved by many of the players.

“Warnie was an all-time great, a once-in-a-century type of cricketer,” he said.

“His record will live on forever.

“We all grew up watching Warnie, idolising him, we all had posters on our wall, had his earrings.

“We loved so much his showmanship, his charisma, his tactics. He just willed himself and his team to win games for Australia. Above all else, his incredible skill as a leg-spinner.

“The loss we’re all trying to wrap our heads around is huge. The game was never the same after Warnie emerged and the game will never be the same after his passing. Rest in peace, King.”

ADJUSTING TO LIFE AS A PARENT

Off the field Cummins had to alter hisnatural tendency of going with the flow to ensure he could satisfy the unique demands of captaining his country while being a new parent. He and English fiance Becky met in 2013 at a Kings Cross nightclub, while she was in Australia on a working holiday visa and they have been together ever since.

Last year they bought a $9.5m home in Sydney’s Bronte and also have a farm in the NSW Southern Highlands.

“I’ve tried to be really conscious of time more than anything else,” Cummins says.

“I’ve always been pretty easy going. But the past couple of months with having a baby and then also being captain – two really busy things that take priority – I’ve really tried to protect my own time outside of those two things and make sure I’ve got space to still live a relatively normal life.

“Or else I’d not do either of those two things properly and I would be burnt out pretty quickly.

“Like any new parent, it’s a big adjustment but it’s been manageable and Becky has been fantastic.

“On tour the challenge is always balancing those two things because things pop up all the time … but again it’s just trying not to blur the lines too much and to have clear family time and clear working time.

“I got a separate room (on the road during the Ashes), but we didn’t actually end up needing it.

“I was always excited to finish the day’s play knowing I could go back and give him a bit of a cuddle and a feed before bed.

“(Captaincy and being a dad) are both great things that I absolutely love doing, so it never feels like a chore.”

Being Australian captain means receiving advice – whether solicited or unsolicited – from every avenue you could think of.

Cummins insists it’s all well intentioned and always welcomed.

“I keep telling him to Mankad (running out the nonstriking batter while they are backing up) more,” says Lee, as just one voice to go with the opinions of the barista, the bloke at the bar and social media’s angry mob.

“But Pat says he’s keeping it as a secret weapon for when he really needs it.”

It’s that kind of diplomacy that will keep Cummins in the hot seat of the Australian captaincy for a long time.

But when he no longer wants the job, there will be no worries either.

“Normally you worry about athletes when they move into Plan B – the next chapter of their lives, because they’re so defined by their persona as athletes,” says Crowe.

“But in the case of Pat and Ash, you couldn’t pick two athletes that will be more comfortable.”

Australia v Pakistan Third Test, Lahore, from Monday, March 21, on Fox Sports and Kayo