In January 2011, a domestic T20 tournament was being held in Australia. But most of the hype seemed to surround just one player – the 17-year-old Pat Cummins. So much so that he already seemed to have a fan club, with one of the banners saying – Pat Cummins FC, we love you. The fast bowler lived up to the hype in one of the matches between New South Wales and Queensland as he ripped through a top order comprising Michael Lumb, James Hopes and Chris Simpson.
Cummins executed the simple but effective plan of hitting the pitch hard and zooming the ball on the stumps. And he did all of it with a smile on his face. At that moment, a thought flashed in the mind – not your archetypal Australian fast bowler.
The year is now 2024. Australia are geared up to lock horns against India in the Borer-Gavaskar Trophy in Perth. From a marketing perspective, it can be safely said that the current Australian skipper, Cummins is one of the big draws of the series. Somewhere it also gives us an indicator that Cummins must have fulfilled all those prophecies about his potential and perhaps even exceeding expectations. Cummins has not just bagged close to 500 international wickets and accumulated crucial runs down the order, but he has also led Australia to a memorable World Cup triumph in India, alongside successfully defending the Ashes in England.
However, Cummins’ career hasn’t always been a bed of roses. Right after participating in the Champions League in 2011, Cummins was picked in the Australian Test squad for the South African tour. He went on to bag seven wickets in the Wanderers Test and even hit the winning runs. Who can forget his delivery to Jacques Kallis in the second innings? Cummins hit the deck hard and the ball straightened to take the edge of the great batter. Basically, he had found the near-perfect line and length for the conditions at the Wanderers.
But after touching noteworthy heights in his opening Test, Cummins’ world crash-landed with a thud as he was laid low by a foot injury. Earlier that year, during the Sheffield Shield final, he had sustained a back injury. The back problem came back to haunt him in 2012, 2013 and 2015. Such was the recurrence of his injury issues that he didn’t play a single Sheffield Shield game for five years. He was, however, sporadically a part of Australia’s limited-overs set-ups, including the successful 2015 World Cup campaign.
The general feeling was that Cummins perhaps needed to make a few tweaks to his load-up and action. One of them was his arms and legs seemed to be moving across his body. Or in a nutshell, some lateral flexion. At that stage of his career, the legendary Dennis Lillee came to his rescue. As Cummins himself once told the Sydney Morning Herald: “My old action was arms and legs everywhere. Both my legs and arms were going across my body, my shoulders were rocking. All my movements were left to right, as well as trying to go straight.
“When it came to my delivery, my legs were throwing me out to the right, my shoulders were throwing me to the left, just a twist, and then you are trying to bowl fast and straight, so all the forces get caught up in my back. It’s always going to be a work in progress, for me it’s trying to get my arms and legs relatively straight without losing pace.”
The watershed moment of his career happened when Mitchell Starc injured his foot during the Tests in India in 2017. Cummins, who had played a solitary first-class game going into that series, went on to bowl almost 40 overs on a flat pitch in Ranchi. He then put on a spirited display in Dharamshala, although Australia lost that Test and the series. That was followed by a successful tour of Bangladesh and the Ashes series at home. Incidentally, since the start of the 2017 Ashes, he has taken 248 of his 269 Test wickets at an amazing average of 22.29.
In that period, Cummins has also sharpened his quiver by adding different tools. Even in the Ranchi Test, Cummins was generating a hint of old-ball swing. With the new ball, he may not have an away-swinger that moves late.
Here, it has to be considered that a part of his middle finger was ripped off in a freak accident when he was young. He also has more of an 11 o’clock release point, not exactly suited to ushering in the outswinger. But there is a school of thought that his small handicap helps him to get more seam movement, as he has a different ‘release feel’ for the ball. He has also developed his own versions of the wobble seam, where with subtle changes in grip and seam position – the leather and seam part of the ball – he looks to outfox the opponent.
Obviously, the major weapon in his arsenal is still his ability to relentlessly hit the deck and extract bounce. Pakistan got a taste of it in the Sydney Test as did India in the 2023 ODI World Cup final. On a slow deck in Ahmedabad, Cummins kept India quiet in the middle overs. He also silenced the massive crowd by removing Virat Kohli.
A day before that all-important match, Cummins had noted: “The crowd is obviously going to be very one-sided, but in sport, there’s nothing more satisfying than hearing a big crowd go silent, and that’s the aim for us.” The Australian skipper basically walked the talk by sending Kohli back to the hut.
A year later, Cummins would be hoping to wrest back to the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, which hasn’t changed hands since India reclaimed it in 2017. Make no mistake, Cummins and his band of men will be motivated to get the elusive trophy back in Australia’s glittering cabinet.
Meanwhile, despite all the publicity surrounding the series, one expects Cummins to absorb the pressure with a smile. The very smile that wowed Australian crowds all those years ago.