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Pat Cummins has won big matches for Australia with both bat and ball. He has advocated on climate change, and stuck up for his teammates in the aftermath of Justin Langer’s axing as coach. Friday is as big a test of his leadership as those moments.
Cummins has nearly always met the moment in the 15 years since he was presented with his baggy green in Johannesburg. His task now as Test captain is to unite a dressing room and re-unify Australian cricket after a bruising week for the game.
For all the work Cummins and his teammates have done in rebuilding the reputation of the national men’s team, the prevailing view of the side, according to the Australian public this week, is they are cheats. Lying cheats as well.
Cricket Australia’s hasty investigation in 2018 left many gaps, which Usman Khawaja’s warts-and-all memoir and David Warner’s social media posts have filled. Warner is likely to say more on Friday when he suits up in the Kayo Sports commentary box in Perth for the opening one-day international against England.
While there has been much angst in and outside the dressing room at the candid nature of Khawaja’s book Sabr , much of the criticism of the chapter dedicated to one of Australian sport’s biggest scandals has played the man rather than the ball.
Whether friendships forged under the baggy green are lost forever is a matter for Khawaja and his former teammates to discuss. Of more significance is how Cummins addresses the central premise of Khawaja’s claims: that the whole team knew sandpaper was being used.
Perhaps Cummins can give ground on Khawaja’s argument that the entire team was complicit as they all stood to gain from an illegally altered ball that hooped around corners. The fining of every player in an XI for a slow over rate is an example of cricket’s one-in, all-in approach to certain indiscretions.
What would be more surprising is a confession to knowledge of the sandpaper plot when Cummins has been adamant from the start he did not know.
He made this point publicly in 2021 when he was a signatory to the statement made by the rest of the Cape Town attack – which also included Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon – after Cameron Bancroft’s interview with journalist Donald Macrae in The Guardian .
Australian cricket missed that opportunity to take the skeletons out of the closet. They have the chance again.
One of Cummins’ problems is many in the public do not believe him or the fast bowlers. There is enough scepticism that a body language expert gave his analysis on Starc’s and Khawaja’s media appearances this week to assess the veracity of their comments.
Some will never give Cummins the chance, based on their disagreement with his progressive politics, but even more fair-minded cricket followers are sceptical of the idea a bowler would not know if the condition of their only tool of the trade was altered.
Cummins, though, is wedged. The more emphatic he is to convince the doubters, and support his fellow bowlers, the more he runs the risk of disenfranchising Steve Smith, one of the three players who copped lengthy bans over the scandal.
Smith is central to Cummins’ ambitions for the team in the next eight months in their goal of conquering India in India and ending what will be a 26-year drought in England.
He remains the team’s best batter in a troublesome top six, an excellent slipper and his onfield tactical acumen alleviates much of the pressure on Cummins as a bowling captain.
Smith, the former captain, has been silent on the matter as he recuperates from a neck injury in his adopted home of New York.
Any schadenfreude he felt when Khawaja’s claims were first aired must surely have faded the longer the issue has dragged on, and the closer it gets to his arrival back home, likely to be early next week when he joins NSW teammates as he prepares for the upcoming Test series against New Zealand.
Not everyone around the team is convinced Smith’s neck injury was the sole reason he withdrew from the recent decider in Cape Town, Australia’s first Test at the venue since the tumult of 2018, and there are concerns how the dredging of the past is affecting him.
Smith can shed more light on these matters if the plans for him to speak publicly next week in Sydney go ahead.
How the Australian team performs in India and England will define Cummins’ legacy on the field. How he handles his state of the union on Friday may well define his legacy off it.
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