This time last year, Australian captain Pat Cummins published a book, Tested. In that pleasing way he has of doing things a little differently, it was not your conventional mid-career autobiography, but eleven highly-polished interviews with various public brand names, from sport to science, politics to podcasting, in a broadly affirming, life-lessony vein.
The only cricketing eminence among them was acutely chosen. Cummins identifies Dennis Lillee as an inspiration and a pathfinder. Like Cummins, Lillee was the embodiment of the tearaway; like Cummins, he surmounted a career-threatening injury. The pair linked up during Cummins’s rehabilitation between 2012 and 2017. The younger man credits his elder with adjusting his action just enough to ease wear-and-tear without sacrificing bodily autonomy. The prior friendship makes for an excellent interview, and an intriguing accompaniment to Cummins’s new dilemmas.
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