Last Orders

GH on Australia's young veteran

Pat Cummins could do with a new cap. It is not quite in the condition of stylised dishevelment achieved by those great fetishists Steve Waugh and Justin Langer; it does not yet call for a successor model like Steve Smith’s. But, in its sixty-eighth Test outing, the peak is fraying and the olive green has been weathered by an excess of sunny days and beer showers.

Alinta yeah nah

You’d be pardoned overlooking Cummins’s senior statesmanship, given his lean, still fresh face, and the easy symmetry of his career: he was thirty-four Tests a player, paying 22 runs per wicket; he has been thirty-four Tests a skipper, paying 22 runs per wickets. Australia’s captain reproduces cricket’s most volatile skill, fast bowling, from beneath a concealment of metropolitan sheen. Today, having bowled fast on a fullish length riffing off the slope, he welcomed Kagiso Rabada, a bona fide tailender, from round the wicket with rearing bouncers from the last two balls of his eighteenth over. The first hit Rabada’s shoulder, the second his helmet. There was no feigned solicitude: Cummins accepted his battered headgear from the umpire, and sauntered towards his position at mid-on, perfunctorily nodding to Rabada before beckoning one fielder and pushing back another. All in a day’s work.