Pat the Bat

GH on the captain's quiet return to batting form.

Gideon Haigh

When Australia were badly beaten during the Boxing Day Test of 2018, Pat Cummins stood tall.  His match figures of nine for 99 represented one of the best bowling performances of all time in a beaten side.  And for scores of 17 and 63, he resisted an Indian bowling attack red in tooth and claw for almost four hours.  

Clutching for positives afterwards, perhaps, I wrote a column countenancing two ideas: that Cummins might in time be considered not only a candidate for the Australian captaincy but also a fully-fledged all-rounder.  But by the time the former became a reality, the likelihood of the latter had dwindled.  Cummins’ batting tapered to the extent that in one fifteen innings sequence, he made it to double figures only thrice, for a highest score of 22.  He seemed unsure whether to stick or twist, and as a result did neither.  Both his average and his strike rate attenuated.  

Flash forward to today at Christchurch.  Australia lose two wickets in two balls to Ben Sears. Their fourth innings ambition of 279 has gone from so near to so far.  Yet the appearance at the crease of their skipper is now curiously reassuring.  He is tall enough that a bat appears tiny in his hands; his ungainly stoop looks like man lowering himself gingerly onto a cold toilet seat. But soft hands now save him from a first-ball dismissal, and his on-drive and punch throughout point to bridge the final gap are thoroughbred shots.  

In the end, Australia breeze to victory, Cummins having contributing 28 to the decisive 61-run partnership with Alex Carey.  It’s so breezy that the captain deprives his keeper of a hard-earned century; Carey has to rest content with the man-of-the-match medal for his ten catches. 

At the end, the obligatory man love - hugs with Carey recalling those at the end of Cummins’ unbeaten partnership of 55 with Nathan Lyon to win at Edgbaston last year.  It was that heady 44 off 63 balls, especially the two nerveless sixes from Joe Root when Ben Stokes got a little greedy with the off-spinner as the chase tautened, that confirmed an upward tilt in Cummins’ batting - the cover of Ashes 2023 might be deemed a souvenir.

The numbers don’t necessarily capture Cummins’ batting improvement.  His lifetime average is 17; his batting average as captain is 18; his average in the last year is 21. What this disguises, however, is the renewed range of his aptitudes, and recovered confidence in his defence. Cummins can hold up an end for a senior colleague: he hung around nearly ninety minutes for 9 in the World Test Championship final to put on 51 for the ninth wicket with Carey.  Cummins can  counterattack: he comfortably outscored Lyon and Usman Khawaja as they added 128 for the last two Australian wickets at the Gabba against West Indies.  Cummins can bat with anyone: at the Oval, he consorted successfully with both Steve Smith and with Todd Murphy.

Cummins can also still look abject from time to time: he failed at Nagpur and at Leeds, coinciding with Australia’s worst defeats of the last year, and his second-innings smear at Delhi was the ugliest shot played by an Australian captain since Michael Clarke’s self-defeated slog at Trent Bridge in 2015.  But above all does he bring experience and nous to the role at number nine, where he averages 22 (versus 14 at number eight).  And that has an impact on his oppositions, and his rival captains.  

All of Australia’s first-choice attack - Starc, Cummins, Lyon and even Hazelwood - can hold a bat.  You are unlikely to blow all of them away every innings; at best it will be only one of them that loiters inconveniently; at worst, they’ll all put work in your bowlers’ legs.  As captain, Cummins has taken 105 wickets at 24.  But his bowling is a given.  He has more to contribute, and that vision of him as a prospective all-rounder still has time to come true.