The World on a String: Pat Cummins lays them in the aisles

PL on the Australian captain who may only play four and a half days of cricket in 12 months

In Pat Cummins' new Prime Video advertisement has the cricketer role-playing as a stand-up comedian, dressed in a plaid jacket and armed with a string of excruciatingly modest one-liners.

“Good evening, I’m Pat Cummins … only joking, I’m already here”.

A few hours before the commercial dropped, it was announced that the Australian Test and ODI captain would not be at the World Cup he was spruiking on behalf of its broadcaster.

If he was already anywhere, it was in the role of one of Australia’s most popular brand ambassadors and cricketers.

I was alerted to Cummins’ announcement by a message from someone irritated that the bowler would be missing from another white ball series, predicting that he would be fit for the IPL (he will be) and claiming that people like me essentially let Cummins get away with murder.

Australia will get four and a half days of cricket out of Cummins in the 12 months between him returning injured from the Caribbean to, hopefully, returning fit for the two-match series against Bangladesh. Given he’s paid around $3m by Cricket Australia, he has done quite nicely for himself.

The 32-year-old, who was photographed among the fabulous at the Australian Open final on Sunday, might be the template for the player of the future.

Captain Planet, as Murdoch’s angry readers love to call him, has found the work-life balance all multi-format players will aspire to: a big national contract that ensures you are around for the important games for your country, a big franchise contract or two to top up the earnings, and a list of brand alliances and business partnerships.

Cummins earns around $3m from Cricket Australia. He picked up another $3.7m from the Sunrisers Hyderabad, and in 2024, signed up with Major League Cricket franchise the San Francisco Unicorns group, which appears to be as much a tech start-up as a cricket business.

He has, as I pointed out in the podcast earlier this week, been missing from white ball games for some time now. He has not played in any of the 28 T20 matches played by Australia since the 2024 World Cup, and played just two of the 23 ODIs played since the 2023 ODI World Cup in that format.

He does, however, expect to be fit in time to pick up his cheque at the IPL, which follows the World Cup.

“If it was flipped, if the IPL was right now, I wouldn’t be playing that, and if the World Cup was in April, May, hopefully I’d be right for that. It’s purely timing,” Cummins told The Code’s Ben Horne who was granted an interview, along with a string of other journalists, on a media day for Prime Video’s ICC World Cup coverage.

Some are cynical, but I don’t have too many problems with this.