ICC World Cup: Why Australia skipper Pat Cummins is yet to crack the ODI code

In a sense, this year has been a test more of his captaincy than his bowing mettle. Cummins the bowler has conquered all shores, is already one of the finest his country has produced, could end up as all-time great in Tests, but the verdict is not yet out on his captaincy. Few captains would have had a tougher year than him—a Test tour to India, the Ashes and the World Cup, apart from the personal misfortunes he had to endure. He lost both Tests against India that he captained. Then how many Australian captains have not lost Tests and rubbers in India? The last to win a series was Ricky Ponting, before that Bill Lawry. The Ashes was drawn, Australia kept the urn, but he faced backlash for squandering the opportunity to win a series in England after 21 years.

Now, he finds himself in the biggest test of his captaincy mettle, deputed to pull his team back from an abyss, after losing the first two games of the World Cup. Not just losing, but losing abjectly. Wracked by spin in Chennai, ripped by pace in Lucknow. Both times, his team failed to cross 200, both times the middle-order imploded dramatically, both times his bowlers were bereft of spark, and in Lucknow, his fielders were hopelessly shoddy. Back home, his leadership has been under severe criticism.

So much so that Cummins dug up some coincidences with the 2019 tournament. “I think looking back at 2019, India and South Africa were the two teams that we lost to in the round games there. I think in the last year, they’re kind of the two teams that we’ve had the most trouble against,” he said. In fact, both the finalists, England and New Zealand, had lost three games and still qualified for the knockouts. So it is not yet a doomsday scenario.

A long round-robin format tournament offers the chance to recoup and regroup. It would benefit them, Cummins assumes, that they are playing teams that they haven’t “played for a while” and that they “have had a lot of success against (these teams).” He would even push in a reminder: “Not long ago, we were number one in the world. So, we don’t have to look back too far to work out when we’re playing our best.”

At its best, Australia could be a frightening proposition. Imagine a pace-trio of the calibre of Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood; a batting line-up that comprises David Warner, Steve Smith, Glenn Maxwell and Marnus Labuschagne; the all-round might of Marcus Stoinis and Cameron Green; not too long ago, Adam Zampa was among the top 10 bowlers of this format in ICC rankings. A group like this could bounce back, no one doubts, but it would require a collective step-up, an overnight makeover. “Everyone’s kind of rolled up their sleeves and want to try and get to work and make amends,” he said. “Including myself,” he would emphasize.

In both games he did not bowl the full quota of the overs; against South Africa, he did not bowl in the first 10 overs. In 15.2 overs, he leaked 104 runs for a single wicket. Part of Cummins’s angst is his own incapacity to influence the game. Incidentally, Cummins has not quite mastered the riffs and flow of the 50-over game, as he had Test cricket or to an extent T20s. He has featured in merely 79 games, as opposed to 59 Tests and 50 T20Is. The numbers are not as glittering as they are in Tests (a plebeian average of 28.59 as compared to a royal 22.94 in Tests).

Before the South Africa game, he admitted his strange relationship with this format. “The biggest challenge is that you’ve got ten overs [to bowl]. It’s quite a physical format. I find it the most physically taxing if you are doing two or three games in a week. We are doing 15k (kilometres) in a 50-over match.”

The roles too keep changing: “With one-day cricket, your roles can be very different – from being an opening bowler with a ball that swings, to coming on first change and maybe bowling cross-seamers where you are trying to defend and get your wickets through pressure. It’s a different kind of challenge to the other formats.”

It’s a format that he does not play on a consistent basis either. The South Africa game was just his fourth this year; he played just six in 2022, none in 2021. Between the 2019 and 2023 World Cup, he featured in only 19 games. This perhaps accounts for his unfamiliarity with the format’s rhythm and nature. Little wonder then that the format that he is least familiar with as a bowler is the most difficult to captain as well. No matter how hard you draw the lines between the two functions, they overlap and entangle.

Therein perhaps lies Australia’s panacea too. If Cummins can crack the ODI code, so could perhaps his team. If he rediscovers his form, so could his team; if he could find his smile back, so could his team.