This time last year, a powerful Australian ODI team battered Bangladesh in the last of their World Cup group games in India, before going on to beat South Africa and the hosts to lift the trophy in front of a stunned Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad.
Those games were the same format as the series in which Pakistan have just smashed Australia, making mincemeat of their batting in particular. But that was about all the two assignments had in common. For evidence of this, look no further than the activities of the captain.
Australian players walk off the pitch after their loss to Pakistan.Credit: AP
Pat Cummins was the centre of a bold and brilliant Cup campaign. He was tactically astute, preternaturally calm and made a match-winning difference with the bat as well as the ball.
Last night, though, as Pakistan took out the series by a resounding eight-wicket margin at a sparsely populated Perth Stadium, Cummins was at another concrete bowl on the other side of the country. He saw Coldplay in Sydney with his wife Becky.
The top priority right now, so far as the Australian set-up is concerned, is being rested and ready for the looming Test series against India on home soil. The squad was named in Melbourne on Sunday. Cummins and other senior players were spared the long-haul trip from east coast to west so they would be as fresh as possible when they do travel to Perth for the first Test of the Border-Gavaskar series.
That Test team travel day, by the way, will be 24 hours before the final Twenty20 game against Pakistan in Hobart, part of a series that starts on Thursday in Brisbane. In this dizzying context, no player should be pitied more than Josh Inglis, entrusted with the white-ball captaincy while Cummins and company rest, but also part of the Test squad for the first game.
Becky and Pat Cummins attend the Coldplay concert in Sydney.Credit: Instagram
India, meanwhile, have three distinct squads either playing, travelling or preparing, in multiple formats at once.
The game style of the Australian white-ball side, all dash and brio at the top of the order, is geared specifically for flat, low pitches – the sorts of surfaces encountered both in India last year and at next year’s Champions Trophy in Pakistan.
That approach, vigorously defended by the likes of Matt Short, Jake Fraser-McGurk and head coach Andrew McDonald over the past week, is more likely to win global trophies, but not so robust on juicy early season pitches in Australia. In his book Tested, Cummins outlined the thinking behind it.
“If our hope was to perform well and not disappoint anyone, we could have gone on as we had before,” he wrote. “But if our ambition was to win the tournament, I thought we had to bring some risk and variance into our decision-making; something that would give us a better chance of winning the competition, but that might see us fail … which would leave us ripe for harsh scrutiny.”
Coldplay singer Chris Martin and his dad watch Australia take on Pakistan at the MCG.Credit: Fox Sports
Right now, the risk of Australia’s approach is to invite exactly the “harsh scrutiny” Cummins spoke about. A pair of vast defeats at the hands of Pakistan, without a single batter passing 50 all series, should be cause for genuine concern at Cricket Australia.
Both the national team’s leaders and the top brass of CA have put plenty of other things ahead of bilateral white-ball series. Tests and global trophies are No.1 for Cummins and company, while head office is all about leaving room at the height of summer and school holidays for the Big Bash League.
What is not so prioritised, creating the likelihood of mounting criticism, is the expectation of the Australian public for a winning team on home soil in all formats, and the extra dollars paid by Foxtel for exclusive rights to white-ball games.
In both 2018 and 2023, it was Fox Cricket’s portion of the broadcast deal that accounted for any major uplift in the rights fees. Seven paid proportionally less in 2018 than Nine had done for exclusive rights for decades. In the most recent deal, Seven wrangled a significant discount out of CA after going to war with the governing body for nearly three years.
Foxtel’s money is thus more vital to CA each time, even as the paywall infuriates many members of the public who still expect all games in Australia to be free-to-air. But how much more money might Foxtel be willing to pay for white-ball games played at the margins of the season with under-strength teams in front of small crowds?
Next summer, the Ashes series is preceded by white-ball matches against India -– which did huge numbers for Foxtel and Kayo in 2020. As he did at the MCG against Pakistan, it is easier to imagine Chris Martin watching Cummins in that series than the other way around.
