On a day when Australia’s bowlers put away the hammer and went to work with the chisel, Patrick Cummins took his 200th wicket in Test cricket. That Cummins has reached this mark so quickly (44 matches) and so cheaply (21.7 runs per wicket) is not at all surprising.
Since his debut in 2011, and even during the six years of injury and recovery that followed, Cummins was Australian cricket’s most confident investment in long-term success. Nothing is inevitable in sport, but every now and then something can seem as if it is.
What is more comment-worthy is the manner and method behind his achievement, the type of bowler he has become.
When he arrived as that coltish teenager in South Africa, Cummins was an old-fashioned tearaway: very fast, a gambler, slightly erratic. A bowler with a hammer looking for a nail. Jeff Thomson, whose wicket tally Cummins equalled this week, was the model for this extreme paceman. It didn’t matter if Thommo bowled a bit of rubbish, the diamonds were worth the rocks.
It turned out that the erratic element inside Cummins was his back, which took those next six years to align and mature. As horse trainers know, sometimes you need to send a talented juvenile male away while they grow into their bodies. Often it helps to geld them. Not that this was advised or performed in Cummins’s case, but when he came back he was neither wild nor raw. He was Kingston Town after the snip.
By 2017, not long after the retirement of Mitchell Johnson, another of the rocks-and-diamonds variety, Cummins returned to the Australian attack. He brought a different mental approach to bowling, one that holds more in common with batting (on which Cummins worked during his convalescence). That is, success isn’t about pulling out the occasional perfectly executed ball. Success comes from striving for perfection with every single ball. Batters can’t afford a single lapse. Nor, in this mindset, can a certain type of bowler.
Pat Cummins removes Kraigg Brathwaite to pick up his 200th Test wicket.Credit:Getty
Glenn McGrath exemplified this approach, but it had a long heritage. Dennis Lillee was a perfectionist, as was Ray Lindwall. Every ball was part of a plan, every step a search for control. Extreme pace was an added bonus, but the main thing was consistency. Curtly Ambrose bowled that way for the West Indies, as had most of the greats in their period of dominance.
To see Cummins at the peak of his powers today is to appreciate that unrelenting concentration, a quality in cricket that is mostly connected with batters but should equally be observed in bowlers. Cummins and his teammates had little in their favour on the drop-in wicket in Perth. Over the first two days, a wicket had fallen every three hours. The West Indian top order, especially their captain Kraigg Brathwaite, were not giving theirs away. The weather wasn’t too hot, but while the bowlers were better for this, so was the pitch, which stubbornly held its form.
So Cummins went to work with his chisel. He pitched the ball slightly fuller to get the West Indians on the front foot, but such is his control, he was rarely so full that they could drive confidently. When that didn’t work, he dropped shorter and pushed them onto the back foot and used the fuller delivery for shock value.
Brathwaite was the main target, so Cummins made him his personal project. On Thursday night, Cummins had bowled 17 deliveries to the West Indian captain. He gave up one single, beat the outside edge twice, and hit him in the groin once. Against the other bowlers, Brathwaite was faultless.
In his first spell on Friday morning, Cummins bowled 18 balls to Brathwaite: three runs, five times past the outside edge, no hits in the groin. This was a batsman totally at his ease blunting the other bowlers, but at sea when facing Cummins.
Brathwaite batted very well for nearly four hours: a leader’s innings of 64 runs off 166 balls. But when Cummins came back for his third spell, Brathwaite only survived one delivery. Cummins speared his second ball past a gate that had been sealed shut to all others. His complete output when bowling to Brathwaite was 37 balls, for three scoring shots (two singles and a two), one blow to the groin, and six times past the bat, including that final ball.
This was a master class in chiselling. Cummins is a captain now, a leader, and many other things can be written in tribute on this important milestone in his career. But on the cricket field he is mainly a bowler. He concentrated on the opposition’s best player, their captain, and he chiselled him away until he won. Brathwaite was just one wicket for Cummins, but this little narrative tells a fair bit about the other 199.
