When a young Pat Cummins travelled to Perth to work with Dennis Lillee more than a decade ago, Mitch Marsh was quickly on the phone to tell him he had a room for his 20-year-old international teammate to stay in.
All was well until Cummins turned up at the bachelor pad to find that the “bed” was, in fact, a couch – less than ideal for a fast bowler working his way through a series of back injuries.
Mitch Marsh and Pat Cummins at a training session last summer.Credit: Getty Images
“If I was injured I would go over there and rather than get a hotel room I’d sleep on …” Cummins pauses. “Well, Mitchy said he had a spare room and I turned up and realised he only had a couch. So he probably gave me more stress fractures, sleeping on his couch!”
More than a decade later, Marsh has again stepped in to offer Cummins some accommodation – by becoming captain of Australia’s Twenty20 side for the World Cup in the Caribbean, and thus allowing Cummins to balance out an extensive leadership load.
Their bond is a key plank of the recent success of the Australian side, underlining how the environment built by Cummins has enabled the likes of Marsh and others to find their best, after years of inconsistency.
There is some poetry to how Cummins – who never considered himself a likely professional cricketer until he was already on the plane for his first tour with the national team – became close with Marsh, so steeped in cricket through his father Geoff (50 Tests) and older brother Shaun (38 Tests).
“I found it interesting because it’s very different to my experience,” Cummins told this masthead. “I finished school and became a professional cricketer and within the space of a month really I went from thinking, ‘I’m an ok cricketer’ to ‘Wow, I’m a professional playing for Australia’. There were no expectations.
Marsh with the Allan Border Medal in January.Credit: Getty Images
“Whereas just by him having the last name Marsh, it’s the opposite. It’s probably something I didn’t fully appreciate until recent years and becoming a dad, and you start thinking about the implications for Albie. But I’m sure there was a weight there. We chatted about it, but I probably didn’t empathise with it as much as I should have.
“Everyone comes in with their own baggage and their own pressure from different areas. Some people find it from media, some find it from family, it might be financial. Everyone’s got different pressure points. We don’t want him to feel burned by Shaun being a great player, or his dad being a great player – we want Mitch.”
For Marsh, to observe and know Cummins has been to reflect on how cricket is ultimately only a game. It need not be the desperately consuming vocation that it sometimes looked to be as he struggled through seven or so years of wildly oscillating fortunes, including being booed at the MCG.
“I’ve often looked at Patty and been like, ‘How is he still enjoying this, how has he still got a smile on his face’,” Marsh said. “And I think it’s something I’ve learned from him a lot, just his perspective. He loves winning more than anyone, loves the game, loves everything about being an international cricketer, but always has a great ability to leave it at the door.
“That attitude has allowed him to be so good for an extended period of time. There’s no burnout, like you see with a lot of guys in international cricket, and something we’ve all learned. There’s no doubt that’s helped us be successful over the last two years.”
The moment that Marsh pinpoints as the start of his path to consistent performance, and the honour of captaining Australia, is one of the unhappier tours in recent memory: the COVID-affected 2021 trip to the West Indies and Bangladesh, which was the beginning of the end of Justin Langer’s coaching tenure.
“My whole mentality shifted towards preparing as well as I can, and making sure I’m enjoying the tour,” Marsh said. “If I never play for Australia again, then I can look myself in the mirror and say I’ve done everything I can. That mentality has allowed me to have more energy in my preparation and try to understand what I’m trying to do. Then, if I fail, I fail.
Marsh celebrates the 2021 T20 World Cup victory with Marcus Stoinis and Adam Zampa.Credit: AP
“I still want to do really well every game, but I understand I’m not going to. I care more than ever about succeeding and the team winning, but it’s having that ability to not take it home with you, which allows you to have more energy for long periods of time.”
Marsh, of course, rose in the nation’s estimation by forging a series of powerful displays at that year’s T20 World Cup in the UAE, but the couple of years that followed were blighted by injuries. Cummins, by now Test captain, kept Marsh thinking big.
“A lot of our conversations were more when I was out of the team, him checking in and always trying to get a gauge on where I was at, whether I still wanted to play Test cricket, and that was always the number one goal,” Marsh said.
“When Patty became captain he probably saw more in me than I saw in myself, which is the sign of someone who cares a lot, and knew exactly what he wanted within this team. So it was really conversations around him saying, ‘I want you back in the team at some point in time, so go and score enough runs so we can pick you’.”
Why, then, was Cummins so eager to get Marsh back?
“Every team needs a little bit of magic in it,” he said. “You can’t just pick on runs and wickets. You’ve got to see how it fits into a team and I think that’s where Mitch is at his best. It’s the fear he puts into the opposition when he’s walking down the wicket and hitting the ball hard. I’m sure the public has seen glimpses of it over the years, but we’ve always seen it as a teammate and I think you’re starting to see more of it in his cricket.
“It’s that energy off the field, the leadership, the fun, the things that are maybe intangible, but they do add to the success of a team. That’s sometimes hard to measure, but it’s real. We’ve seen in the last year or two, winning the Allan Border Medal, how valuable he is as a player.”
As is the way with current coach Andrew McDonald and selection chair George Bailey, there was no surprise in Marsh’s unveiling as captain this week. Instead, a steady run of series in which he has already led the side, with success, has set up a path to the World Cup and the chance to repeat 2021.
Marsh (left), Mitchell Starc and David Warner in this year’s IPL.Credit: AP
Marsh was delighted when, during the recent New Zealand tour, left-armer Spencer Johnson took him to one side.
“He said to me before one of the games, ‘I can’t believe how calm everyone is’,” Marsh said. “There’s a real trust among the senior playing group that no matter whether you’ve played 100 games or one game, I look Spencer in the eye and I have full trust that he’s going to do a good job for me.
“And if he doesn’t, he’s going to learn from that experience, which will be invaluable for us in the future. So I want them to feel that calmness and feel trusted that they’re in the team for a reason; their skills are going to win us games.”
As for Geoff Marsh, not only Border’s long-time vice captain but a winning coach of Australia between 1996 and 1999, there are contrasting approaches between father and son, but common goals.
“Things were just so different back then,” Mitch Marsh said. “I’m not sure I would’ve survived under Dad’s coaching regime, having to catch a thousand high balls before you finish training.
“But my dad has really good perspective on the new generation and how we are vastly different to what they were, and we go about it differently. But ultimately the core of it is that we’re here to win, so what’s the best way for us to do that.”
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