Captain Cummins stands on the cusp of another title

Chennai: Pat Cummins shook off all the controversies hounding Australian cricket and captained them to a World Test Championship title and a 50-over World Cup crown in 2023. 

Cummins was made skipper of a floundering Sunrisers Hyderabad in March 2024 and a few months on, he is on the cusp of winning them their first title in a decade. 

This level of success as a skipper across formats is not unprecedented, one needn’t look further than MS Dhoni, but finding a winning formula to work within such a short turnaround time is impressive nevertheless. And yet, Cummins sandbagged it quite nonchalantly. 

"I think the run's got to stop at some point,” he said on Saturday. "Yeah, it's been a great couple of years, but I hadn't captained any T20 cricket before this series. So I wasn't too sure what to expect. It's obviously quite fast-paced, a T20 game.”

When asked about how he took a side which finished tenth out of as many teams in 2023 to a position where they could well win the title, Cummins spoke of Daniel Vettori’s influence on the team instead of his own. 

“I think at the start of the season, you map out the style that you want to play that you think is going to give yourselves the best chance to win,” he said. "Obviously, along the way, you're allowed to adapt that and maybe change some personnel. But we were pretty strong that how we wanted to play was super aggressive.”

Cummins also revealed that he blends data with intuition to get the best out of his men, a case best expressed in their openers Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma. 

"The way Abi and Trav have gone out and batted this season, data probably doesn't tell you that that's going to be successful, but, you know, I know as a bowler that's pretty scary if you're coming up against guys who are batting like that. It's always a balance between objective data and what we're feeling out there.”