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In Pat Cummins, Australia have one of the rarest of cricketing commodities: a dynamic strike bowler who is also frugal.
Across the past 20 years, perhaps only Curtly Ambrose, Wasim Akram and Allan Donald have fit this bill as an aggressive Test bowler who physically intimidates the opposition, while also being economical.
Typically, the best fast bowlers fit into one of two categories.
The first is quicks who attack relentlessly and scare opposition batsmen, but who are quite expensive in the process. This describes the likes of Mitchell Starc, Mitchell Johnson, James Pattinson, Shoaib Akhtar, Waqar Younis and Brett Lee.
The second category is bowlers who strike fear into the batsmen due to the risk of losing their wicket, rather than losing their head. These quicks rely less on pace and intimidation and more on subtler skills like unrelenting accuracy, swing and seam movement. Into this group slot the likes of Josh Hazlewood, Trent Boult, Stuart Broad, James Anderson and Vernon Philander.
It is truly uncommon that attributes from both of these groups are fused into one bowler. While it is early in his Test career, Cummins appears to be just such an anomaly.
Not since Dennis Lillee have Australia possessed this category of bowler – one who has both brain and brawn, who can bowl 150kmh with pinpoint accuracy, who can outthink batsmen as adeptly as he can blast them out.
Akram, Ambrose and Donald were able to string together maidens while bowling in an attacking style. And, if they so chose, they could switch up a gear and terrorise batsmen with hostile, express-pace bowling.
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Cummins now has the best bouncer in world cricket, taking the mantle from the recently-retired Mitchell Johnson. This became patently clear at Ranchi where, on an utterly dead surface, he managed to bounce out opener KL Rahul, classy number five Ajinkya Rahane, and all-rounder Ravi Ashwin.
Rahul was in scorching touch all series and was cruising on 67* when Cummins roughed him up and sent him packing. Rahane, meanwhile, plays the short ball better than any other Indian batsman yet he, too, was worked over by Cummins at Ranchi. Ashwin looked genuinely rattled by Cummins’ venomous approach. To achieve this on such an unresponsive pitch was a mark of the young Australian’s potency.
The key to a good short ball is not just pace. Crucially, it must not be telegraphed. Batsmen sometimes know a short ball is coming before it even leaves the bowler’s hand. They are able to pick up on certain triggers in a bowler’s approach or action which tells them what’s coming.
Some bowlers are easy to read in this way, and others have to dig their bouncers in particularly short, which gives the batsmen more time to recognise and react.
Johnson’s bouncer clearly was very hard to read. Partly that would have been the result of his slingy action, but he also seemed to get the ball to rear at a batsman’s throat from a significantly fuller length than most other pacemen.
Like Johnson, Cummins does not telegraph his short ball. Even at Ranchi, on the slowest of surfaces, he was able to shock well-set batsmen.
This unique skill was evident in his debut Test when, as an 18-year-old, he had Proteas superstars Jacques Kallis, Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers all in a tangle trying to play his searing short balls. He dismissed all three of those champions in that Test en route to seven wickets and a man-of-the-match award.
The manner in which he roughed up Kallis in the second innings was particularly extraordinary. With a succession of nasty short balls he succeeded in prompting Kallis to hang back in the crease. Then he threw one up much fuller and wider, catching Kallis flat-footed on the crease as he fed the slips cordon.
This is the great value of possessing a scary short ball – it helps you earn wickets from your fuller deliveries. Johnson demonstrated this brilliantly during his all-time-great purple patch in late 2013 and early 2014 against England and South Africa.
When people recount his performances the focus is heavy on how he bounced out the Poms and the Proteas. What tends to be overlooked is the high number of easy wickets he got from batsmen prodding feebly at pitched-up deliveries, back deep in their crease nervously anticipating another lethal bouncer.
Time and again, Johnson floated up relatively benign deliveries outside off, which would have been easily dealt with by someone who was taking a confident stride forward. Instead, the batsmen were on their heels, distracted by the worry of having their helmet rattled, and so their forward weight transfer came too late for them to get their head over the ball.
Cummins’ terrifying short ball looks set to earn plenty of soft dismissals in just this same manner. In between these startling bouncers, he rarely releases the pressure on batsmen by offering up loose deliveries. So far in his Test career, Cummins has conceded a miserly 2.96 runs per over, compared to the far more expensive Starc (3.42rpo) and Pattinson (3.35rpo), while his career first-class economy rate is also much better than that pair.
He offers his captain the priceless to simultaneously attack and defend. In that way, he perfectly complements the dynamism and unpredictability of Starc and the suffocating accuracy of Hazlewood.
Australia may well be in possession of a truly rare type of bowler.