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Opinion
Pat Cummins has been copping plenty of stick but he was nothing but classy as Australian captain despite all the drama of the Lord’s Test.
The England camp need to be careful with some of the accusations they’ve been throwing around because their talk about the spirit of cricket hasn’t always been backed up with what they’ve done on the field.
Cummins’ response was spot on after the game following all the booing and blow-ups about Alex Carey getting Jonny Bairstow out when he dropped in a bit of humour by saying “I thought the crowd took it pretty well”.
Then he was asked about the problems with the MCC members abusing the Aussie players as they walked through the Long Room and Cummins said he thought it’d be a shame if that ever went away.
He doesn’t want the players to have to take alternative routes to the field because it’s one of the iconic moments in cricket to walk through that room containing all that history.
Pat Cummins and Alex Carey celebrate the wicket of Jonny Bairstow. (Photo by Gareth Copley/Getty Image
It could have been easy for him to go a different way on both those topics but I thought he showed genuine class in a volatile situation.
What happened in the Long Room can’t happen again. The MCC have suspended three members so they’ve got onto it pretty quickly. It should be a privilege to be in that position where you can be there watching the players going out to the field so that needs to be stamped out.
They were unhappy about the Bairstow dismissal but I thought it was snoozy cricket from him and most of the old England players that I spoke to thought the same.
It was astute cricket and top-quality execution from Carey. Normally a keeper will try that and miss and the batter has a bit of a warning to stay in their crease but he picked his mark after watching Bairstow drift out of his crease the previous few deliveries and then hit the stumps when it mattered.
Bairstow did it himself to a few of the Aussies so they can’t then complain. I thought it was smart cricket from Carey and they needed it at that stage of the match because if Bairstow had got going with Ben Stokes, it could have been an England win and a 1-1 series deadlock instead of Australia being up 2-0.
Brendon McCullum wasn’t happy but there were clips going around social media soon afterwards of him doing similar stuff when he was the New Zealand wicketkeeper.
People get respect when they’re not contradictory.
It’s a bit like Ollie Robinson sledging Usman Khawaja in the first Test and talking tough off the field then all of a sudden he’s backing away at the crease like he did in Hobart at the end of the last series.
If you’re going to be a hard man of cricket, you need to be consistent, you can’t contradict yourself and he did that again on day five by throwing his wicket away cheaply when the match was still there to be won.
If you’re going to be upholding the spirit of cricket, you can’t be unwavering, which is again what I liked about Cummins.
He had every right to be angry when Mitchell Starc’s catch was ruled not out at a crucial juncture on day four but he accepted the umpire’s decision and got on with the game.
Plenty of Aussie captains who I played under would have reacted a lot differently.
He stayed in control and the rest of the team followed his lead.
Stokes was playing one of the greatest Test innings of all time, Stuart Broad was trying to taunt the Aussies when he was out there batting, they didn’t have their fourth-innings specialist in Nathan Lyon because of his torn calf.
But Cummins kept his cool.
Starc’s catch still looks to me like it was fair enough and there’s too much grey area about whether a fielder has total control of their movements.
In the old days that’s a completed catch. I would have been totally comfortable if that was given out and I can understand why the third umpire has come to that interpretation. This isn’t the last time this kind of thing will happen – the laws of the game need to be clearer.
There was a ridiculous stat that 21 wickets had fallen to bouncers but Stokes went into T20 mode on day five and just kept pinging world-class fast bowlers into the stands.
He’s a magic match-winning Test player – if he’d got them home, it would be hard to be possibly the greatest of all time, on one leg.
Ben Stokes and Pat Cummins. (Photo by Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
The first few days it was actually pretty quiet at the ground but the fans arced up on day four and on the last day with 25-quid tickets, it’s a great way for people who can’t normally afford it to get in, which is great, but it was probably a bit different to a standard Lord’s crowd.
It was as rowdy as I’ve heard a crowd at the home of cricket.
Broad was adding to the theatre by putting his bat well behind the crease at the end of every over to get the crowd riled up. I would have loved it if Carey had been able to run him out too when he was trying to do that.
I found it rich that this guy was ripping into Carey about that incident affecting his legacy and this is the same Stuart Broad who nicked one to first slip and didn’t walk.
Once again, it’s contradictory behaviour.
In the end, the Aussies got it done on the back of Steve Smith’s brilliant ton in the first innings. He was itching to get a big score after missing out in the first Test and he showed exactly what he’s made of.
Nathan Lyon is checked on by Joe Root. (Photo by Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)
He couldn’t have done it without the groundwork laid by Khawaja and David Warner, negotiating the first session with a 73-run partnership. The Aussies could have been four down at lunch on the opening day after being sent in but they put a high price on their wickets in both innings.
Ben Duckett surprised me by doing the same for England – he looked out of his depth in both innings in the first Test but he batted superbly and was unlucky not to get a century.
But overall, I think this Test again shows that Australia have a stronger all-round team. With Lyon out and the pitch having little life in it, the only option was to go with the bouncer barrage and it worked because there was a two-paced nature of the wicket.
And a special shout-out to Lyon for his heroics batting with a torn calf to help his team. Those 15 runs he put on with Starc turned out to be very important in the final wash-up.