Cummins stands firm on ball tampering to leave Australian cricket back where it started

The Test captain kept his promise to answer all questions at a press conference that made his position clear and filled some but not all gaps

Our coverage on Thursday said that Pat Cummins needed to front up, and nobody can fairly say that he didn’t. It was a proper ’til-they-drop affair from Australia’s cricket captain, an hour and 10 minutes at a press conference podium taking questions about the 2018 ball-tampering episode until every journalist present ran out of steam. You might have expected some partial concession to teammate Usman Khawaja’s depiction of endemic cheating, but Cummins was firm that this did not reflect the life he’d known. Once more with feeling, but more importantly with detail.

Media accounts will now depict this as Cummins and Khawaja at war, because a falling-out among friends is a juicy story to fatten up and serve for gluttony. It isn’t fair, because both have emphasised the importance of their friendship, strained as it must now be. As two thoughtful people with shared history, they have a better chance than most to find a way through.

Khawaja’s depictions of the Australian team of that era have never been specifically aimed at Cummins, a junior player at the time. Khawaja has declined to explicitly implicate any individual player besides the three punished in 2018, in favour of vague statements that implicate the lot, led by his headline that ignited this story: “It was all of us.”

Cummins, by contrast, was specific in his repudiation of Khawaja’s account: that it was “100% wrong” and “utter nonsense” to say that the whole team created a wider scheme rather than a few players escalating a harebrained one. The assumptions about who was involved, he said, damaged those who weren’t. “It’s something I’ve actually been grappling with the last couple of days – that Usman’s a friend, but I think the way he’s been quite casual and quite flippant with people’s lives, and Australian cricket, I don’t think that’s OK, and I don’t think that’s what friends do.”

More useful than his assertions was the minutiae they were applied to. Cummins detailed all the methods he’d heard of for tampering with cricket balls, and that he had never seen them used or agreed to their use while playing for Australia. He specified that the one instance of tampering he’d seen professionally involved a bottle cap in a Sheffield Shield game, and he’d become aware of it when umpires had shut it down.

He explained the practice of shredding cricket balls with an array of implements in the nets, including sandpaper, and how the thought remained alien of transplanting this to a match. He talked through the dynamics of team rooms and training sessions, how different groups gather and swirl and coalesce, and how conversations may never spread beyond one eddy. He specified that he and several others he’d consulted had no memory of their teammate in the rooms urging collective responsibility, nor of anyone blocking such a move.

The only confluence in the accounts was in Khawaja writing that players had lifted the quarter seam of the ball to get movement during the 2017-18 Ashes, and Cummins saying that during his first series on home soil, he had sometimes noticed the raised leather and thought that it was a normal defect, only to reconsider that as he grew more experienced.

Sure, his whole performance might be lies. If so, it was a convincing matinee. A liar would have given a little ground; Cummins stood his to the millimetre. There are people who will never believe him, who will insist that every bowler knows what happens to their weapon of choice. That is logical. It is also true that the most logical thing is not always the one that happens. Anomalies pepper our lives. Batters monopolise ball management, the well worn parabolas after each delivery from keeper to slip to cover to mid-off before finally being returned to the principal operator. Batters monopolise strategy, because they monopolise captaincy; remember that Cummins is Australia’s first specialist bowler in the job.

Under him, the team environment is improved. Khawaja wrote in his book about a moment of inclusion, when Cummins realised that spraying champagne after a win alienated his Muslim teammate. “It was that one little gesture from Pat that changed it all and showed the world we are for everyone. I already liked Pat, but I loved him after this.” There was evident sadness on Friday from Cummins as he reflected on this. “Uzzy’s said to me a few times how much he’s enjoyed being part of the team. That means more to me than any win.”

People crave the simplicity of a villain. There isn’t one. Khawaja has no reason to lie, though perhaps his judgement is affected by the want to defend lifelong friend Warner. The reliability of his framing is undermined by the same chapter that records being aggrieved at not being handed Smith’s captaincy. Having just seen Smith removed for allowing sandpaper use, Khawaja by his own admission had done exactly the same. Why would he have been more suitable? Cummins did not miss the contradiction. “It’s a revelation to me that he knew what was going on, that he was sitting next to Cam [Bancroft], and that he told Cam to be careful. So maybe he’s been grappling with that for eight years.”

So we are left where we started. A group of players who worked on plans for reverse swing, a group of players who didn’t, an assumption by all parties that everyone was thinking the same way, and a series of rude awakenings on discovering they were not. Some friends who are hurting, some followers polarised, most left unsure. But the positions have been made clearer, gaps filled in around the empty words of press releases. Everyone involved has spent most of a decade saying nothing. That much at least has changed.