Pat Cummins is expected to miss next month’s Ashes opener in Perth as doubts grow around the Australia captain’s availability for the entire Test series against England.
Cummins has been sidelined with a back injury that the latest scan revealed has not yet healed. While the scan showed improvement with his back stress issue, Cummins is not ready to resume bowling just six weeks out from the first Ashes Test starting on 21 November.
The 32-year-old was ruled out of Australia’s recent white-ball series against South Africa and New Zealand, and will sit out the upcoming ODIs and T20s against India. Cricket Australia declined to comment on Cummins’s fitness and has not ruled out the fast bowler from the first Test as he continues to work through his rehabilitation. He
Cummins last played in the 3-0 Test series sweep of West Indies in July and his absence would be a huge blow to Australia’s hopes of retaining the Ashes that they have held since 2018.
Scott Boland is likely to take Cummins’s place in the pace attack alongside Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood after the evergreen quick took a hat-trick in his most recent Test for Australia in the Caribbean. Steve Smith will almost certainly stand in as skipper if Cummins is unavailable to face England, having led the side several times since the star fast bowlerquick was appointed Test captain in November 2021.
The fifth and final Ashes Test in Sydney will begin on 4 January, leaving Cummins with little time to slot back into the Australia XI if he is to miss the start of the series.
Australia coach Andrew McDonald backed Cummins to play a part in the five-Test series against England when speaking on SEN radio last month. “It’s not ideal … he is working through a program. It was a routine scan on the back of the West Indies [tour], he does have a lumbar bone stress issue there, so he will just work through what his return to play looks like,” McDonald said in September.
“We have got time. If it happened any closer [to the Ashes] then you would have to be making key decisions around what it all looks like. But we have got time, a lot more information to come, and as I said, we’re really hopeful that he will take a key part in the Ashes.”
Joe Root believes England are ready to “bring the urn home” having not won their most prized series since 2015 and having last triumphed in Australia in 2010-11, almost two years before the first of Root’s his 158 Tests.
Root himself is yet to win a single match in Australia in 14 attempts and, despite 39 career hundreds, is still waiting to bring up his first in the country. Australia’s past players and figures in the media outriders have already put that issue on the agenda, with Matthew Hayden pledging to walk out naked at the MCG if Root fails to score a ton. However, for Root that is a distraction from the tourists’ wider goal, and he is confident they have never had a better chance.
“At the end of the day this tour is not about me,” said Root.
“When we look back in five years’ time no one is going to remember what Matthew Hayden said to me, or Greg Blewett, or Mark Waugh, whoever it is. They are going to look back on the scoreline and think that it’s a historic England win or not.
“It could be six weeks that live long in the memory if we get it right.”
Meanwhile, Andrew Flintoff has left his role as head coach of Northern Superchargers in the Hundred, saying the new Indian owners had offered him a quarter of the salary of his peers. “I said: ‘This isn’t going to work for me,’ and they weren’t going to move on it.”
