Twelve years after making his ODI debut, Pat Cummins
still finds the tactics involved in building a spell to be a challenge that he
is eager to overcome. It may seem odd to draw that conclusion from a
conversation with an Australian captain who was feeling under pressure
following his team’s loss to India and their difficulties against spin, but it
serves as a little illustration of a larger issue that we will be discussing
throughout the tournament: the future of this format.
We don’t even need to discuss the plans to stop
playing bilateral ODIs and solely use the format at World Cups because we
already have one in Cummins. Including Australia’s World Cup opening loss to
India, he had only appeared in 19 matches between the previous World Cup and
this one. Overall, he had featured in just 78 games during the previous 12
years. As a result, it has taken him longer than it would have to feel secure
in his tactical strategy for ODIs.
“Early in my career, I found it a hard balance
between Test cricket and T20, and I was getting too funky,” Cummins said
at the Ekana Stadium in Lucknow, the day before Australia prepared to play
South Africa. “With one-day cricket, your roles can be very different –
from being an opening bowler with a ball that swings, to coming on first change
and maybe bowling cross-seamers where you are trying to defend and get your
wickets through pressure. It’s a different kind of challenge to the other
formats.”
“The biggest challenge is that you’ve got ten
overs [to bowl]. It’s quite a physical format,” Cummins said of ODIs.
“I find it the most physically taxing if you are doing two or three games
in a week. We are doing 15k (kilometres) in a 50-over match.”
On Thursday, Cummins believes there will be pace and
bounce available on a surface that is still somewhat mysterious, and he
anticipates that at least one of those things will become simpler. The Ekana
Stadium has only hosted four ODI matches thus far, with the highest total
batting first being 249 in a full 50-over innings. The pitches for one of those
ODIs from last October have since been dug up and resurfaced. Three of those
ODIs were played in 2019.
The middle overs are also thought to be the hill on which
ODI cricket may die, unless the narrative that unfolds in that passage is
captivating even if nuanced. As Cummins hinted, those overs are the Goldilocks
of the game where players are required to not do too much of one thing or too
little of another, and for Australia, it’s about finding out how much is just
right.