Pat Cummins isn’t the kind of Aussie that India has grown up watching and grudgingly appreciated. He isn’t quite like the late Shane Warne. The confrontation and controversy seeker, the ‘play hard, party harder’ believer, the true celebrity cricketer – Warne was the Aussie. Cummins, though, is doing at Sun Risers Hyderabad (SRH) what Warne did at Rajasthan Royals in the opening season.
Warne once said that he scripted the fairytale 2008 win with “good people who we trusted under pressure.” Cummins too seems to have found those men. With just two more league games to go, SRH is third on the table. But going by their present form, they are most likely to make it to the playoffs. Beyond that, going by the monstrous batting totals they have been compiling, SRH has built a reputation of beating any opposition on their day. And this IPL, they have had too many of those days.
The other day, around the time the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) captain and owner were having their now infamous conversation on the field, Cummins was celebrating with his own trusted good people who had delivered under pressure. In the dressing room, not far from the birthday cake that had Cummins’ name, the team was celebrating their most emphatic win.
SRH’s official social media handle put out a dressing room video of the post-win party. It had a lot of smiling faces in sweat-soaked jerseys with an orange-black maze. But those still charmed by Warne’s Class of 2008 could see hazy faces of a champions side wearing Rajasthan Royals original dark blue with matte golden stripes jersey. The team’s leader, the tall Aussies pacer with a kind smile and crow’s feet laugh lines around his eyes, looked like the charismatic man with flaming blond hair.
Sunrisers Hyderabad’s Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma celebrate after winning the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024 T20 cricket match between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Lucknow Super Giants, at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium, Uppal, in Hyderabad, Wednesday, May 8, 2024. (PTI Photo)
The clip had Abhishek Sharma, Travis Head, Heinrich Klaasen, Aiden Markram, Abdul Samad, Shahbaz Ahmed, Cummins, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jaydev Unadkat, T Natarajan, Nitish Kumar Reddy among others. But they looked like Graeme Smith, Swapnil Asnodkar, Sohail Tanvir, Shane Watson, Mohammad Kaif, Yusuf Pathan, Ravindra Jadeja, Shane Warne, Mahesh Rawat, Munaf Patel, Siddharth Trivedi and others.
That day they had chased down LSG’s total of 164 in 10 overs. The heroes for SRH were their openers – World Cup winning Aussie Head and an uncapped Indian Abhishek. Earlier in the tournament, they had put up a record 125 runs at the end of the first power play. Their teammates call them Travishek. By the end of the tournament, the name is most likely to be mainstreamed.
The partnership is a throwback to RR’s Class of 2008 when seasoned South Africa pro Graeme Smith opened with little-known Goan Swapnil Asnodkar. In the company of Smith, Asnodkar got a swagger. He was fearless. By the end of the tournament his confidence was so high that he even dared to walk across the pitch and advise his super senior partner Smith.
Abhishek too has the same charming temerity about him these days. He calls Head his friend who he loves to hang out with. The company has done the young Punjab boy good. He is learning the finer points of T20 batting. Against LSG that day, Head, a master of playing spin, taught him how to tackle the variations the pacers try in T20 cricket. “They were bowling cutters in the middle. I thought the cutters could slow down on their way, but Travis and I had planned to play it the way you would hit spin. So, if it is an off-cutter, we look to hit towards long-off covers. If it is a leg cutter, obviously we look at mid-wicket or mid-on.”
In young Swapnil, Warne saw a dasher he could punt on to give the team a flying start. In his autobiography, No Spin, he mentions the exciting opener that he introduced to India. “He had good technique but just wanted to hit the ball, which he did more often than not. He was a natural to open with Smith,” he says. Cummins saw the same promise in Abhishek and he wasn’t wrong.
Abhishek Sharma of Sunrisers Hyderabad plays a shot during match 57 of the Indian Premier League season 17 (IPL 2024) between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Lucknow Super Giants held at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium, Hyderabad on the 8th May 2024. (Sportzpics)
Abhishek, recently, shared the conversation he had with the team management. “Our support staff and Pat (Cummins), the way they think, I have never seen anyone else think like that. They’re like, ‘Go out there and express yourself. Play as aggressively as you can, we’ll back you.’ I think that matters a lot.”
Warne had also seen the spark in another young player. That was a 19-year-old Ravindra Jadeja. Warne had got a modest brief about Jadeja. “He bats nine and bowls a bit of spin,” he was told. But the hawk-eyed Aussie saw in him what others didn’t. He writes: “The more we saw of him (Jadeja) – the way he moved in the field, the athleticism, the swagger – the more we thought, ‘We’ve got something here.’ It was even obvious in the way he walked out to bat. I said, ‘This guy can do it for us in the top four or five.’”
Cummins’ Jadeja this season has been Nitish Reddy. Before this season, all he had was promise; now he has two crucial game changing half-centuries and two match-winning spells. He also is an exceptional fielder. They are also fond of him in the dressing room.
Back to the video where Cummins is seen giving an internal Play of the Day trophy to Bhuvneshwar Kumar, the India international who had been off-boil before the season. Under the Aussie captain, he has found his old form, just like Shane Watson rediscovered his touch on Warne’s watch.
Nitish Kumar Reddy of Sunrisers Hyderabad play a shot during match 23 of the Indian Premier League season 17 (IPL 2024) between Punjab Kings and Sunrisers Hyderabad held at the Maharaja Yadavindra Singh International Cricket Stadium, Mullanpur on the 9th April 2024. (Photo by Arjun Singh / Sportzpics for IPL)
Bhuvi requests Nitish and debutant Sanvir Singh who took a stunning catch, to step forward. He wants to share the prize with the day’s other two performers. There are claps and cheers all around. In the background, one hears a loud yell by Cummins. “Nice one, Bhuvi,” he says. The Aussie skipper is a World Cup winner, he knows what this thoughtfulness means to the collective spirit of the team.
The camera then pans to T Natarajan, the team’s yorker man, the death-over enforcer. He is the sharpest tool in the SRH box. Cummins unleashes him at crucial times, like Warne would use Munaf.
Back to the book and Warne and a spell of play where Munaf had the great Glen McGrath in front of him. “Munaf Patel said to me, ‘Captain, still short?’ I said, ‘Munaf, if I tell you to do something different, then we do something different.’ So … okay. Munaf bowled four bouncers in a row to Pigeon. The last one broke his thumb … To this day, his thumb is still a mess.” Against KKR, Andre Russell was felled by a Natarajan toe-crusher. When he is on target, more toes can be in mess.
The two poles apart Aussie captains have one common trait. Gideon Haigh in his book On Warne, mentions a ‘Web of Warnitude’ that stifles batsmen in submission. It was the reason those facing him would play the larger-than-life man, not the ball and get consumed by the legend. SRH this season has spun a Web of Patitude around its rivals.
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