Pat Cummins has never thought of himself as a leader.
“I think for most of my life I’ve always been the youngest person in the room. I never really felt like a leader at all,” he told Elizabeth Day on her podcast How to Fail.
Then Australia asked him to captain the Test side in November 2021. Then he won the World Test Championship. Then the 2023 ODI World Cup. Then SRH handed him their IPL franchise and he turned them into one of the most watchable teams in the tournament’s history, liberating a batting order that had forgotten it was allowed to swing.
Abhishek Sharma, the main beneficiary of what followed, put it plainly on the YouTube show Breakfast with Champions: “Marte hue out hona chahiye, darte hue nahi. I am fine with the team being 100 all out, but I don’t want safe scores of 160 or 170.”
That was Cummins speaking through Sharma. The captain who didn’t seek the role, expressing it through the batter who most completely understood it.
He came back to SRH this season after his last competitive game — the third Ashes Test in Adelaide — and walked straight into a team that had been finding its shape without him. Stand-in captain Ishan Kishan was getting used to the role. The bowling was firing. Things were falling into place. The question by the press pack, late at night after a thumping win over Delhi Capitals, was no longer whether Cummins was available but where exactly he fit.
SRH bowling coach Varun Aaron didn’t hesitate. “Pat is world-class, one of the top bowlers in the world. So he would walk into any team, irrespective of whether somebody was doing well or not doing well.”
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SRH had a difficult 2025 campaign. This season, things have looked different.
On April 25, against Rajasthan Royals in Jaipur, Cummins returned as captain. He took 1 for 27 from four overs and his captaincy looked as shrewd as ever. The Orange Army, entering the important phase of the tournament, had their man back.
Accepting the captaincy of Australia had not been simple.
“Just seen the previous few captains really go through the wringer. There are parts of the role that are obviously appealing — the esteem of captaining Australia — but parts of it that didn’t really appeal to me too much. So, in the end, I decided to go for it. But if it wasn’t to be and if it didn’t work out, I was very comfortable,” he told Day.
Leadership came to him anyway, as easily as bowling quickly. But the cricket is only part of it.
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His mother, Maria, died of breast cancer in 2023. His son Albie was born two and a half years ago.
“We were barely home ever since becoming a father. So I think that’s the one I’m always jostling with,” he said on How to Fail.
After his mother died, the jostling became clearer.
“I’m so crystal clear now on the family’s priority. I want to spend as much time as I can with my family. And you just can’t keep kicking things down the road. I think a lot of sports people, but maybe me in particular, think — okay, I’ll play cricket till I’m 35 or 36, Albie will be seven or six years old, and then life will start, and then we can start hanging out as a family. I’ve definitely changed my mindset now. It’s like, no, I’m going to live life.”
“I’m going to say a big emphatic yes to things that we really want to do as a family. When we’re on tour, let’s make sure we have the time of our lives. We don’t just want to watch the clock tick by.”
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He never really felt like a leader. Then he became one of the finest captains of his generation. He never thought much about time management. Then he lost his mother and his son learned to walk and he became, as he says himself, crystal clear.
The cricket, it turns out, is the easy part.
