Clear Cummins keen to take Ashes form abroad

Come the 20-minute tea break at Blundstone Arena on Sunday night, Pat Cummins was confronted by a scenario he had not previously known in his brief but largely stress-free tenure as Australia Test captain to that point.

England was not only off the mat for the first time in a mostly lopsided Vodafone Ashes contest, but seemingly on the charge having reduced their 271-run victory target by 68 in the space of just 16 overs for the loss of opener Rory Burns to the final ball before the adjournment.

In days not so far past – most notably last summer's series loss to India where Australia's performances faded and frustrations grew as the campaign wore on – the match scenario might have brought addled thinking and an inability to stick to a single strategy in the haste for opposition wickets.

But this is demonstrably a different team under Cummins' leadership.

And when play resumed after a concise and clear chat about what was needed to stem England's push and swing momentum back Australia's way, the result was as clinical as it was swift.

Cummins and his men scythed through the last nine England wickets for the addition of just 56 additional runs from 116 deliveries sent down in less than two hours as Australia closed out a 4-0 series win by piling one final humiliation on their long-time foes.

"We had a really good chat, Andrew McDonald the bowling coach and (coach) Justin Langer as well," Cummins revealed of the tea meeting that preceded his team's 146-run win.

"I think you can get carried away under lights here that it's going to seam around everywhere, it's going to swing around corners and you get carried into bowling really full.

"It didn't feel like that was the length that was going to draw wickets, we felt that slightly back of a length (was better) and try to dry up the runs.

"So we had a really clear plan to hold just a good line and length outside off stump, put an extra fielder or two back and as soon as we did that I felt like an extra 200 runs was a long way away for the English batters if we stuck at that plan.

"No doubt bowling under lights does help, it did dart around a little bit more, but I thought we had really clear plans in that last session."

It's that clarity of planning – which Cummins also spoke about after the final day at Sydney where he felt his bowlers stuck to the strategy even though it netted only nine of the 10 wickets they sought – that has Australia's latest Ashes-winning skipper enthused about the future.

Not just the next Test assignment, which is scheduled to come in Pakistan starting next month when Australia makes their first red-ball venture overseas since the 2019 Ashes campaign in the UK.

But Cummins also believes the experiences gained during this challenging summer (more through logistics than opposition), the seamlessness with which players swung in and out of the starting XI, and the development of talents such as Compton-Miller Medallist Travis Head and allrounder Cameron Green bodes well for an even longer stint of success.

That excitement was palpable in Cummins during his post-match media interaction last night, and he cited the manner in which his less-experienced batters counter-attacked on day one despite Australia being 3-12 on a green, seaming Hobart pitch as evidence for his confidence.

"I thought way Marnus (Labuschagne), Trav Head and Cam Green took on the game was a really good template for any conditions that are foreign to what we might expect," he said.

"We can be the type of team that are brave enough to take that positivity overseas if we need to, and I think that puts us in a great place.

"We had a squad of 15 players used this series, everyone brings slightly different skills and goes about it slightly differently, so I'm really excited about the upcoming Pakistan tour.

"We've played really well in Australia, it's now up to us to take that overseas.

"We haven't played a lot overseas in the last couple of years, so Pakistan, Sri Lanka (this year), India next year, England – it's all really foreign conditions to Australia.

"This is just hopefully the beginning.

"I feel like we're in a really good place, there's hopefully no imminent retirees so hopefully we're building something big for the next few years."

The obvious goal in that time span is the recently introduced ICC World Test Championship, the final of which is loosely pencilled in for the northern summer of 2023 prior to Australia's Ashes defence in the UK.

Standing between Cummins' team and that aspiration will likely be Test series in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India as well as planned home series against West Indies and South Africa next summer.

The new Test captain, who took over when Tim Paine stood down from the role just weeks before the opening Ashes Test in Brisbane, knows Australia's record overseas has been patchy amid a paucity of matches with just five wins from 17 offshore Tests in the past five years.

And he also recognises it will be those away assignments, most immediately amid the steamy heat and alien pitch conditions of the subcontinent, where the seemingly seamless manner in which he's taken to the captaincy will face its harshest examination.

"I think the biggest challenges are going to be ahead," Cummins said. "We're lucky we live in an age where we've got incredible support staff around who take a lot of those stresses out of what a captain might have had around strategy, man management, those kind of things.

"Probably my biggest worry in accepting the role as captain was that I'm in the team as a bowler and I want to make sure that's protected and I'm able to perform as well as I'd like.

"I think with each game I felt better at managing that.

"I could really switch off and take off the captain's hat and just be a bowler for my overs.

"Even little things around bowling changes, moving fields, in between my overs, I felt I got better at that as the series went on.

"So that's a hugely pleasing thing.

"It might be difficult in the heat, or (during) longer innings, but I feel like it's something I'm only going to get better at."

Indeed, for all the angst and debate that accompanied the decision to ignore the convention of batting specialists in the leadership role and instead install a fast bowler as Australia Test captain, results suggest it was an outcome that amplified rather than defied history.

After all, the only Australia Test skipper to boast a better success rate than Cummins' three wins and a draw from his first four Tests in charge was Warwick Armstrong, an allrounder.

And having slipped comfortably into the position by overseeing a mauling of the nation's historic cricket rival, Cummins has found that balancing the duties of bowling fast alongside the tactical subtleties of captaincy are perhaps not as vexed as many wanted to believe, himself among them.

"For sure there's more scrutiny, but in terms of the actual role on the field and conversations around the changerooms and that kind of thing, it is manageable," he said in reflecting on his first Test series at the helm.

"It's not a helluva lot different to what I'd be having anyway as a bowler, you just have to be across a little bit more.

"The role is big and important, but it's probably not as all-encompassing as I perhaps might have thought when I first took it on."

Vodafone Men's Ashes

Squads

Australia: Pat Cummins (c), Steve Smith (vc), Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Cameron Green, Marcus Harris, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Mitch Marsh, Michael Neser, Jhye Richardson, Mitchell Starc, Mitchell Swepson, David Warner

England: Joe Root (c), James Anderson, Jonathan Bairstow, Dom Bess, Sam Billings, Stuart Broad, Rory Burns, Zak Crawley, Haseeb Hameed, Dan Lawrence, Jack Leach, Dawid Malan, Craig Overton, Ollie Pope, Ollie Robinson, Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes, Mark Wood

Schedule

First Test: Australia won by nine wickets

Second Test: Australia won by 275 runs

Third Test: Australia won by an innings and 14 runs

Fourth Test: Match drawn

Fifth Test: Australia won by 146 runs