Have you heard about Big Pat’s back? You must have by now. The eyes and ears of the cricketing world are zeroed in on a locus of about 10 inches of Pat Cummins’s lumbar region. Hushed whispers about the Australia Test captain’s “stress injury” after his side’s tour to the West Indies in July became a rumbling concern as the weeks passed and there was no reassuring statement from the Cummins camp. Ideally it would have been delivered by the man himself with a megawatt smile, just letting everyone know that he was locked in for a full part in the Ashes series.
By contrast, this week a more circumspect Cummins put his chances of playing at Perth in the first Test on 21 November as “probably less likely than likely”.
