Cummins summons special delivery as Australia pressures India | Australian cricket team

Batters have signature shots. This is a given. Certain shapes or sequences of shapes that forever associate you with that player. The ponting train, the Lara follow-through over the shoulder, fill your own list. Signature dismissals are much less common for bowlers. There are so many ways to get players out, so many variations. An off-break from Nathan Lyon may have a shape you can follow in your sleep, but what happens after you reach the bat has its own unique character.

Pat Cummins has the Pat Cummins ball. The dismissal of Pat Cummins. The one that KL Rahul received on the second day of the fourth Australia-India Test in Melbourne. Even on a pitch that isn’t dangerous, or during an innings that’s flowing the other team’s way, there are times when Cummins can produce that performance. Of course, every wicket he takes doesn’t make a difference – it’s still valuable. But it’s happened so often that you can tell at first glance: it’s part of a rare collection rather than a jewel in its own right.

The Pat Cummins Ball consists of several parts. It begins like any other, with his gentle, bent-legged excursion to the summit of his destination, channeling a cowboy feeling a bit tender after too long in the saddle. His shoulders roll, his gait radiates both tiredness and willingness to continue working. The turnaround and impending run seem like they could last all day. He has this straight, direct line, his knees are not particularly high, his elbows are rather pointed. The thrifty man gathers together, his arm to his ear.

The line is the thing, always to a right-hander. It’s all about the subtleties. Starting with just enough width to reach the stumps, but not by much. Enough seam movement to pull the seam back the other direction, but only slightly. The first movement pulls the player forward into the line. There is full expectation that the ball is about to hit a defensive shot.

But within that subtlety, delivery is a bit tricky. About this line. It slides just past the bat where there seems to be no room for it. It happens on the outside edge, not the inside. And once free in that magical space behind the batsman, now unhindered in a field of opportunity all its own, it sails radiantly towards the top corner of the target, the crest of the off-stump, using perfect contact economy to exploit the location completely destroy.

Joe Root is the most celebrated receiver, partly because people forget he finished twice in the 2019 Ashes and confuse their memories of Old Trafford with the Oval. But Cummins Ball’s specialty is taking out captains. Rohit Sharma got one just a few weeks ago when he joined this series in Adelaide and also had one in Nagpur last year. Kraigg Brathwaite scored in Australia for two consecutive seasons, first in Perth, then in Adelaide.

If it’s not a formal leader, it’s a key player. Babar Azam got one in his Boxing Day Test, exactly a year before Rahul’s. Kusal Mendis got one in Canberra, Harry Brook at Lord’s last year. Apart from Root, Jos Buttler and Jason Roy also had their sobering moment in 2019. Far rarer has been a Cummins ball for a player who didn’t need that quality: we could recommend Maheesh Theeshana in Galle a few years ago or Umesh Yadav in the World Test Championship final.

It was fitting, therefore, that the final appearance was for Rahul, India’s best player in the series, who best coped with Australia’s fast bowlers. The tracking analysts showed his Cummins ball had almost three times as much seam movement as the ball Root carried at Old Trafford and traveled faster. It was as good as it had to be.

Given that Cummins had already put together a century partnership that morning, with 49 to Steve Smith’s 140, Rahul’s dismissal felt like the moment when the day’s resistance would change. Virat Kohli and Yashasvi Jaiswal held out for a while but together they ensured that the latter was eliminated and the former made another unnecessary push. India are five points behind and 310 points behind when they needed their form player to bat for long.

Cummins bowled a lot of other players: yorkers, chop-ons, missed slogs. He has a series of perfect in-duckers: Dawid Malan on an Adelaide evening, Faf du Plessis on the final day in Durban, Glenn Phillips or Ross Taylor in Sydney. But none is the Cummins Ball, where every ball that is the Cummins Ball is. The look is entirely his own, the shapes are echoes, the doughs in the way are shadows. Replacement actors block the stage. Except blocking never works. Many bowlers may strive for an entire Test career to bowl such a perfect ball. Cummins produces them regularly. Each of them is the best wicket of his career. They are all the same.