Pat Cummins emerged the biggest gainer at last year’s IPL auction when he fetched a jaw-dropping Rs 15.5 crore to be part of two-time champions Kolkata Knight Riders but his ambitions of featuring in the IPL 2020 took a massive hit with the COVID-19 pandemic. With still no word on the future of the IPL, Cummins isn’t too optimistic about his chances with KKR this time around.
“Everything is changing, literally every single day,” Cummins told reporters via video-conference on Friday. “The last I spoke to (KKR team officials), they said they’re still really confident and hopeful it (the IPL) will be on at some stage.
“They obviously haven’t cancelled it or anything like that yet. It’s still a bit of a holding pattern, so we’re in contact with our teams every few days. Obviously everyone is still really keen for it to go ahead, but the priority is to minimise risk of (the virus) spreading. It’s going to be pretty tight, I think the (Indian) travel ban is in place until April 14 so I don’t expect anything too soon to happen.”
That said, Cummins is keeping his fingers crossed as far as the biggest cricket tournament of the year is concerned the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup in October-November this year. The current scenario has cast doubts over the World Cup in Australia and although up until earlier this month, Cricket Australia remained hopeful the tournament will go ahead as planned, reports have emerged that few stakeholders have proposed with the ICC to delay the showpiece T20 event in the wake of global lockdown enforced due to the deadly COVID-19.
“The T20 World Cup is something we’ve spoken about for the best part of two or three years. The ODI World Cup in 2015, that was absolutely a career highlight for me and I wasn’t even playing. I’d love to see that go ahead. That’s the big tournament this year for international cricket,” said Cummins.
“I’d love for that to happen in a perfect world and if I was to be really greedy, I’d love for the IPL to happen (and) Test cricket, that’s the pinnacle of cricket. Hopefully we can play as much of that as possible but there’s so many more much bigger things at play.”
The only silver lining for Cummins in these times is the well-deserved break the Australia speedster is getting. The 26-year-old quick has bowled a staggering 1442.2 overs in all three formats since March 2017, with his 203 wickets being the most by a bowler in international cricket.
“The preference would be to be over there (in the IPL) playing, but I think the silver lining is we do get a bit of a break,” he said.
“We’re lucky in cricket, that it’s right at the end of the season. We’ve played basically our whole season out, except for the last couple of games (against New Zealand) and we’re always looking for those small breaks to refresh. But it almost feels like the start of an off-season at the moment, albeit we’re all training by ourselves at home rather than going to the team gym.”