Knowing he would probably be bowling if not for a back injury, Peter Siddle has expressed his concern over the problem Cricket Australia is currently facing.
“They are two blokes who at this stage you were probably hoping you wouldn’t have to call upon. It’s going to be a tough call,” Siddle said.
The players Siddle refers to are his Victoria teammate James Pattinson, and 23-year-old Pat Cummins, who was the one selected to travel to India to take the injured Mitchell Starc’s place in the squad.
Both possess blistering pace, similar to what Starc offers, but both have also just recently made their Sheffield Shield comebacks, albeit impressive ones at that.
“Ideally, I don’t want either of them going because I’d like them to play some more cricket, but they’re going to take one of them,” Siddle said on Saturday.
True to form, the Australian selectors went with Cummins, who in his return match last week, bagged eight wickets. But this wasn’t just any return. This was his first Shield match in almost six years.
An impressive return no doubt, and nothing less than we expect of a peak power Pat, who dazzled in his one Test at age 18, way back in 2011, and made us believe we had another pace prodigy on our hands.
However, years of physical breakdown, including a debilitating stress fracture in his back, have kept ‘Cummo’ to that lone Test and only 28 one-day internationals for Australia – unremarkable considering what could have been by now.
Cricket Australia has long been trumpeting an Ashes recall next summer as both Cummins and Pattinson’s triumphant return to Test action, but the situation with Starc has seen them seemingly forced into panic.
Obviously, with Cummins' ability to push the 150 kilometers per hour barrier, his pace will more closely resemble that of Starc’s than someone like Jackson Bird, who is also in the squad.
If the selectors were going to choose purely on pace, why have Bird in the squad at all?
However, all this sticky conundrum does, is show that there are no right answers.
We can of course select someone already in the squad who likely doesn’t have the pace to trouble the Indians on their home decks, or we can select one of our pace aces – the two best of whom are still slowly recovering.
James Pattinson would be my personal choice. The Victorian impressed in his last Shield match, on a tricky surface in the Northern Territory, taking five wickets.
He also has more Test cricket under his belt, more first class cricket, and his injury problems have not nearly been as bad as that of Cummins. He also has a good record on the subcontinent.
But this does not come without its dramas either. Pattinson battled shin and back problems all last year, and Peter Siddle, who arguably knows him better than any other quick in the country, also warned about his selection.
However, the response from Trevor Hohns to the Cummins selection queries is a fairly simple one – do you have a better idea?
