Report: Righto Can We Just Play Some Fucking Cricket Now Or What?

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

Australian Test captain Pat Cummins spent 68 minutes this morning answering questions about what he knew, what he thinks and what he would like everyone else to understand about this week’s events.

They covered ball tampering. They covered forgetting to take the bins out and what that means as a young father. The questions kept coming and Pat kept answering, until eventually even a room full of cricket reporters ran out of things to ask.

Then he went off to do some jumping jacks, roll his back out or whatever he does at training. Presumably, there was still a bit of the day left for cricket.

According to this masthead, the most eventful moment came immediately afterwards, when Cricket et Al’s Peter Lalor dropped his phone on national television. At last, a development nobody had already spent a week arguing about.

Now that we’ve hauled another cricketer in front of the cameras like he’s just sold state secrets to the Russians, perhaps we can digest what he said and move on.

Nobody is obliged to like every answer. But surely there comes a point when we can let the bloke leave the room without treating his departure as the beginning of the next investigation.

Because the Kiwis are coming, and they will be bringing bats rather than follow-up questions.

They might look like a team of geography teachers and Christian camp counsellors, but they are the real deal. They’ve already shown they can flog India. At home. They are perfectly capable of turning up here, ruining our summer and going back to their Bay of Plenty bachs in mid January and pretend like it's not a big deal anymore to flog the Aussies in their own backyard.

And unless we pull our socks up, that is exactly what they’ll do. All this puritan wank about the state of Australian cricket will seem like a fairly poor use of November if we end up listening to our Kiwi cousins gloating in the sun all summer.

We’ve heard from the captain. It might be time to let him get back to being one.

So can we play some fucking cricket now or what?

More to come.