- Cummins currently playing in IPL
- Set to miss white-ball tours of Pakistan and Bangladesh
- Only played one Test in last Ashes series.
Australia captain Pat Cummins has declared that his No.1 priority will be Australian cricket for the next few years at least. This has come amid conjecture that some of the best players in Australia may turn their backs on national duty to plat franchise cricket beyond the IPL.
Cummins, who is currently with the Sunrisers Hyderabad in the IPL, is set to miss Australia’s upcoming white-ball tours of Pakistan and Bangladesh, due to his involvement in the IPL playoffs. There is also the need to rest ahead of 20 (possibly 21) tests between August 2026 and August 2027.
Australia have ten back-to-back Tests between December and Mid-March, including five in India. That’s before the IPL season, and then an away Ashes series next summer.
“My priority is Australian cricket”
Speaking at the New Balance Grey Days 2026 celebration, Cummins said:
“Nothing has changed for me, my priority is Australian cricket, No.1, particularly Test cricket. As Test captain, I never want to miss any Test cricket and make myself available for as many Aussie games as I can.
“The IPL is good in that it normally fits in our holiday break, so that’s the obvious one, but they are probably my main focuses and I don’t see that’s going to change at all for the next few years for me at least.”
Cummins only played in one of the Ashes Tests due to a serious back injury. He has missed a lot of white-ball cricket for Australia to preserve his body for Tests. Since the 2023 ODI World Cup in India, Cummins has only played in two ODIs for Australia. Cummins hasn’t played in any T20I match for Australia, since the 2024 T20 World Cup.
Since that T20 World Cup, he has played one full Major League Cricket (MLC) season of six games for San Francisco Unicorns, and two IPL seasons for Sunrisers Hyderabad, playing 20 games.
“Actually feel really fresh”
Part of the reason Cummins has been so conservative with his back issue was so he had the best chance to play as many of those 20 tests as possible. He said:
“I actually feel really fresh for the last four months. I haven’t played much. So physically, I feel as good as I have probably in six or seven years. I think a lot of the reason why I did probably miss longer than perhaps I could have was with the next 18 months in mind.
“Stress fractures in you rback do recur quite often and we just wanted to eliminate all that risk to make sure that if I had a problem in six months, that could rule me out of a lot of those 20 tests. So physically, I feel great. My back’s healed, really strong. We took a very low-risk approach to the rehab to give myself the best chance to play all those Test matches.”
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