NEW DELHI: Australia captain Pat Cummins, who missed the first two Ashes Tests with Steve Smith deputizing as skipper, returned for the third Test to help Australia seal an unassailable 3–0 lead. However, Cummins is now unlikely to feature in the Boxing Day Test and may not play again in the remainder of the series.
“I’m feeling really good, [but] as for the rest of the series we’ll wait and see,” he said. “We had a pretty aggressive build-up knowing that it’s the Ashes there to be won and we thought that was worth it. Now that the series has been won, there might be a sense of job’s done and let’s reassess the risk.
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“We’ll work it out over the next couple of days, I doubt I’ll be playing Melbourne, and then we’ll have a chat about Sydney. But certainly before the series it was, while the series was live, let’s take on the risk and have a crack at it, now it’s done, I think we’ll need to have a chat about it.”
Australia retained the Ashes with two matches to spare after paceman Mitchell Starc took three of the last four wickets to blunt England’s defiant comeback Sunday in a tense fifth-day finish to the third Test in Adelaide.
Australia started Day 5 needing four wickets to retain the Ashes, with England resuming at 6-207 and still 228 runs away from the victory target of 435 that would have required a world record to achieve.
“Feels pretty awesome,” Cummins said of the 82-run win at the Adelaide Oval. “We got it done.”
“You can’t really rush things here in Australia, it doesn’t work that way,” Cummins said of the Test going the distance. “It’s a good old fashioned grind a lot of the time and, yeah, I love the toil from all the guys today.
“It got a little bit closer than I would have liked, but pretty happy.”
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