Cummins Sneers at Bazball's Funeral While His Own Batting Order Flatlines for 198

On the eve of Australia's first Test against Bangladesh in Darwin, a reporter lobbed Pat Cummins a question loaded with the kind of retrospective drama cricket journalists live for. Had Australia, the reporter wanted to know, effectively killed Bazball? Was the philosophy that Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum built now dead and buried, its tombstone carved by consecutive Ashes drubbings?

Cummins' reply was two words long: "Don't really care."

It was peak Cummins — ice-cold, dripping with the alpha-predator indifference of a captain whose team has won the World Test Championship, retained the Ashes twice running, and positioned itself as the undisputed top dog in Test cricket. Why should he care about England's internal combustion? Stokes has retired. McCullum has been sacked. Joe Root is back in the captain's chair, promising to "tweak" rather than tear up the blueprint. England's problems are England's problems.

Except here's the thing: twenty-four hours later, Cummins' own batting order was bowled out for 198 by Bangladesh. Not England's vaunted pace attack. Not India's Bumrah in Perth conditions. Bangladesh. At home. After winning the toss and choosing to bat. And the truly uncomfortable part? It wasn't even a surprise anymore.

Strip away the bravado and look at the raw numbers. Australia's first-innings batting on the opening day of a Test series, after coming off a break from red-ball cricket, has become a recurring nightmare. Four consecutive series. Four collapses. The pattern isn't a blip — it's a structural fault line running through the most celebrated batting lineup in world cricket.

In Perth, November 2024, Jasprit Bumrah reduced them to 67 for 7 on the opening morning. They limped to 104 all out. At Lord's in June 2025, Kagiso Rabada and Marco Jansen rolled them for 212. In Brisbane last November, Jofra Archer, Brydon Carse, and Ben Stokes had them 123 for 9 at stumps on a 19-wicket day — they eventually scraped to 132. And now Darwin, where Hasan Mahmud's career-best 6 for 55 bundled them out for 198 after they'd been cruising at 45 without loss.

That's four first-innings totals in four series openers: 104, 212, 132, 198. Average: 161.5. The pattern is so predictable it should come with a weather warning: when Australia's batsmen return from a layoff, duck.

Steve Smith's 71 off 109 balls was the only innings of substance in Australia's 198. The next-best contribution was Jake Weatherald's 23 — and he was caught behind trying to drive through the off side when the ball was doing plenty. Nobody else passed 22. Smith was the lone adult in a batting order full of passengers, and he knew it.

But it was Smith's post-play comments that carried the real sting. When asked about Cummins' decision to bat first on a tacky Darwin surface with overhead conditions tailor-made for seam bowling, Smith offered a reply that was diplomatic in tone but devastating in implication: "Maybe it's one to look at."

That's the kind of sentence that starts dressing-room conversations in Australian cricket. When your most experienced batter — 82 fifty-plus scores in Tests, equal with Steve Waugh — publicly questions the captain's toss decision, the internal pressure gauge is twitching toward red. Smith also offered a broader, more alarming observation about Australian batting.

Nobody wants to say it out loud in Australian cricket circles, but the numbers scream it: Marnus Labuschagne is in freefall. The man who averaged 64.94 in 2019, who was the run-machine understudy to Smith's genius, who seemed destined for 10,000 Test runs, has been averaging in the low 20s for two years running.

In Darwin, he made 1. One run. And that wasn't an outlier — he's been out in single digits in half of his last 32 Test innings. His year-by-year decline isn't a slump; it's a controlled descent into mediocrity that no amount of Shield runs has been able to arrest at the international level.

He was dropped after averaging 20.85 in 2025 — the lowest for an Australian top-four batter in a calendar year this century — then recalled after scoring two Shield hundreds. But Shield runs and Test runs are different currencies, and the exchange rate keeps getting worse for Labuschagne. At some point, the conversation shifts from "backing your player" to "is this selection costing us matches?" Darwin suggests we've arrived at that point.

Here's the uncomfortable truth that Cummins' two-word dismissal tried to paper over: Bazball died because England lost. But Bazball was always a philosophy — aggressive, boundary-seeking, intent-driven. You can argue it was reckless, you can argue it was naive, but it was at least a coherent response to a specific problem: England's batting had been too timid, too defensive, too afraid to dictate.

What's Australia's response to their batting problem? They don't have one. There is no philosophy, no reimagining, no counter-narrative. There is only the assumption that the talent pool is deep enough to self-correct. Labuschagne will find form. Green will deliver on the promise. The next debutant will slot in. The top order will click. It always does, eventually. Except it hasn't — not in Perth, not at Lord's, not in Brisbane, and not in Darwin.

Cummins can sneer at Bazball's funeral all he wants. But while England are at least trying to rebuild — Root taking the captaincy back, Stephen Fleming replacing McCullum, a stated intent to refine rather than abandon — Australia are doing the cricket equivalent of insisting the house isn't on fire while standing in the smoke.

Australia have 20 Tests scheduled in the next 12 months. The Ashes are on the horizon. The World Test Championship cycle demands consistent results. And the batting order that is supposed to underpin all of that ambition has now produced four consecutive opening-day horror shows spanning two calendar years.

Cameron Green, who hasn't averaged better than 23 since his 174 not out in March 2024, occupies a middle-order berth that demands runs, not potential. Weatherald's Darwin homecoming lasted 39 balls. Labuschagne's regression is entering its fourth year. Even Smith, the one constant, admitted the conditions were as brutal as anything he's faced — and he's been playing Test cricket since 2010.

Cummins doesn't care about Bazball. Fine. But he should care about his own team's first-innings batting average of 161.5 in series openers. He should care that his most senior batter is publicly raising eyebrows about tactical decisions. He should care that Bangladesh — Bangladesh, who were 54 all out in a warm-up match last week — responded by having his attack under siege on Day 2.

Because the real Groundhog Day here isn't about England's identity crisis. It's about an Australian batting order that keeps waking up to the same alarm, making the same mistakes, and hoping tomorrow will be different. At some point, "don't really care" stops sounding like confidence and starts sounding like denial.