Australian captain Pat Cummins celebrated his team’s triumphant 2023 World Cup campaign as “bigger than the Ashes”.
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Australia won nine matches on the trot to end India’s streak of ten consecutive wins and lift the 2023 World Cup trophy with a six-wicket win in the final at Ahmedabad.
Australia have now won six out of thirteen men’s World Cups, across five countries. They also became the first team since 2007 to win a World Cup they did not host or co-host. At the forefront was captain Pat Cummins, outplaying India with exceptional tactical acumen and an excellent spell of 10-0-34-2.
Captain Pat Cummins had mentioned that the triumph was “the greatest feeling” he ever had in cricket. In an interview with the Age, he was asked whether it trumped even winning the Ashes.
“Yeah, I think it does,” responded Cummins. “The Ashes is special but you play it every 18 months or two years and it’s a two-horse race. This is up against every serious national cricket team in the world, and competing just once every four years. You might only get two or three cracks at it in your career, and to have played it in front of over 100,000 people in India and win, well, it doesn’t get better than that.”
Since regaining the Ashes at home in 2016/17 with a 4-0 win at home, Australia have held on to the urn. They beat England 4-0 in 2020/21 as well, and have drawn the 2019 and 2023 series in England 2-2. As captain, Cummins himself has held on to the urn for two series now.
However, Cummins agreed that “Test cricket is still the pinnacle” for him, because it “challenges you in every aspect more than any other format.”
While loving Test cricket and its history, Cummins feels like “T20 does sometimes take away from that”, but that opinion changes when “you go over to India and you see them watching a T20 match every single night of the week, and with new countries getting involved and new supporters coming to cricket it’s hard to argue with the idea that T20’s anything but a good thing for cricket in general.”
