Pat Cummins: 'Abhishek, Klaasen, Trav, Ishan shouldn't be told that they can only bat a certain way. You want to see them at their full flight'

New Delhi: Every now and then, the cricketing world needs a reminder that Pat Cummins remains exceptional at his primary craft: fast bowling. Yet, in the process, Cummins the captain has been somewhat overshadowed. Amid the celebration of his extraordinary skills with the ball, his tactical brilliance as a captain has been flagrantly overlooked.

But one cannot deny that Cummins the captain and Cummins the bowler are inseparably intertwined. Nowadays in the IPL, even a score of 264 is not safe, and it is Cummins’ ultra-aggressive captaincy that has shifted the paradigm of this tournament. In his first season as captain in IPL 2024, he set the tone.

And who can forget his dressing room talk to his teammates, where he famously said: "Everyone's terrified when they come up against us and we've got to blow some teams out of the water before they've even walked out onto the field. " SRH had a difficult 2025 campaign. This season, things have looked different, and they are once again in the playoffs.

Although Cummins joined the campaign midway after recovering from a stress injury, SRH continued to play a "take-no-prisoners" style of cricket under stand-in skipper Ishan Kishan, a brand that had been instilled into their DNA by Cummins. In an exclusive interaction with TimesofIndia. com on the sidelines of the New Balance Grey Days 2026 celebration and the launch of The New Retail Concept store in Noida, Pat Cummins opens up about his captaincy style, SRH, the six-hitting madness in T20 cricket, workload management, being an all-format cricketer, and why he went "wow" after watching Vaibhav Sooryavanshi bat.