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By Louise Rugendyke
Pat Cummins after taking five wickets in an innings during day one of the First Test Match in the Ashes series between Australia and England at The Gabba.Credit:Getty
The day before his first match as the Australian men’s Test captain, Pat Cummins is in a hotel room in Brisbane, making tea, hanging his cricket whites in the wardrobe and nervously wondering if he’ll remember what to do. “I haven’t played a Test in 11 months, so [I’m] trying to remember how Test cricket runs,” he says.
He’s talking to Andre Mauger, a cameraman who has spent the past few years following the men’s cricket team around for The Test, Amazon Prime’s fly-on-the-wall cricket documentary that became a critical hit when season one premiered in early 2020.
It’s a fascinating scene for cricket tragics and sticky beaks alike. How often do you get to see someone on the night before their life changes? When Cummins walks onto the Gabba the next day, he will forever be an Australian Test cricket captain, a job half-jokingly described by former prime minister John Howard as the most important in Australia.
Why would he agree to be followed on the most important night of his professional life? Starting a new job is bad enough, but with a cameraman in tow? That’s crazy.
Pat Cummins nervously organises his wardrobe the night before his debut as Test captain in a scene from season two of the Amazon Prime documentary The Test.
“Well, I said yes to [being filmed] before I was captain,” he says, laughing.
Cummins is sitting with The Test’s co-director Adrian Brown. In another room are batsman and former captain Steve Smith and co-director Sheldon Wynne. All four are in Adelaide before the team’s second Test against the West Indies. It’s an early press day for the documentary, in which Cummins has moved from being a bit player in the first season — he thinks he was a bit camera shy — to being, well, the star.
“Honestly, before the start of the first season [of The Test], there was a lot of trepidation from the guys — just mainly logistically, about how it was going to work. Change rooms are for us an almost sacred space, a safe haven,” says Cummins, a fast bowler who made his Test debut in 2011 at age 18.
“But it’s literally just one guy, Andre, who’s in there with his camera and lights, microphones and GoPros around, so it feels like a whole production, but it really is just one of our mates standing there filming. So [I thought], ‘Yeah, why not?’”
I ironed my shirt for the first time ever. I thought, ‘First day as captain, I should probably not have a crinkled shirt.’
The only time it felt weird was when former players came into the change rooms to talk to the team and ended up speaking directly to the camera. “We’d all be confused as to what they were staring at, forgetting there was a camera there,” says Cummins.
Brown, ever the documentary maker, is keen to know what I thought of Cummins’ hotel room scene. As a professional sticky beak, I found it compelling, not only for revealing how much work goes into the night before a big match (studying the pitch, field placements), but because Cummins actually hangs his cricket whites in the hotel wardrobe.
Cummins agreed to be filmed for The Test before becoming captain of the Australian men’s Test team.Credit:Amazon Prime
“All I remember about that night was Andre kept asking me like, ‘Oh, what do you expect for tomorrow? How are you going to do it?’” Cummins recalls. “And I was like: ‘Honestly, I’ve got no clue. I’ve never done it before. But we’ll see how it goes.’ I just remember so many unknowns that night.”
He didn’t change his behaviour because he was being filmed?
“I ironed my shirt for the first time ever,” says Cummins. “I thought, ‘First day as captain, I should probably not have a crinkled shirt’.”
Season two of The Test begins about three weeks before the start of the 2021-22 season. Tim Paine and Justin Langer, who were then the captain and coach, have been lauded for reviving the team, personally and professionally, after the 2018 ball-tampering scandal.
The departures of former captain Tim Paine (left) and former coach Justin Langer are handled swiftly in The Test.Credit:Getty Images
As batsman Usman Khawaja says of the team’s once-dismal reputation: “The rest of the world hated us. They thought we were dicks.”
The first Ashes Test at the Gabba is looming, but a sexting scandal soon causes Paine to resign, while tensions over Langer’s abrasive coaching style and a six-month contract extension eventually led him to quit.
“They came in and did a rescue mission in Australian cricket and within 12 weeks, both of them are gone,” says cricket journalist Peter Lalor in the documentary. “Where does that leave Australian cricket?”
The answer to that question is simple: in pretty good shape. In Cummins, they have a steady hand as leader — he appears ridiculously cool, calm and collected in the documentary, even the glasses he wears off-field give him the air of Clark Kent. The remaining team members come across as nice guys. Great for a cricket team, surely infuriating for a pair of documentary makers. Where was the tension? The big personalities and petty feuds? Even the resignation of Langer is dealt with swiftly.
“Of course, there’s a part of you that salaciously wants to have these amazing fireworks take place,” says Wynne. “But actually, I’m probably at a point, personally, where I love to be able to say, ‘OK, well, this is the truth of what happens. And how do we fashion that into a story?’”
There’s so much more to [cricket] now with social media and media and documentaries. So that’s certainly a learning curve.
Brown agrees, believing there is just as much value in observing the players than there is in manufacturing any conflict. “That’s going to be the interesting point of view in this one,” he says. “You can live the experience with the players and then what you might have thought was the case, you might walk out of it with a totally different perception.
“Because it’s not until you sit with it, and you go, ‘OK, that’s what was going on. That was how it was going behind the scenes.’ And I think equally important is to tell that side and to go, ‘Oh, that’s the story.’ Let’s not try and fabricate it just to try and get more clicks or get more views.”
Surely, Brown just wanted Cummins to lose his cool or throw a bat at some point?
“Can’t say much,” he says, laughing.
That’s not to say season two is without drama. Khawaja talks candidly about the pain of being dropped from the Test team, fast bowler Scott Boland explores his Indigenous heritage, and several players discuss the difficulty of leaving young families behind for weeks at a time.
The deteriorating relations between Langer and the players is the big headline grab, though. It’s teased in episodes one and two and dealt with in episode three. Cummins is shown reading his statement about Langer’s resignation, then it’s swiftly onto the team’s tour of Pakistan and Sri Lanka and later the Ashes.
It’s a delicate balance between the personal and the professional, one that could easily become a brand exercise for Cricket Australia, which oversaw cuts of each episode. So how did the directors avoid it becoming purely PR, especially when it came to dealing with difficult subjects such as Langer’s resignation?
Pat Cummins on arrival in Pakistan, on Australia’s first Test tour there since 1998.Credit:Cricket Australia
“I actually reckon along the way, you don’t tend to be thinking that way,” says Wynne. “The Justin Langer [part], for example, is not in there to pull back that element of it feeling like a PR job.
“The Justin Langer story is in there because it was the experience of the players. And I think that’s a really good indicator of what we’re looking at … You just don’t think about it. You just say here are the people whose lives we are telling a story about, let’s just tell the story we find.”
Each 45-minute episode — there are only four episodes in season two, compared to eight in season one — is whittled down from hundreds of hours of footage. Not only from what Mauger shoots, but from TV footage, press conferences and interviews with journalists and commentators.
“It’s a really delicate blend of working out the narrative that you’re going to apply to it,” says Wynne of the editing process. “And then also how to balance that with just sitting in moments and [having] a laugh. Like, you want Marnus [Labuschagne] to be able to put his toastie in the fridge and [for viewers to go], ‘What the hell am I watching here?’”
Ah yes, Labuschagne. The eccentric batter became the unexpected star of season one, thanks to his bromance with fellow batsman Smith. At first, it seemed to be a reluctant friendship between master and apprentice, with the eager Labuschagne trailing the more reserved Smith through the dressing room. It was delightful. If only Smith had actually watched it.
“No, I didn’t watch it,” says Smith. “I lived it. No need to watch it.”
The bromance between Marnus Labuschagne (left) and Steve Smith is a continuing delight in season two of The Test.
Cummins said season one helped him fill in some memory gaps. Maybe there’s some stuff Smith has forgotten?
“I’ve no doubt I have a memory gap. I don’t remember anything,” he says, laughing. “It doesn’t bother me too much. But all the feedback I’ve heard from everyone is that they loved it. So that’s the main thing.”
Hang on, he’s just remembered that he did watch one episode of season one in which he was concussed at Lords during the Ashes.
“I was absolutely cactus,” he declares.
For Smith, filming The Test is just one of the many (approved) extracurricular activities now expected of professional sportspeople. He doesn’t mind it, but he’d rather be batting.
“It’s certainly different,” he says. “I didn’t get into cricket to be starring in a documentary. You know, I’m just gonna do my job. And I don’t really call it a job, to be honest. I call it just playing cricket. I’m really fortunate, but there’s so much more to it now with social media and media and documentaries. So that’s certainly a learning curve.”
Both Cummins and Smith say one of the reasons they agreed to participate in the series was because of what it would have meant for them to watch as young cricketers.
“As a kid, I’d turn on the TV and see the players on the ground and I didn’t know a lot about them,” says Cummins. “Here, you get the backstories, you see our players with their families and see what makes them tick. I hope it just humanises a lot of us. We’re normal, very normal people that get to do a pretty cool job.”
Season two of The Test streams on Amazon Prime from January 13.
Season two of The Test arrives at a peak moment for fly-on-the-wall sports documentaries. It premieres the same day as Netflix’s flashy new tennis documentary, Break Point, which features Nick Kyrgios as its poster boy. The popularity of Drive to Survive, Netflix’s look at Formula One racing, has been credited with boosting the sport’s popularity, as well as ticket sales. The streaming service also has a Tour de France documentary, covering the 2022 race, slated for this year.
As well as The Test, Amazon Prime has All Or Nothing, which follows top-flight football teams Arsenal, Tottenam Hotspur, Manchester City and Juventus. Pat Cummins is a fan. “You see how they deal with pressure, what makes them tick,” he says. “I like seeing how the different captains and the coaches, how they kind of manage the season and manage themselves.”
Disney+ has jumped on board, too, mixing local – Fearless: The Inside Story of the AFLW – with celebrity – Ryan Reynolds’ Welcome to Wrexham and Save Our Squad with David Beckham.
Stan, meanwhile, has Show Me the Money, a behind-the-scenes look at AFL player agents.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
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