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"Not ideal": McDonald gives update on Cummins injury and Ashes hopes
Lachlan Geleit • September 17th, 2025 6:34 pm
Australia coach Andrew McDonald is confident that Pat Cummins will play a big part in the upcoming Ashes series.
The Aussie skipper is currently sidelined with a lumbar bone stress concern, which flared up on the recent Test tour of the West Indies.
While Cummins is now in a period of rest, the paceman himself says he’ll build towards bowling again well before the summer begins.
Even though McDonald acknowledged that the situation isn’t ideal, with more than two months between now and the first Test in Perth, the coach expects the 32-year-old to have enough time to recover ahead of the series.
“We're confident that he's going to partake in the Ashes. I think to sensationalise that he's not (going to play) would be an overreaction,” McDonald told SEN Whateley.
“It's not ideal. I'm not going to sit here and say that it's ideal. He does have a lumbar bone stress issue there. So, he'll just work through what his return to play looks like.
“We've got time. If it happened any closer (to the series), then you'd have to be making sort of key decisions around what it all looks like, but we have got time… as I said, we're really, really hopeful that he will play a key part in the Ashes.
“We'll see what that looks like for Pat, but there's a lot more information to come and I think everyone will probably live through that with the footage of him training and when he re-enters around the group.
“We're hopeful that you'll see him around our One Day team preparing as well.
“We look forward to our captain taking a significant part in the Ashes.”
When asked whether he could expect Cummins to play all five Tests or have his loads managed throughout the series, McDonald refused to look that far ahead, even if rotation is usually a consideration at the back end of a long series.
“In our planning, we never really pitch that forward to our players,” McDonald said.
“As the season or the summer unfolds, if you get some shortened games and you get some games where the load's organically being managed by how quick the Test matches have been, then you can start to flip into, ‘This is a possibility’.
“We've got some good spaces between Test matches one, two and three, so that feels really manageable for most of our quicks.
“Where the real stress point comes is Test match four and five, and that's going to be the real art of management across the summer.”
If things don’t go to plan for Cummins and the Aussies, McDonald isn’t too concerned about how the team could operate from a leadership and structure perspective, given Steve Smith has proven that he can take the reins whenever the quick has missed a Test.
“We're well enough drilled,” McDonald said.
“Steve Smith's got a lot of captaincy experience. We haven't really got to that conversation yet because there's no finality or timeline on Patty.
“I'm just thinking out loud here that I think Steve's done it five or six times in the absence of Pat, so that would be an obvious person to step in, and we'd have great confidence in him.
“It seems an obvious choice (to have him step in), he understands how the team operates and he's a very good leader in his own right.”
The first Test between Australia and England begins on November 21 at Optus Stadium. Catch every ball of the Ashes on SEN - your home of cricket.
