In a glorious season, the fast bowler captained Australia to the World Test Championship title and followed it by leading them to the ODI World Cup triumph – playing both finals against India. In T20 cricket, he only enhanced his leadership credentials as captain of Sunrisers Hyderabad in the IPL leading them to the final with an highly aggressive style of cricket.

Interestingly, as he slips on his national colours in the Caribbean and the United States for the ICC tournament, Cummins will now take a back seat to play under Mitch Marsh. There would be an obvious temptation for the Australia selectors to name Cummins as captain but they have to take into account his heavy workload as an all-format player and permanent Test captain.

For the cricket fans from the subcontinent, this kind of captaincy arrangement will be difficult to imagine. In India and Pakistan cricket, the appointment of captains is rarely smooth. It was seen again ahead of the T20 World Cup with lack of clarity before Rohit Sharma was finally declared ahead of Hardik Pandya. There was even more drama in Pakistan where first Babar Azam was sacked after the team’s ODI World Cup debacle, Shaheen Shah Afridi appointed before Babar was reinstated for the T20 World Cup.

On the other hand, Cummins has slipped into a normal player’s role without any fuss over his exalted status. The rapport between the two leaders is at the heart of how the Australian team functions — Marsh was Cummins deputy at the ODI World Cup held in October-November in India.

In his interview with the Cricket Australia website on reaching Barbados for the World Cup, the 32-year-old Marsh spoke about their bond. “He (Cummins) is just a great friend, he has become a bit of mentor, just the way he goes about things, we got a great relationship, and I feel lucky to have him in our team as a player and as a person, a leader within our group, we have got lot of them. Hopefully, it will make my job a lot easier,” said the Australia captain.

Australia open their T20 World Cup campaign against Oman on Thursday.

Ever since he led Australia to the Under-19 World Cup title in 2010, Marsh was marked out as a future leader. His senior career, however, didn’t go as per expected lines. Despite coming from a proud cricket family, father Geoff and brother Shaun both being Test cricketers), it took a long time for him to establish himself.

The transformation came with his match-winning knock in the 2021 T20 World Cup final – 77*/50 balls, vs New Zealand, and in the 2023 Ashes Test at Headingley, when Marsh playing his first Test in four years hammered a counter-attacking 102-ball century, the fastest by an Australian in England since 1902, to lift the side from 85/4.

He hasn’t looked back since. In early 2024, he was named the Allan Border Medalist, awarded to the most outstanding Australian men’s cricketer of the past year. And in an emotional speech at the event Marsh paid tribute to his Test and ODI captain Cummins for believing in him and allowing him to be himself.

An easy-going individual, Marsh is a natural leader and more in the mould of India captain Rohit, who believes in creating a calm and fun environment.

“Given thought to how you want to do things: Staying true to myself, we are blessed with a really experienced group, so not much has to change, keeping the environment relaxed, allow guys to express themselves and big thing for me is for us is to have fun. We do understand there are high pressure situations in tournaments like this, and we have to face them head on about we can also have a lot of fun while doing that, taking on the challenges, hopefully it’s a good environment for guys to do that,” Marsh said ahead of the T20 World Cup.

If he can inspire the Australia team to an impressive show this month, he can be their long-term white-ball captain beyond the World Cup.