Pat Cummins: Australian captain plays his shots in remarkable one-hour sandpaper saga press conference

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Pat Cummins said he would stand and face up to all and as many questions as the waiting press pack had to ask. And he did just that in a masterclass conference that went for more…

Pat Cummins said he would stand and face up to all and as many questions as the waiting press pack had to ask.

Bouncer, bouncer, yorker, yorker, inswingers and outswingers. Cummins saw it all in an hour-long press conference with no-holds-barred from either side.

But he wasn’t just dead-batting, or fending off questions like teammates have in recent days — and for the past eight years.

He played plenty of shots along the way one of the most extraordinary sporting press conferences we have ever seen.

Usman Khawaja’s recollection of the events of the sandpaper cheating scandal — released in his bombshell book this week — were “nonsense”, “100 per cent wrong” and “casual with people’s lives”.

The Australian team had a “dark underbelly” under Darren Lehmann at the time.

The bans handed down to Cameron Bancroft, Steve Smith and David Warner were “heavy-handed”.

Cummins had seen a bottle-cap being used in a Sheffield Shield match to alter the state of the ball, but had also heard of sandpaper being taped to the inside of fingers, super glue being applied to wicketkeeping gloves and mints rubbed on the ball.

This was a masterclass in crisis management. The slew of questions came thick, fast and were many and varied. These press conferences can be difficult because reporters have different lines of questioning, particularly when sport and news reporters both jump in.

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