Pat Cummins has spent a career hunting wickets. Yet when he’s asked to name the toughest Indian he’s bowled to, his mind goes straight to the man who seemed in no rush to score at all.
Cheteshwar Pujara.
Not Virat Kohli. Not Rohit Sharma. Pujara – the quiet accumulator who turned Australian fast bowlers into exhausted spectators during two epic Border-Gavaskar Trophy triumphs.
‘Death by a thousand papercuts’
In a recent promotional video for Prime Video Sport, Cummins was asked to pick the toughest opponent he has faced from seven countries – India, Pakistan, New Zealand, England, Sri Lanka, South Africa and the West Indies. For India, there was no hesitation.
“India, I'm going to say, Pujara. Really hard to get out. Just like death by a thousand papercuts. Happy to face 100 dot balls if he wanted to. Not going to give you a chance,” Cummins said in a clip shared on social media.
Anyone who watched those draining Test series in 2018-19 and 2020-21 knows exactly what he means. Pujara would plant himself on the crease, leave with discipline, defend with soft hands and slowly bleed the Australian attack of energy and belief. It wasn’t flashy. It was suffocating.
Across 25 Tests against Australia, Pujara piled up 2,074 runs at an average of 49.38. Almost half of those came in Australia: 993 runs, three centuries, five fifties, and a highest score of 193. Those numbers don’t just sit on a page; they live in the memory of bowlers who kept running in, over after over, for little reward.
Pujara retired from international cricket last year with 7,195 Test runs in 103 matches at 43.6, including 19 hundreds and 35 fifties. He played five ODIs for India as well, scoring 51 runs, but it was in whites – and especially against Australia – that he carved out his legend and, clearly, left a mark on Cummins.
A roll call of retired greats
Cummins’ selections came with a quiet twist: every name he offered has already stepped away from international cricket. This was not a list of current rivals, but of opponents who defined eras.
From New Zealand, he went back to the chaos at the top of the order.
“From New Zealand, I played Brendon McCullum a couple of times when he was really going hard at the top of the order,” Cummins recalled. McCullum’s brief but blistering stays at the crease often felt like a sprint against the new ball, not a negotiation.
Pakistan took him in a different direction. Not Babar Azam, not the left-arm menace of Shaheen Shah Afridi, not the pace of Haris Rauf. Instead, Cummins reached for a spinner who once baffled the world.
“Pakistan, Saeed Ajmal. It was like the last ball of the over; I walked in, Saeed Ajmal just goes, and I went, what? Clean bowled. I have never seen anything like that,” he said, replaying a dismissal that clearly still stings.
From England, he chose Sir Alastair Cook – the immovable opener who built mountains of runs through sheer concentration and economy of movement. From South Africa, it had to be AB de Villiers, the man who could either stonewall for hours or dismantle an attack in a session.
Sri Lanka’s pick was Tillakaratne Dilshan, with his audacious strokeplay and that trademark scoop, a constant threat in limited-overs cricket and a disruptor of bowling plans. For the West Indies, Cummins settled on Chris Gayle, the self-styled “Universe Boss”, whose presence at the top of the order turned every over into a risk.
Seven countries. Seven very different challenges. One common thread: each of them forced Cummins to think, to adapt, to accept that sometimes even the best fast bowlers in the world are the ones under pressure.
And right at the top of that list, from an Australian perspective, sits Cheteshwar Pujara – the man who turned dot balls into a weapon and left one of the game’s great quicks describing the experience as “death by a thousand papercuts.”
