Pat Cummins Names Cheteshwar Pujara as Toughest Opponent
Pat Cummins has spent a career hunting wickets. Yet when he looks back at the batters who truly tested his limits, one name from India still looms larger than the rest: Cheteshwar Pujara.
The Australian captain, speaking in a promotional video for Prime Video Sport, was asked to pick the toughest opponent he has faced from a list of cricketing powerhouses – India, Pakistan, New Zealand, England, Sri Lanka, South Africa and the West Indies. For India, there was no hesitation.
Pujara.
‘Death by a thousand papercuts’
Cummins has seen enough of Pujara from 22 yards to know exactly why. Their duels in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy series of 2018-19 and 2020-21 have already slipped into modern Test folklore. Australia hurled everything at him. Pujara just blocked, absorbed, and batted on.
“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 the video shared on social media.
Australia’s famed pace trio of Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Cummins himself pounded away at him across two bruising series. Pujara simply wore them down. Ball after ball. Session after session.
Across 25 Tests against Australia, Pujara scored 2,074 runs at 49.38. Nearly half of those – 993 runs – came in Australia, with three centuries and five fifties. His highest, a grinding 193, stands as a monument to his method: not just scoring runs, but eroding bowlers’ belief.
Pujara retired from international cricket last year, bowing out with 7,195 runs in 103 Tests for India at an average of 43.6, including 19 hundreds and 35 fifties. He also played five ODIs, scoring 51 runs, but it was in whites that he carved out his legend – and clearly left a mark on Cummins.
A roll call of retired greats
Cummins’ selections came with an important caveat: he only named players who have already stepped away from international cricket.
From New Zealand, he went with a man who changed the tempo at the top of the order: Brendon McCullum. “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, summing up the chaos McCullum so often unleashed.
Pakistan offered no shortage of modern stars. Cummins has faced Babar Azam, Shaheen Shah Afridi, Haris Rauf and more. Yet his mind went back to a different kind of challenge – the mystery of Saeed Ajmal.
“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," Cummins said, reliving the shock of a delivery he simply didn’t pick.
From England, he chose Sir Alastair Cook, the relentless accumulator who ground down attacks for over a decade. South Africa’s slot belonged to AB de Villiers, the shot-maker who could flip a game in an hour. Sri Lanka’s representative was Tillakaratne Dilshan, all angles and innovation at the top. For the West Indies, he went straight to the most destructive of them all: Chris Gayle.
It is a list that spans styles and eras: Pujara’s defiance, McCullum’s fire, Cook’s patience, de Villiers’ audacity, Dilshan’s invention, Gayle’s brute force, Ajmal’s deception. Different methods. Same outcome for Cummins – the feeling that, for a while, the game was being played entirely on their terms.
