Pat Cummins middle finger: What really happened during Pat Cummins finger cut in childhood?

Australia captain Pat Cummins didn’t have the most pleasant of starts to his professional career because of multiple injuries. It is a well-known fact that Cummins missed out on a lot of international matches, particularly Test cricket, in the first half of his career due to these injuries.

However, Cummins had first suffered an injury in the form of a finger mishap as a four-year old at home. As a result, the middle finger of Cummins’ right hand is comparatively shorter that what it usually is.

One of the five children at Cummins’ household, Pat was distributing lollipops to his other four siblings when the accident took place over a couple of decades ago. The same happened when an excited Cummins opened the door of a bathroom to present sister Laura with a lollipop.

With the reply from the other side not being very supportive, all Cummins witnessed was the door getting slammed in response only to cut the top part of his middle finger.

Pat Cummins middle finger cut

Cummins, 29, has narrated the incident several times in the media including having to do it right before his first international match in South Africa 12 years ago.

“I lost the top of my finger when I was about three or four [years old],” Cummins had told cricket.com.au in Cape Town in 2011. “It got slammed in a door and I lost about a centimetre off the top of my finger.”

While Cummins’ mother Maria Cummins was bothered in anticipation of her son not finding a girlfriend in the future because of an unusual hand, his father Peter Cummins was worried more about whether he would be able to bowl or not even at that age.

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Second-youngest Australian Test debutant and youngest to pick a Test five-wicket haul, Cummins narrated the whole episode to renowned anchor Mayanti Langer and former England spinner Graeme Swann on Players’ Lounge Cricket Broadcast during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Does Pat Cummins’ finger cut affect his bowling?

In what is also his bowling hand, Cummins reckons that a shortened middle finger doesn’t hamper his ability to bowl in any way before joking about how it has cost him a “leg-cutter”.

“It doesn’t really affect me because [the finger] is about the same length as the other one [index finger],” Cummins had told cricket.com.au in the same conversation.

According to former Australia fast bowler Brett Lee, two same-length fingers can aid a bowler with respect to a better seam position. “[The two fingers] are the exact same length, which may aid the ball coming out of the fingers with a nice seam position,” Lee was quoted as saying by cricket.com.au during Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2017.