If, as expected, Sam Billings is given a Test debut in the fifth Ashes Test this week, it will herald a reunion with Pat Cummins that Penrith Cricket Club members have awaited for some time.
It is almost eight years since the pair last took part in the same red-ball match, as team-mates for the Sydney grade club. Billings had travelled Down Under to continue his development after emerging as a destructive white-ball wicketkeeper-batsman at Kent and breaking Geraint Jones’s run of 115 consecutive County Championship appearances.
Cummins, already a three-format Australia international aged 20, was suffering one of the numerous back stress fractures that derailed much of his early career and was keeping himself busy playing for his local club as a batsman.
One match, in particular, stood out. Batting at number four against Sutherland in December 2013, Billings – under the pressure of being the club’s first England import – was caught for a fifth-ball duck; Cummins, coming in at six, hit an unbeaten 110.
It was a formative time in Billings’s life that he describes as “the best thing I’ve ever done, both for my cricket and as a bloke”. Now, a hop over the Bass Strait to Tasmania, he is ready to take the final step on his cricketing journey.
For much of his career, Billings, 30, has been unfortunate to be known as professional cricket’s most famous water carrier, so often selected and left unused by England and T20 franchises worldwide.
As he joked after completing a gruelling solo drive from Brisbane – where he had been playing Big Bash cricket and was 90 minutes from boarding a flight home – to answer England’s wicketkeeping SOS last weekend: “It would be a very Sam Billings thing to do to drive nine hours to run the drinks.” Such is the jeopardy of being one of English cricket’s nice guys.
Born into a wealthy family of property investors with multi-million pound assets, Billings is self-deprecating enough that when asked for four words to describe himself, the first is “posh” (the others are “driven” and “good fun”).
