Boxing Day Test: Australian captain Pat Cummins says Sam Konstas will be able to play with complete freedom

Call it blissful naivety, blind faith or the freedom of youth — there’s something special about playing Test cricket as a teenager, according to Pat Cummins. The Australian captain, who is the second youngest man to ever play Test cricket for Australia, will lead his new debutant Sam Konstas — set to become the fourth youngest — into this week’s blockbuster Boxing Day Test. And Cummins says the 19-year-old opener, who has shown off his big bag of tricks in the Melbourne Cricket Ground nets in recent days, will be allowed to play with all the freedom in the world. Only Ian Craig in 1953 and Tom Garrett in 1877 have debuted at a more tender age than Konstas, who will be 19 and 85 days on Thursday. Cummins did it for Australia on a tour of South Africa in 2011 aged 18 and said the experience was a whirlwind. “It’s pretty awesome. I spent a bit of the time wondering why or how I was there, how it happened so quick,” he said. “I just remember being really excited and similar to Sammy this week, there is a level of naivety that you just want to go out there and play like you do when you’re a kid in the backyard. “You want to take the game on and overthink it, so that’s the message to Sam, that’s definitely how I felt as an 18-year-old and then once the game started you go into game mode and it’s just like any other game.” Cummins joked he felt freedom as a teen Test cricketer because “if I didn’t have a great game it wasn’t my fault, it was the selectors fault for picking me”. “It’s like ‘well they’re the idiots who picked an 18-year-old’,” he said with tongue in cheek. “I was saying this to Sam the other day, as an 18-year-old I was thinking, I got a lot more leeway because I was young, almost publicly. “You’re so young starting out your career, it’s Boxing Day, it doesn’t get any better than this, so just enjoy the moment.” The New South Wales and Sydney Thunder star boy batted in the nets on Wednesday before joining families on the MCG surface where it was clear he has settled nicely into the group. “He’s great, quite relaxed, good fun, happy to roll along with the jokes and take the mickey out of himself and others,” Cummins said. “We just always encourage him to be himself. He seems relatively like he has got a good head on his shoulders for a 19-year-old. We’re there backing him up.” Konstas will stride out onto the MCG alongside Usman Khawaja, who at 38, is twice his age. His selection also signals a shift in strategy for Australia at the top of the order. McSweeney’s selection took them away from the two-paced opening partnerships they had operated with while David Warner was in the role. Konstas has clearly been given a directive to take the attack to India’s bowlers, including their new-ball terror Jasprit Bumrah. He has already declared his plan is “to put pressure back on the bowlers.”