'Happy to be playing anywhere' - Cummins

"It's good to be here - it's good to be anywhere," Keith Richards said during the Rolling Stones concert at Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday. A stone's throw away at the MCG, Pat Cummins expressed similar sentiments on Friday. Three years after his remarkable Test debut in Johannesburg, Cummins has added only two more first-class games to his tally.

Both of those were for Australia A in Zimbabwe; he has not played a single Sheffield Shield game since March 2011 due to a string of injuries, notably to his back and foot. But sending down four quick, miserly overs and collecting 1 for 11 in Australia's Twenty20 thrashing of South Africa in Melbourne continued a happy and unfamiliar trend for Cummins - playing during the Australian summer.

"At the moment, I'm just happy to be playing cricket anywhere," Cummins said. "I haven't been looking any further than the games I'm playing at the moment. After the T20s we'll see where I'm at, but hopefully I can get back into first-class pretty quickly. I'll probably have to have a couple of games of getting used to bowling long spells again."

A likely Sheffield Shield return will be the major test for Cummins as his body continues to strengthen, but at only 21 there is no rush, and New South Wales are unlikely to ask too much of him. The T20s in Adelaide and Melbourne this week have been his first internationals on home soil and he said the timing of his injuries over the past few years has been the most frustrating aspect of his struggle.

"I was pretty tired of getting injuries right at the start of the Australian summer," he said. "That was the most frustrating thing. Between each injury I'd bowled quite a bit and achieved what I wanted to do to get back in the Australian winter, and then just before each summer it was pretty frustrating.

"But talking to a lot of other guys who have been through the same thing, Brett Lee and Mitchell Johnson and those guys had similar time-frames as me. Knowing how long and injury-free their careers are towards the back-end gave me confidence."

His past history has trained Cummins not to look too far ahead, although the World Cup is an attractive lure towards the end of the summer if he remains fit over the next couple of months. Cummins is not in the squad for the first two ODIs against South Africa in Perth and he just wants to get as many games under his belt as possible, whatever form they take.

"In the past 12 months I haven't really played that many games," he said. "I've had a lot of time in the nets and it's totally different to game form. Just playing more games I've felt a lot better. In the past maybe a little bit of thinking of actions or trying to swing the ball, worrying about those things rather than just going out and bowling.

"I'm probably a couple of kilos stronger and a couple of years older. I feel like I'm maturing into my body a little bit more. The action, trying to straighten up a little bit and be a little bit more efficient in how I move, running as well. The end result isn't too different but maybe I'm just standing up a little bit taller."