Cummins is Australia's first specialist bowler in the captain's job. Batters have long monopolised the role, and with it the running of strategy. On the field, the ball still travels a well-worn path from keeper to slip to cover to mid-off before it returns to the bowler.
Cummins stood at a press conference podium for an hour and 10 minutes on Friday, taking questions until the journalists present ran out of steam. The session put the episode back at the centre of Australian cricket after most of a decade in which those involved had said little.
Cummins answered in specific terms. He said a few players had escalated what he called a harebrained plan, and that it was wrong to describe that as a scheme made by the side as a whole.
He showed evident sadness as he reflected on the rift. Khawaja's depictions of the Australian team of that era have not been aimed specifically at Cummins, who was a junior player at the time.
Cummins set out the methods he had heard of for tampering with cricket balls. He said he had never seen them used, and had never agreed to their use, while playing for Australia.
He described the practice of shredding balls in the nets with an array of implements, including sandpaper. The idea of taking that practice into a match, he said, had remained alien to him.
The one instance of tampering he said he had seen in professional cricket involved a bottle cap in a Sheffield Shield game. He said he became aware of it when the umpires shut it down.
The same chapter records Khawaja's grievance at not being handed Smith's captaincy, a detail that sits beside his account of the dressing room of that period.
Cummins did not give ground on the central charge. His answers filled in detail around years of near-silence and the empty wording of official statements, and left the split with Khawaja on the record.