The Blaze 2026: Craig Cumming on Development and Progress

Craig Cumming is The Blaze’s Head Coach. Having joined from Otago Sparks early in 2025, he took over a squad that had tasted T20 success in 2024 and were among the favourites to repeat that in Cumming’s first season.

“Along the way, you probably want to get punched in the nose a few times.” It’s part of Cumming’s thinking about developing better cricketers. “Sometimes learning means you have a negative experience, especially in the game of cricket. You want to make sure the players are learning. I want them to become really good at making decisions under pressure, and sometimes you have got to let things go out about the place and then talk about it afterwards.”

One of those punches to the nose was losing to Lancashire in the Metro Bank One Day Cup, where Cumming admitted, “we played some exceptional cricket. We just didn’t win the last 10 overs with the bat and ball.”

Looking back, he says, “there was a lot of ‘if onlys’”; it’s those sorts of setbacks that Cumming hopes his players can react to and what he and his coaching team are looking to instil in the squad.

One of Cumming’s non-negotiables is that “the players always come first… sometimes we’ve got to be careful that we don’t feed too much, give too much information, try to be proactive in giving, let players learn.”

He knows the importance of a culture that gives space to the players to share, “we’ve all got different childhoods and come from different places. If you create a really quality environment, everyone enjoys sharing it.”

Talking about the way the squad feels like a family, “I think if people turn up and know that people care about them, then that makes a big difference to how you go about your day.”

“I think that’s the exciting thing in coaching. You want to inspire them and still hopefully help them grow. Being able to help develop the next wave of players, give them the skills and belief in themselves, is the real art of what we do, and probably the most satisfying part of what we do.”

One area that the modern cricketer has “got to be good athletes, especially in the field.” He credits the work done by Anne Sharpe, the Strength and Conditioning Coach, “who’s fantastic and leads them well in that area.”

That leads to being a good fielding side. “We’ve been working hard, Simon Guy’s been leading that. To catch a ball, you've got to get there first; to get run outs, you've got to get there quickly. So hopefully you’ll see the orange shirts flying around on a bit of a wave this year.”

It’s all about getting “to the dance floor at the end of the season, then you’re ready for the dance off. And we got ourselves to the dance floor.” It will be a challenging task to get there again this season with the T20 World Cup stretching The Blaze squad more than it has in recent times.

With Scotland being involved in the World Cup, Kathryn Bryce, Sarah Bryce, and Kirstie Gordon are expected to join the England players on international duty for part of the season, but with Cumming at the helm, he seems to be preparing a squad that will take the punches and come back stronger.