Jason Cummings lifts lid on World Cup, becoming Scotland's forgotten man and shared Australia dream with Martin Boyle

Blazing sunshine in September. Socceroos tracksuit. Fan day at a club smashed by Brisbane’s autumn floods. Kids, oldies, King Charles Cavaliers all want to say hi. Jason Cummings is new to it all, ecstatic to take it all in. The new boy in Australia’s national football team loves a laugh and a good time.

It’s stuck him in trouble before, and is actually the very reason he ended up leaving the UK, where he’d built a tidy career scoring regularly in Scotland and England’s lower leagues, to Australia at the start of 2022. Late last year, Cummings, the good time bandit, decided to appear in a stage show, dressed as The Joker days before a huge game for then-club Dundee.

He was sent home from training the next day. Dundee manager James McPake was thunderous. Cummings protests he did nothing wrong to this day. Whatever the truth, the fact is Cummings never played for Dundee again and ended up moving to Australia in January. To Gosford and the Central Coast Mariners. With an Australian-born mum, he was free to enter.

Ten goals and cult status already in concrete, here he is now. In Brisbane with the Socceroos for the first time. Signing autographs and having a laugh with the good people of Mitchelton FC, smiling again after floods ruined their club in March. Cummings laps up the attention, and when asked if he’s just trying to blend in like a nervy new boy, Socceroos manager Graham Arnold, standing nearby, bursts out laughing.

“Blend in? Blend in!” Arnold laughs. Cummings isn’t one to just blend in. He plays the way he lives. Never dull. His exploits in 2022 with Central Coast, 10 goals and endless energy, meant a growing chorus calling for inclusion in the Socceroos games in March and then the squad for June’s World Cup