Steve Smith can’t play cricket for Australia again for some time, but he should not be exiled forever
THEY’LL be taking Steve Smith’s faces off the cereal packets. Removing his image from the poles and buildings as if to signal the regime change. He’s fallen and it’s heartbreaking, writes PETER LALOR.
Cricket
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THEY’LL be taking Steve Smith’s faces off the cereal packets. Removing his image from the poles and buildings as if to signal the regime change. He’s fallen.
It’s heartbreaking. Even if he does deserve everything that’s coming his way, although I suspect he doesn’t deserve all of it. This pile on is unseemly but speaks volumes. I want to hug him and say it will be alright but I know it won’t.
The ceiling was sagging in the dressing room long before he entered it. The roof had been leaking for years. Nobody was interested in the rising damp because there was so much sunshine. Nobody noticed how low they had to stoop.
And then it caved in. And every indiscretion and negligence of past and current tenants fell on the head of Smith and whoever was with him that lunch time on day three at Cape Town.
David Warner was certainly one. There’s a sense that every time there’s a bin fire in cricket the opener has been seen wandering from the scene with a pocketbook of matches, an empty can of petrol and a ‘wasn’t me’ shrug.
It’s not all him. The contempt has been building for years. Opposition players have danced a jig of delight that this has caught up with the Australians. They aren’t holding back in public and in private.
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The blame game has started in Australian cricket’s inner circle. They’re under siege and turning on each other. Cameron Bancroft is collateral damage. A man in his eighth Test he knew nothing but the environment he walked into. He was stupid and he deserves punishment but the fact the match referee didn’t even see fit to suspend him for a game suggests something. He says he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”. He was, Nuremberg style, just following orders.
Warner, the ball maintenance man will argue that he has just been doing his job. The bowlers benefit from it. The team benefited from it. The coach, well, the coach sets the agenda. He’s not exactly the retiring type.
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Smith’s clumsy attempt to protect the identity of his co-conspirator(s) had an unfortunate side effect. Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc were rightly upset and wanted it corrected.
Back to Smith because I can’t shake the sadness about his demise. Here was one of the most personable, least calculating, more talented and one of the more genuinely decent people to skipper the Australian team in recent decades.
That’s no knock on the others, but Smith has an openness, even naivety, that few of those men had.
Here was a man with no pretensions. An enthusiast. In Port Elizabeth he’d been out with his drone (the fad that’s keeping them occupied this tour) and he’d filmed a pod of dolphins swimming beyond the waves. It was spectacular footage and he couldn’t wait to show it, standing in his towel in the foyer of the team hotel, as excited as a kid with a new toy. Which he was.
Smith entered the highest office in Australian sport wearing shorts and flip flops, opened the door and greeted all comers with a goofy grin.
And boy can he play. Gifted with natural talent, but not of the scale of an AB de Villiers who has had his bat kissed by god, Smith worked and works and worked and works and grafted a goofy approach that has seen him achieve results in his career no batsman, Bradman aside, had.
The outrage is searing, crippling even. People are concerned for him. He cuts such a lonely, devastated figure in the corridors of the hotel. Most of the others have their families with them, for once he is flying solo.
It’s a mark of his character that he saw a bus headed for Cameron Bancroft, knew that it wasn’t right and attempted to throw himself in front of it. He knew he couldn’t completely protect the opener, but he wanted to share his pain. How many would have done that? How much has it cost Smith?
If he’d kept quiet this could have been “managed”. Maybe if he had his time again he would. What sort of person voluntarily risks all they have achieved?
This time a few days back Steve Smith had the world at his feet. He was the friendly face of Australia’s favourite sport. Indian franchises were willing to pay him the best part of $2.5m to turn out for month or so. Australia paid him around $2m just to play cricket. How good was life?
The ground that was at his feet has crumbled and Smith is plummeting, hitting a world at every plunge like the character in Emily Dickinson’s poem. There’s a funereal air around the Australian cricket team in Cape Town, but there’s nobody sending flowers or notes of sympathy.
I want to understand what happened in the dressing room that lunch time. You might want to bury Smithy but it shouldn’t stop you taking the time to wonder how this god awful mess came about.
The pressures of captaining the Australian team are immense. Greg Chappell talked about the mental strain that led to the underarm moment that Trevor Chappell says has haunted him the rest of his life. Every time he enters a room there’s an announcement from the PA, ‘here is Trevor underarm Chappell, the man who brought disgrace on Australian cricket’. He’s almost an old man now, but a moment in his youth, in another century, stalks him.
Captains go crazy with the strain. Most crack at some point. Sometimes its calamitous other times just a little unsettling. Ricky Ponting turned on an England coach in unseemly scenes as the Ashes slipped away, he took a catch once and threw the ball into the turf as a World Cup slipped away. He did it because another fielder collided with him. Steve Smith was his name.
Allan Border is a simple man, an exception to life’s usual course in that he has grown less grumpy with age. He snapped regularly as skipper, said things to his teammates that he regretted, but it was his release valve. He blew up once and was briefly on strike over selection. Refusing to go with the team, yelling on the phone instead of playing.
Michael Clarke got himself into some dark places. His captaincy was hanging by a thread on the day Phillip Hughes died. He had gone off the reservation and Cricket Australia was considering disciplinary action against him.
In Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Lord Jim, Jim is a friendly young man who makes a critical bad decision in the heat of the moment. Unlike others who are possibly more culpable he faces the music, but the shame haunts him for the rest of his life.
Smith will be beating himself harder than anybody can beat him over this. He’s done something foolish and he’s paying for it like few before him. Politicians lie and cheat and stay in office unscathed. Everybody does something they are ashamed of.
The greatest shame is that moment of treachery is so out of character with everything else about Steve Smith. Maybe I had him wrong, but I am pretty sure I don’t.
He can’t remain as captain and he can’t play cricket for Australia again for some time, but he should not be exiled or excoriated forever.