Hard to escape feeling that batsman should not have returned to crease
Australia obeyed the concussion protocols but Smith looked in need of more protection
Abad sleeper during matches, Steve Smith took a nap in the dressing room bath on Friday afternoon. On Saturday night he slept much better, for ominous reasons. The chilling blow to his neck from a Jofra Archer bouncer was having a delayed effect on the world’s best batsman and his body was forcing him to rest.
Smith’s non-appearance for the final day of this compressed, but dramatic Lord’s Test was a landmark in cricket injuries. But not all the reasons were good. As soon as Australia’s talisman emerged from his unusually long slumber to report grogginess and headaches it was plain he should take no further part.
That decision, however, could not hide the dubiousness of his return to the crease on Saturday afternoon, 46 minutes after he was felled by a blow so sickening that even hardened legends recoiled.
One called it the most violent impact he had seen in a lifetime of playing and watching cricket. Others told anecdotes of having eye sockets smashed and helmets battered by deliveries that were either misjudged or too good to deal with. Smith’s trauma set off a flow of reminiscence which showed up the gulf between what was acceptable 20 or 30 years ago and what we know now about head injuries: not just the immediate impact but the potential long-term costs.
This was a weekend of unrelenting ferocity, much of it from the brilliant Archer, who must have prompted a sigh of relief across Australia when he finally put his hat back on for the last time at 7.13pm, like a Clint Eastwood bounty hunter. Archer has invaded Australia’s dreams with his controlled aggression.
English team sport has stumbled across an overnight sensation who could wreak havoc across the world. He also forced us to think with renewed intensity about the game’s most dangerous aspects.
Until Phillip Hughes died five years ago following a blow to the neck in the same area where Smith
was hit by Archer, men’s cricket was stuck in a warp of macho terminology. A bang to the head was a test of character. “Weakness” could not be shown. Bouncers, “chin music” and balls of fire were a cult within a game. They still feel intrinsic to cricket’s appeal.
But the downing of Smith during Archer’s graduation to the ranks of world-class fire-breathers revealed a lingering disconnect on player welfare.
Smith passed his concussion test on Saturday afternoon. Nobody disputes that. Cricket Australia is the governing body which pushed the International Cricket Council to accept concussion substitutes – a change that allowed Marnus Labuschagne to deputise for Smith. That too is an important detail.
Neither fact though alters the sense that the decision to allow Smith to resume his innings on Saturday was an error: a failure to think outside the concussion protocols and consider the potential cost of sending him back out.
One risk was that he might face Archer again – and be hit on the head or neck a second time. Another was that Smith might be emotionally disturbed or in some kind of shock. The decision ignored the reality that the “new Bradman” already had a swollen arm. Smith’s wish to return, in part to complete his hundred, became the determining factor when, as we now know, Australia’s former captain was already on a path that would lead to his health deteriorating.
Yesterday morning Smith reviewed the previous 20 hours and said: “I have declined in the way I have felt over that time.”
Of his neck he said: “I do have pain there.” The conclusion is unavoidable. If a player has been struck with such force in an unprotected area, been knocked off his feet and forced to leave the field, he or she should take no further part in that day’s play whatever the result of a concussion test, for maximum safety’s sake.
Yesterday morning’s helpful admission spoke for itself: “Cricket Australia statistics show that 30 per cent of concussions in Australian cricket are delayed. It is not uncommon for players to pass their tests and feel well on the day of an injury and then display symptoms 24-48 hours later.”
A sport that introduces concussion subs but sends batters back out after they have been poleaxed by a missile to an unguarded part of the neck is failing to think beyond bureaucratic box ticking.
How, you might ask, did it take decades for a sport to see that if a player is medically concussed it is reasonable for them to be replaced, not least to remove the pressure on them not to leave the team short on numbers?
The next tussle will be over neck protectors, or stem guards, created after the death of Hughes, aged 25. Smith has said he will now consider wearing one and Cricket Australia is expected to make them compulsory. As the Smith incident shows, however, old patterns of thinking are hard to shift, however much equipment evolves.
As Archer said of Smith: “To see him go down, everyone stopped and everyone’s heart skipped a beat.” It was that kind of weekend: turbulent, thrilling, scary.
A guilty pleasure, at once exciting and disquieting.
Where Smith fell, Labuschagne, his “sub” also hit the deck, his helmet thumped by another Archer bouncer that put the batsman on the floor and brought the medics scurrying out again.
The battle was hot, but it was also chilling.