Look who’s back and raring to go
SPEAKING for the first time since he was struck by a Jofra Archer thunderbolt in the second Test, Steve Smith has admitted he woke up the following morning with the fuzziness you might normally get from having a few beers the night before.
Australia’s batting maestro also admitted feels “claustrophobic” when he puts protective stem guards on his helmet and isn’t locked in to wearing them when he makes his Test return at Manchester.
STEVE Smith woke up with the fuzziness he might get from having had half a dozen beers the night before.
A “little bit under the weather” was how the 30-yearold batting superstar described the feeling which led to him being ruled Smith out of the second Test at Lord’s.
It was a massive Ashes moment, a historic move for Test cricket too as Smith became the first player to be replaced in a match because of concussion.
But the bigger moment came the day before.
The cricket world took a collective deep breath when Smith got a bit tangled up trying to get out of the way of a bouncer from England pace weapon Jofra Archer.
Smith had been hit in the helmet by Ben Stokes during one of his dual centuries in the opening Test at Edgbaston. But he shook it off.
Archer smashed him on the forearm at Lord’s too, which brought about an audible groan from Smith. But he batted on.
This time though the ball didn’t hit his arm, or plastic. It hit Smith in the neck, close enough to where Phil Hughes was struck in 2014, with tragic consequences.
Everyone who saw Smith get hit had that “oh no” moment, and the 30-year-old former Test captain, who was walked from the ground, to relief around it, revealed he did too.
“I had a few things running through my head, particularly where I got hit, just a bit of past came up if you know what I mean from a few years ago,” Smith said, speaking for the first time about the blow.
“That was probably the first thing I thought about then I was like ‘I’m OK here’ and I was all right. I was a bit sad but I was all right mentally for the rest of that afternoon.” So much so he went back out to bat less than 30 minutes later, to face Archer again, in search of a third straight hundred.
When he swatted three straight boundaries to get to 92, before getting out LBW in bizarre fashion, totally missing a Chris Woakes inswinger, he just didn’t look right.
It was enough for the armchair critics to vent.
“How could anyone let him go back on?” they said in various forms, on various platforms, with high degrees of outrage.
Team doctor Richard Saw