Smith sets Ashes standard with Bradman-esque knock
If this Ashes series carries on like this, cricket will have us gasping for the second time this summer. It even had a redball version of two ‘‘Super Overs’’ – 12 deliveries that England’s openers had to survive after Steve Smith had used Edgbaston as a giant page for a redemption script. Football’s juggernaut is coming. But a late-starting Ashes series stands in its way.
On day one we had a five-fer from Stuart Broad, a scan for the injured James Anderson, a bee sting for umpire Aleem Dar and Smith, the restored pariah, scoring 144 of Australia’s 284 runs after the visitors had drooped to 122-8.
This Edgbaston crowd deserve high praise. The many who booed Smith throughout evidently believe there is no way back from the shame of the sandpaper scandal. Some will care less about the morals of that shaming episode and just want to make Smith and company squirm. Many more, however, applauded his magnificent innings and savoured the thought of the fireworks still to come in London, Manchester and Leeds.
Crowds are painted in primary colours. Hostile, appreciative, raucous, passive. But the audience in ‘‘Fortress Edgbaston’’ passed through every state, proving that watching Ashes cricket is as
nuanced and intense as the contest.
They booed, they jeered, they chanted: ‘‘Cheat, cheat, cheat.’’ They watched Anderson limp off and felt their spirits sag. They were boisterous and introspective, confident and fearful. And by the time the floodlights blazed and Australia passed 250, they understood all over again what the Ashes demands of its viewers: a long, long shift of ebbs and flows in which players are broken and opponents block the road to happiness, as Smith did with his brilliant declaration of intent.
England’s supporters turned up for an execution. Still buoyed by Cricket World Cup joy, they bustled to their seats like an army of amateur comedians as England’s summer conquest advanced to the red-ball game.
The risky mantra about Edgbaston being a graveyard for Aussie dreams has mutated into a marketing slogan, plastered around this wonderful ground. The English contingent in the stands believed it. They were full of fizz by 11am. They had comedy props.
The Ashes, though, are not an Instagram post but a novel, even if England’s potent early bowling threatened to erase Australia’s batsmen. Then, Smith revived the deeper certainties and stubbornness of a Bradman.
Tim Paine, Australia’s captain, must have been thinking: ‘‘Why did I say there are 15 grounds more intimidating than this?’’ His team failed to deal with the early onslaught of Broad and Chris Woakes.
One began to wonder whether Australia’s new forced ‘‘niceness’’ was a denial of their nature: a pointless surrender to guilt. Maybe a few new rules might have sufficed. Perhaps it was selfharming to go in search of ‘‘our authentic selves’’.
The last time England were on cricket’s biggest stage they crammed a lifetime of drama into a single hour. The final phase of their epic Cricket World Cup win over New Zealand produced more plot twists than the heart could bear. Around the country people reported nausea from stress. The journey to a super over and those 12 balls were a wrenching exposition of triumph and heartbreak.
But sport moves on fast, even from its most spectacular spectacles, and the onus falls on Ashes cricket to show that it, too, can mesmerise a country in an age when the consumption of sport is a snacking culture.
Gone were England’s retro blue pyjama kits; in came the milky white uniforms and navy caps of a more patient form of the game: a game that allows 25 days in which to settle an argument, and has, as its entertainment benchmark, the great summer of 2005, when the nation gathered around free-to-air images of a struggle comparable – in longer form – to last month’s Cricket World Cup win at Lord’s.
In that competition, EnglandIndia at Edgbaston felt like an away game for the hosts. This time, Australia’s supporters looked like package holidaymakers dressed in identical Aussie livery by a tour operator. They sat in a tight wedge of green and yellow gazing across to the fabled Eric Hollies Stand, where the most boisterous of England’s supporters assembled to cheer on their own side and torment the wearers of the Baggy Green.
Cameron Bancroft’s recall by Australia gave birth to the year’s best sports headline: ‘‘Getting the banned back together.’’ Bancroft, Warner and Smith all returned to Ashes cricket and offered an English crowd a chance to warm tired jokes over a new high heat. Sandpaper – a bit passe now – made a comeback.
Booing was revived on the grounds that all three balltampering conspirators were in one place and therefore ripe for ridicule. Even Warner appeared manic under this spotlight. So edgy was Australia’s best opener that he failed to review a Stuart Broad lbw ball that was missing leg stump.
England thought they had Australia pinned. But they will not underestimate them now, not with Smith on a mission. The long battle has begun.