Smith abandoned

Peter Smith is the father in the background. He is the big body who stepped forward and laid a comforting arm on his son when Australia’s cricket captain wept in public. It is Peter who kept loading balls into the cricket machine when his son, Steve, was wandering tearfully through the long night of the soul.

It is a strange image. There is Steve Smith, the disgraced captain of Australia, the man whom then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called ‘‘a shocking disappointment’’, quite broken, a world in ruins. And his father starts loading balls into a bowling machine. Come on, son, this will take your mind off cricket for a moment.

Looking back Peter Smith said, ‘‘You work on what you can control, what you can do to help. Putting balls in the ball machine, things like that. You have to work on that only and that’s what we did. Worked on what we could control.’’

I wonder about the Steve Smiths and the Tiger Woods of this world. They’re still playing games. They seem to be eternally caught in the twilight of their childhood. Like Peter Pan they never quite grow up. And that is all very well, but unfortunately the world is full of Captain Hooks, louring father figures who will tear them apart when things go wrong.

Cricket Australia systemically and ruthlessly infantilised Steve Smith. There was a talent manager. They invested in youth. Promising players were coddled at a young age and brought up to know nothing but cricket. They were taught that there was ‘‘an Australian way’’.

The baggy green was sacred. And so these young men grew into what their masters had made them. Winning was everything. Cheating was a word that became flexible. Professionalism, cheating, what’s the difference. So long as you’re winning, lads. The only boundaries that young Steve Smith knew were on the edge of

the cricket pitch.

And then the inevitable happened. One day the television cameras caught Smith and his mates doing something that someone from long ago said they weren’t supposed to do. Lots of cricketers had done similar things before, but this was a moment in time when the world was into moral outrage, trumpety, trumpety, trump.

So Smith was publicly shamed. And all the people who had taught him not to know right from wrong ran for cover. The corporates were saving their own skins. Prime ministers were standing on soap boxes. So poor little Smudger tells the world, ‘‘It was a failure of my leadership . . . I will regret this for the rest of my life . . . I hope in time I can earn back respect and forgiveness.’’

Sixteen months later Steve Smith cover drives the ball to the boundary for his second century of the match and raises both arms in the air. Commentator Nasser Hussein tells us that redemption is well and truly complete. And perhaps it is, perhaps Smith has fled his demons like Tiger Woods outran his chasing Furies at Augusta in April.