Boy lost in Neverland
The crowd still had their fun with the 30-year-old Aussie. Some wore masks of Steve Smith crying. The masses in the Hollies stand sang, ‘‘We’ve seen you cry on the telly.’’ But there was nothing vicious about it. There was even a playful empathy. The yeomen from the Shires knew that Smith was just a boy who had made a mistake. It wasn’t his fault he could never grow up.
Even now Smith practises his cricket shots in the shower, shadow batting against a bar of soap. I imagine he has a coffee, picks up his teaspoon and starts fine glancing sugar cubes down to fine leg.
Steve Waugh, the former Australian captain, says, ‘‘I’ve never seen anything like him. He hits more balls than I’ve ever seen anyone and when he goes out to bat it’s almost like he’s in a trance-like state . . . He analyses every ball and it’s like a computer, he spits out the answer.’’
But is it much of an answer to live your life by. Has professional sport infantilised these young men?
I think of the late Brian Lochore and of the man he was. Lochore was a giant of a rugby player but he was also a giant of a man. When New Zealand was at odds with itself, a country ripped asunder by rugby’s relationship with South Africa, Lochore put the pieces back together again. Before the Rugby World Cup he had a group of players who didn’t trust each other. So he took the players out into the rural rugby heartland of the Wairarapa and billeted them with ‘ordinary people’.
Who in Australia thought to do something like that when their cricket world was falling apart. There was plenty of strategic planning and performance charts, but not so much in the way of good old common sense. David Warner and Smith might have done a lot better out on a parched cattle station than in front of a lot of TV cameras and microphones.
Are these people ever going to grow up or have we let them down? Have we created a mythical sporting Eden of professionalism that is really a wasteland of arrested development?
Author Gideon Haigh wrote that when the current Australian cricket coach Justin Langer visited the team as a visitor in 2017; ‘‘he was shocked at the dressing room’s degeneration, its inward focus, its pervasive hauteur. Yet that was a brittle cockiness, masking weakness and unease.’’
It was a grown up kindergarten. And has any of it left Smith, even now, in this moment of triumphant redemption. He touches his toes on the way to the middle as the crowd boos. He fiddles, and breathes, and scrapes at the dirt. A cover drive hurries to the boundary and Smith rolls his shoulders at Ben Stokes and has a few words. Oh, if only he could spend the rest of his life out in the middle of a cricket pitch, away from the cares of the world.
‘‘There were times throughout the last 15 months where I didn’t know if I was ever going to play cricket again,’’ says Smith. ‘‘I lost a bit of love for it at one point.’’
But what else is there. Without cricket Smith would have to leave Neverland. And how would he find his way out when none of the other lost boys know the way?