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All you can think of as you watch Ryan Harris bowl is that he shouldn’t be here.
Not that he isn’t worth a place in the team – far from it. It’s that you’re witnessing an anomaly that stretches credulity; that by all conventional markers, none of this should be happening.
Harris was Australia’s most important player through the final innings at Cape Town last week. If any team was going to bat through a day and more to save a Test, it was South Africa. Get bowled out, and the Australians would take a series win.
A long early partnership was needed to push through a chunk of the overs. Australia needed to deny this comfort with early wickets.
Harris provided, opening the breach in the third over for Mitchell Johnson to rush through. South Africa’s top three lasted 36 balls. The world’s best batsman walked out to start the seventh over, and stayed until the 85th. Then it was Harris again, seaming the new ball after pitching it perfectly, drawing AB de Villiers’s edge behind.
It was Harris once more, late in the day, after South Africa had piled resistance upon resistance. Vernon Philander had kept out 105 balls, Dale Steyn 43. They were eight down, but one by one the overs bled away. Just 30 deliveries remained in the match when Harris took the ball, swinging a yorker that beat Steyn sufficiently to clip the toe of his bat and bounce into off stump. Morne Morkel is a left-hander, and his height leaves a hell of a gate. Two balls later, Harris swung through it, and the task was done.
That performance would have been called unbelievable no matter who summoned it. It sealed a series that even three months ago was far beyond this Australian side. But, in this case, it was literally unbelievable, because it came from Ryan Harris, a cricketer whose career should not exist.
That career began at an age when most fast bowlers start to fall apart. Harris stepped into Test cricket halfway through his 31st year. Australia’s fast bowling stocks were low: Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee and Stuart Clark were gone, Johnson was erratic, Peter Siddle was more green than gold, Ben Hilfenhaus and Doug Bollinger were as good as options got. Harris found his way into the One-Day International team early in 2010 and put together a scorching run, taking 28 wickets in ten bowling innings at an average of 14. The last match was in Auckland, and a week later, there was a Test against New Zealand. The selectors decided to throw him in. Harris took 2 for 42 and 4 for 77 in a bowling follow-on, and they thought they might be on to something.
Harris is built like a bullock, broad across the chest and shoulders, heavy in tread. He approaches the pitch like he’s about to shoulder-charge the door of a meth lab. His boots beat down with a flagellatory cadence. When he arrives at the crease though, his frame transcends itself to attain a moment of grace. Above his right shoulder, his wrist cocks back outrageously, the hand holding the ball angled away from his forearm like a cobra head. At the point of delivery, it strikes, whipping forward, the seam so rigid that the ball could be standing still while the world moves towards it.
Sometimes that ball swings, sometimes it reverses, sometimes the seam strikes the pitch on a good length and moves hungrily for the edge. More often than not, it does none of these things, goes straight as a desert highway through to the wicketkeeper. When it does, the man who learned his trade on a dead Adelaide deck turns and walks back to try again. Harris is not a magician. He’s just very, bloody good.
His heft might be to blame for his fragility. Some bodies strain to do things that the lighter-framed manage with impudent ease. Harris played both Tests against New Zealand in 2010. It was the last time in four years that he would get through an entire series. Injuries turned up like loaded dice: soft tissue, tendon, bone, body parts popping in a slow, sad relay.
Nine months after his debut, Harris returned for an Ashes flogging in Adelaide, took nine wickets in Perth, then trudged off with a fractured ankle in Melbourne. Eight months later, he managed two Tests in Sri Lanka and ruined a hamstring. A couple more months got him one Test in South Africa. He played two of four Tests against India on home soil that southern summer, two of three on the tour of the West Indies in April, then went 15 months without a match before entering the frame for the 2013 Ashes in England.
It was a surprise to see him back. True to form, the selectors judged him a medical risk for the first Test. They threw him in at Lord’s. He took 24 wickets in the next four Tests, more than any teammate, at 19.58. He was the best paceman in the series by an English country mile. His body held up. He was then 33, having played 11 Tests in three and a half years. The whole thing was impossible.
Except Harris was always impossible. Even through those years, he’d kept himself in discussions about the national side purely by how good he was when available. After almost every break, he’d come back on top of his game. There was that 6 for 47 in the second innings in Perth after his first layoff, 5 for 62 in the second innings at Galle, 4 for 33 in the first dig in Cape Town, and 5 for 72 to start his 2013 comeback. Harris couldn’t afford to start slowly. He just started.
Making it through four straight Tests for the first time was the next phase of Harris bullshit. Bear with me on that description. Many countries use it, but it has a particular resonance in the Australian vernacular. When the excitement of an unlikely triumph has subsided, and you’re looking over it with admiration, you pick out the word ‘bullshit’, draw out the opening syllable, then swallow the ‘L’, folding it under itself so it becomes a long, open-ended vowel. You barely open your mouth, and drag everything through the sinuses to the right nasal pitch. You physically align yourself in matching fashion, stretched out on the grass or leaning back in your chair, and let it drawl: “Bawwwwwwwshit”. You are saying: “I admire your achievement, having previously thought it hugely unlikely that anyone could perform this deed in such impressive fashion.”
That was the response that Harris drew, as he began to defy even the parameters of his own impossible world. He went from those four Tests in England to five in Australia, all of them, even when the Ashes were won and the dead rubber matches lent the chance of indulgence. He grabbed another 22 wickets, another series average under 20. He was told to get surgery to remove floating bone fragments from his dodgy knee. He mulled it over, turned it down. The leg was still working well enough to bowl, even if it hurt, and there were three Tests to play in South Africa. With his history, it was a matter of grabbing every match he could while his luck held.
He shouldn’t have been there. A battered, creaking, 34-year-old facing up to the undisputed world champions, a human episode of Bush Mechanics entering his 22nd Test match with an elite bowling average of 21.56, a rumpled forehead, and a shotglass worth of fluid in his knee. After three wickets and a hearty spanking in the first two Tests, he looked beaten for the first time in his ellipsis of a career. The leg got to him. The South Africans got to him. His average ballooned with his injury, he was dragging short, he was pausing to thump his troublesome joint like a dodgy television.
He shouldn’t have been in that third match, yet somehow Siddle was dropped instead. He shouldn’t have taken his hundredth Test wicket, one of seven for the match. He should never have had a chance of a hundred Test wickets, anytime, anywhere. And he certainly shouldn’t have been trying for number 102. The medical staff had recommended he bowl eight to ten overs in the second innings. He shouldn’t have been lining up for his 25th in the long shadows of the end of day five.
He shouldn’t have had the ball thrown to him. He shouldn’t have been able to bowl it. He shouldn’t have been able to find swing, to beat a man who had played with such control against scarier and more functional opponents. You could feel the draw coming on. After all that fighting from de Villiers, Faf du Plessis, Philander and Steyn, so late in the game, so close to the end, Australia really shouldn’t have won.
All you can think, as you watch Harris run in to bowl, is that none of this should be happening.
Writer and radio broadcaster Geoff Lemon joined The Roar in 2010, and tweets from @GeoffLemonSport. This article was first published by our cricket partner, Wisden India.