Enter Steve Smith with a white tiger. Only days ago I was in Nottingham, asking Australian cricket for surprises. Into the Lord’s Test, it’s still delivering.
With the shadows lengthening and the late sunlight deepening its gold, no one was expecting Steve Smith to tear through England’s previously impenetrable batting with a spell fashioned equally from precociousness, skill, and sheer arse.
A far more seasoned cricket observer than I, happily lamenting that his pre-planned copy had been largely made redundant, remarked “We really shouldn’t be surprised by this anymore, but we still are.”
The magic of the part-timer, however well known that cricketing story may be, still seems to emerge in a flurry of sparks that leaves the onlooker dazzled.
Arriving at Lord’s gives you a sense of timelessness. Here is a venue that wears its history prominently on its red-and-yellow striped sleeve. The tour guides, the signage, the literature all revel in it, a smorgasbord of all that is ancient, spread out beneath the idiosyncratic robot eye of the media centre spaceship.
Everything is particular to the venue: the old stone foundations of the stands, the W.G. Grace gates where we collared and interviewed the impeccably courteous and jovial MCC crowd, the pronounced slope of the field that would make cover drives from the Nursery End redundant if not for the artfully manicured outfield.
A couple of days earlier, we were able to shoot footage while standing on the outermost grass. It was a curious intimacy with a revered object, like spooning the Venus de Milo.
Then this morning, it was on, the crowds thickening in the streets around the ground, coagulating at its incredibly thorough entrance checks, a presumable legacy of the London bombings, before moving inside to a place so amiable that such thoughts were entirely out of place.
In that context of old-world gentility, with her Majesty the Queen the only non-player to wander onto the field without earning a crash tackle from a fluorescent steward, it seemed only proper that the England captain won the toss and elected to bat.
But the procession of tradition finished there. A couple of loose overs from James Pattinson saw Michael Clarke’s alleged mortal enemy – or possibly just a guy he disagreed with once – asked to come on and bowl.
A few minutes later, Shane Watson had figures of one over, no maidens, one for eight. My sharpest Twitter correspondent of the day remarked “His bowling like his batting in reverse – a couple of flashy boundaries and a wicket.”
From there, Ryan Harris took over. For many, the surprise is that Ryan Harris is still a prospect in international cricket, when at nearly 34 years of age most are in line for a fast bowling pension.
But Harris’ notoriously fickle body has spared him the rigours of heavy cricketing schedules, and when it’s fit to deliver, the man himself does likewise.
The most impressive thing about Harris is the standard he has set in a constantly interrupted career. However lengthy the lay-offs between matches, he will return for the next fully firing.
Today he took his 50th Test wicket, an especially impressive achievement for a man who has managed 13 matches in over three years, and who debuted with the entirety of his 20s behind him.
His bowling average of 23.63 is in the elite bracket.
The variety of his wicket-taking was exceptional. In a narrow window before the seam softened and the pitch dried out, he beat Joe Root’s edge to slam into pad with a delivery that seamed in, then while some poor soul was trying to explain the DRS to Elizabeth II, he left Kevin Pietersen for a caught behind.
England at 3/28 were shaken. Jonathan Trott steadied things with a half century, then Harris returned to confuse him into a short-arm pull to midwicket.
But nothing has given more sense of inevitability this series than Ian Bell. As soon as he’s emerged from the dressing room he’s looked set for a five-day stay. His shots have been true, chances minimal, assurance at maximum.
His clueless entrance to Ashes cricket, humiliated by Shane Warne in 2005, seems to belong to a different player. Today was his third consecutive Ashes hundred, after Nottingham and Sydney, and it looked almost a certainty from about his tenth ball.
For 310 minutes he stayed at the crease, and for each one of them England’s ascendancy only increased.
Jonny Bairstow stayed with him, surviving the no-ball that clean bowled him from serial overstepper Peter Siddle and playing some strokes better suited to killing seal cubs.
So with lunch stretching into tea and then into the final session, it took the element of surprise to change things.
“Smith?” grunted Cam next to me. “He bowls pies.”
“Maybe,” I sagely said. “But in India he bowled a couple of full tosses for boundaries, then got a good one to get Tendulkar out.”
First over, a full toss was neatly put away by Bell for four. Next ball, a perfectly pitched leg break had the centurion prop forward and edge to slip.
I’d suggest that slight memories of 2005 stirred then, seeing Bell’s inability to combat the simplest leg-spinning delivery, but I’m afraid of making Ian Bell mad. I think we’ve seen more than enough of him for one series.
At a roulette table, Clarke would be one to ride the streak. Here, he stacked up on Smith. Another over, then another. On BBC radio, Glenn McGrath quoted Warne’s description of a spinner’s full toss as “the underrated ball”. Moments later, Smith produced one that Bairstow drove back on the full.
In fact, that sort of full-bunger can be quite hard to hit. On off stump, it’s drifting further away in the air, spinning viciously, and dipping as it approaches the batsman. There’s also the expectation that comes with seeing a full toss – how often do we see tennis players massacre the overhead smash at the net with the court wide open?
Full tosses immediately state that the batsman must be able to hit a boundary. The pressure comes on as soon as the ball leaves the hand. The batsman feels compelled to comply, and in that moment of rushed decision the mistake can be born.
The Ian Bells of this world don’t make that mistake. The Jonny Bairstows do. And the solitary Matt Prior of this cricket team didn’t know what to do when faced with a flipper. Thinking it was a long-hop, he went back to cut. His desperate flail as he saw it hurrying through only surrendered a top edge.
With the curious instance of England sending in a nightwatchman for their nightwatchman – Jimmy Anderson coming out ahead of Stuart Broad – that was all the excitement done.
A day that had been inevitably England’s had suddenly very nearly become Australia’s. Steve Smith had the pick of the figures, and the faces of the English batsmen showed they couldn’t believe he had done this to them.
As our erstwhile correspondent mentioned, no matter how many times we’ve seen this, we couldn’t believe it either. He’s quite right. I’ll be less surprised when Ian Botham captains the press box into a low-earth orbit.
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