It was one of those days when you wondered why the hell anyone would be a cricketer. Western Australia’s flat harsh light came down hard on the world below.
Temperature reports from the WACA wavered between 41 and 44 degrees.
The ground announcer talked about sunscreen and hats almost as often as he talked about memberships to the Perth Scorchers, their name an unreasonably heavy elbow in the ribs from the dad-joke marketing department.
The crowd were either hiding from the heat or surrendering to it, lubed in a protective coating of beer. The press contingent had long since given up doing any pressing.
The press box at the WACA, mind, is not a box, or a room, or even inside a building. It’s a tent full of trestle tables.
A wedding reception could arrive at any minute and complain they’ve been double booked. It’s also positioned at square leg, meaning no one inside has a clue what’s going on.
Today, rows of journos shovelled aside drifts of empty water bottles to sweat delirium into their keyboards, or slumped in the detritus like beached fish.
The place looked like a refugee camp after a rare rain of laptops. Even the fridge was stacked with computers, trying to cool the drives enough to use.
It was no good, the fridge had checked out for the day. Fair call. There’s no point wading against the tide.
Steve Smith, though, was doing just that. He was resisting the flow of the world around him and the actors in it.
In the middle of a circle of grass in East Perth he was digging in, convincing one comrade to stay alongside him, and keeping eleven opponents in the last place they wanted to be.
Batting in these conditions looks a surreal pursuit.
You take a day on which even those in the shade are releasing every button and discarding every garment within the bounds of an increasingly flexible dignity, then you strap on pads, arm guards, thigh pads, thick gloves, yards of strapping and a helmet in order to go and stand in the full sun over the hottest span of the day for what you hope will be several hours.
It reminds me of my American friend Washington, formerly a serious college wrestler, who had stories of sleeping in five jumpers or hammering the treadmill in a wetsuit to sweat out the pound or two of fluid required to fight in a lower weight class.
It was a bizarre blend of adolescent concerns: the posturing of hypertrophic masculinity with the obsessiveness of female body image.
But while the batsman may look uncomfortable next to even the luxury of the fielding team’s unencumbered shirtsleeves, he can use these uncomfortable days to control the game.
He can make the fielding team run, make them worry, make them call out with hearts in mouths when a ball rises into the air, make them feel the deflation when it lands safely or clears the field of play. The fielding side moves to his tune, if he can only keep hold of the playlist.
Smith’s innings today was aggressive in parts, yet all about control. “From ball one today I felt pretty good,” he said after stumps. “I think I summed up the conditions pretty well and it came off in the end.” He did.
He took 16 balls to score, but rather than a first run he scored six of them, having watched eight sighters from Graeme Swann before coming down the pitch to lift him into the sightscreen. The ball was there for the shot. Four balls later, James Anderson overpitched and Smith was driving through midwicket, always an indicator of good timing.
Even when Warner and Bailey fell, Smith was unfazed.
He’d left plenty of short balls from Stuart Broad, but got one whose line he liked and smashed the pull through midwicket.
It would be a feature of his innings: the quick snap of the hands, a white-trousered pirouette, and the ball routinely speeding away well forward of square, rather than the hook behind that in this series has brought no small number undone.
Any time England strung together some quiet overs, Smith waited them out. When they erred to his liking, he took full value.
“The WACA’s one of the best places to bat because you can leave a lot on length,” he said. “That’s something I was pretty conscious about doing today: leaving well and waiting for balls in my areas to score off.”
Three times, Ben Stokes was taken for two boundaries in an over, the final brace bringing up Smith’s hundred.
The approach to the century was nerveless, the loss of Brad Haddin was nerveless, then for ten overs after his milestone Smith barely scored a run to ensure he made it to stumps without mishap.
Resist the tide long enough, and eventually it has to turn another way. “It was a tough part of the game,” said Smith of his arrival at the crease.
“They’d taken a few wickets and they were pretty high. So to dig through their big bowlers’ spells and really start to cash in late in the day, that was the plan.”
“It’s right up there for me in my career: you know, obviously under a little bit of pressure coming into this game having not scored too many runs, and the position of the game as well.”
The plan worked perfectly. As for pressure, there shouldn’t have been any. In cricket coverage, any two low innings will be called a slump, but that’s reactive reporting.
In Adelaide, Smith froze against a good Monty Panesar ball, then was 23 not out when his captain declared.
In Brisbane he staged a mini-recovery worth 59 runs, one that Haddin and Mitchell Johnson carried all the way, then hung the bat out early as any batsman can do.
Go back three Tests and we’re at the scene of his debut hundred, 138 not out at The Oval, an innings that perhaps only rain prevented from setting up a win.
The talk and scrutiny from sports reporters with too much time and space to fill is just another environmental factor in a cricketer’s life.
But with Smith surviving the ferocity of this Perth summer day with so much more composure and aplomb than the mess of humanity watching on from the press box, he’ll absorb whatever heat the media can generate just fine.
Geoff Lemon is a writer and radio broadcaster. He joined The Roar as an expert columnist in 2010, writes the satirical blog Heathen Scripture, and tweets from @GeoffLemonSport. This article was first published by Wisden India, in a new-founded Ashes partnership.
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