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When I was a teenaged boy there was a story that went around school that if you ever contracted the clap (gonorrhoea) doctors would insert a very small umbrella into your urinary canal like a catheter.
And then they would flick a little switch and the umbrella would open and be drawn backwards and outwards, scraping along the internal cavity of one’s most tender of tender loins.
Steve Smith’s press conference was more uncomfortable than that.
Oh, man, how about that for a press conference?
It was a press conference so emotional and raw that Steve Smith turned back into a boy.
There’s always been something child-like about the way Smith’s played his cricket. You can tell he deadset loves it.
But at Sydney Airport last night, Smith fronted the media – and some radio dickhead craving celebrity by association – and told Australia and the greater cricket world that he was very sorry, that he’d made a grave error of judgement and would live with it for the rest of his life.
And then mentioned his dad.
And cried like a son.
And it would be a hard-hearted human being – or a Daily Mail sub-editor who blared “TEARS OF A CHEAT” across the dodgy fish paper that is that flaccid organ – who wouldn’t have wanted to give Steve Smith a big manly bro-hug right there.
Smith did a dumb thing, for sure. He lacked the leadership and maturity and balls to put an end to a dodgy and flat-out stupid piece of cricketing dumb-arsery.
He cheated. Or sanctioned it. Same diff.
But bring it in tight, Steve Smith. You’ve copped it sweet like a man. You didn’t dump David Warner in anything. You owned up and stood up, and, well, go well, Steve Smith.
Australia will one day bring the man back into its bosom, if Australia hasn’t already, so powerful was his contrition.
When he’d got through maybe five questions – including the radio wanker’s whatsit – Smith stood up and headed out through the celebrity exit, out the back and into the night. To his people. His fiancé. His home.
And to purgatory.
He’ll play grade cricket for a year. Run clinics. Help kids. He was doing that anyway. He’ll just do it now without being Australian Test cricket captain, the thing he’d craved since he was a child, and that he loved most in the world outside his people.
And they will be initially hard yards. And here’s hoping Smith can, soon enough, relax over beers with his best mates, and get the whole imbroglio into perspective.
(Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)
And here’s a little to begin with:
Mate of mine is a former first-class cricketer, played for Australia. And he reckons being banned for 12 months is, to quote him, “ridiculous f***ing bull***”.
If he ran Cricket Australia there would again be a nationwide limit of 24 cans per man at games.
And secondly, Smith wouldn’t have copped any punishment outside that which was dished out by the ICC, which was a one-match suspension, 100 per cent of his match fee, and four demerit points, whatever they are, like notches on one’s driver’s license.
And that would be it.
And my man’s rationale?
Simply put: “Shahid Afridi bit the f***ing thing!”
Remember that? In 2010 in a T20 against Australia Shahid Afridi got his over-pronated front choppers onto the cherry and tried to eat it.
We saw it on television and everything, saw Shahid Afridi bite into a cricket ball in an attempt to alter the cricket ball’s shape.
And we laughed.
How we laughed! Ho ho! Silly Shahid Afridi. Silly, naughty Shahid Afridi, looking to raise the seam and make the Kookaburra sing by… eating it. Ha. What a silly moo.
And his penalty? Two matches. Two T20 matches. Don’t do it again, Shahid Afridi, you funny, silly moo.
Perspective! There’s been ball-tampering in cricket since the game first came out of the Weald in southern England in the 17th Century.
Michael Atherton was captain of England and rubbed dirt on the ball. Stuart Broad and James Anderson rubbed their spikes on the thing.
You think the prodigious reverse swing obtained by Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram came because the ball wasn’t mucked about with? Waqar was suspended twice.
Sarfraz Narwaz, they say, invented reverse swing. He once ran out Rodney Hogg as he was patting down the pitch. Tell me he didn’t have some special sauce on the cricket ball to make it go Irish. He got so much Irish he wouldn’t tell anyone how, his team-mates included.
Faf Du Plessis sucked on a bunch of mints, and got his spit all syrupy and slapped on a big dollop of special sauce, a combination of Du Plessis and Mentos mucous.
And he was fined 75 oer cent of his match fee and while we didn’t laugh, we just largely… moved on.
But this one? With its narrative threads of conspiracy and bungling and cover-up and subterfuge, and the dirt-encrusted bit of yellow (yellow!) sticky-tape stuffed into a man’s underpants – and all live on glorious Panavision – well. It was hot from the word go.
It was like watching a slow-motion bungled bank robbery.
And Smith’s out for a year a’cos of it.
(STR/AFP/Getty Images)
Just as I was wrapping this piece up, a mate emailed me, asking that “as a mate, a sports lover, a father and a man who respects another man’s folly, that you have it in your keyboard an article that truly reflects what we have just experienced in Steve Smith’s interview”.
What did we experience?
“A tipping point in Australian sport,” wrote my pal. “Smith can be a catalyst for change in how sport is played in this country. He presided over a train wreck of a cricket team. It was not of his making but under his control. It represented all that is ugly about Australian sport.
“Yet Steve Smith doesn’t represent the Warners, the Tomics, old mate Lodge. He is an individual who has taken his poison and started earning respect from the moment he walked into that press conference.
“So he will do his time, he will be back and I hope cement himself as Australia’s second-best-ever batsman.
“On Sunday I was worried how to tell my two cricket-obsessed sons about their idols’ transgressions, and how they had let themselves, their country and my boys down.
“But Smith, through his courage and obvious contrition, has taught them a fantastic lesson early in their cricketing and general lives.”
Taught us all something.
Good luck to him.