Disgraced ‘new Bradman’ left to search for salvation

Steve Smith’s zenith was during the Ashes, when the “new Bradman” label really began to stick and he stood on the great cricket fields of Australia as England’s nemesis. Now, the autobiography we all scoured for clues to his talent has been repositioned by a Brisbane bookshop in the True Crime section.

The book, called The Journey, requires a mortifying sequel, to be called, perhaps, The Downfall, because Smith now stands in the face of condemnation coming at him like a thousand Mitchell Johnson bouncers.

History was guiding him to the place reserved not only for revered Australian captains, but master batsmen. To see him collapse on that road is a seminar in fallibility.

All through the ball-tampering scandal, there has been talk of an “error of judgement” and a “mistake”. We can all see the truth of those descriptions. The unspoken and even more painful part is that Smith made a “decision”: A calculating, consequence-oblivious choice to alter the condition of the ball with a foreign object, and thus defraud South Africa and the audience in Cape Town and around the world.

If this was a one-off — which is hard to believe — Smith’s rise was interrupted by a brainstorm, a failure of logic, a loss of bearings that will now stay with him for the rest of his life. If there were previous offences on his watch, the verdicts will be even more pitiless.

Wrapped inside Smith’s cheating in South Africa is personal disgrace, a public crucifixion and a mystery about human psychology. What makes people risk everything when they have already won life’s lottery? What disconnect stops them seeing the bonfire they are walking towards?

These are eternal questions, for all living souls, not just cricket captains too deluded to see that using improvised sandpaper to change a ball under the gaze of HD cameras was bound to be spotted, and then jumped on as a crime against the Australian homeland. The cycle we are in is: Detection, punishment, fallout. And it is the fallout that is most complex, because it places Smith (and others, but mainly Smith) at the old crossroads between ignominy and salvation.

He has no way of knowing which way the forgiveness bit will go. His sentence will end, he will return to his business, and he will doubtless construct a PR strategy that gives him the best chance of getting on with his job in something approaching peace.

But you would not fancy his chances of escaping the rolling vengeance and ridicule that accompany such acts (again, we all contribute to that); he has no control over the society and culture that may mark him out as a villain unfit for cricket’s pantheon.

Wherever you stand on this, the possibility that Smith will always be a pariah — for the orchestrated and craven nature of the offence, as much as the transgression itself - is one full of pathos and waste.

However sacrilegious it sounded to the guardians of Bradman’s memory, Smith’s batting statistics were steering him in that direction. His leadership of a new Australia side, with the world’s best bowling attack, was rich in promise. All this was laid out as good news for Australian society — and for Test cricket, which needs individual red-ball brilliance to sell in a sport fixated by white-ball thrills.

Smith led Australia to victory in the Ashes with 239 in the first innings of the third Test, in Perth, after which the Bradman comparisons ran free.

This series-defining knock raised him, at the age of 28, to a career average 62.32 from 59 Tests — second only in Test history to Bradman, who averaged 99.94. Smith’s average has since fallen slightly to 61.37. At the same time, an Australian TV network counted 23 flick and fidgets during Smith’s preparation to face a delivery.

There was always a lot going on in his head, but nobody guessed it stretched to ball-tampering for a bowling attack that was already formidable and had no great need of nefarious assistance.

From David Warner, the vice-captain, cricket came to expect a renegade spirit, but Smith might have understood that the statesman role was there for him to take. He was being offered a double bounty of towering scores with the bat and a place at the head of Australian cricket. Instead, his downfall has become almost a parody of what happens to icons when they lose contact with reality. Smith has disappeared from Weet-Bix boxes. No longer is his the face that launches Australia’s day.

Many will not care, but he must be in turmoil. Hell must be raging through his soul. He has to live with the knowledge that he gambled everything he has worked for.

People in professional sport are often incapable of seeing beyond actions to consequences. When Smith needed someone to tell him that ball-tampering might destroy him, no one was there, so he ploughed on to this excruciating outcome.

Australia’s players failed the game, but they also failed each other.

Their minds were not open to what would happen to the perpetrators if the plot went wrong. This blindness is common in sport, and in cheating. The world’s best batsman got greedy. The small potential gains from that are eclipsed by egregious losses.

Until the Cape Town Test match against South Africa, Australian captain Steve Smith was revered as one the finest batsmen in modern cricket and an able captain. But hereafter, he would be referred to as the “chief plotter” in a ball-tampering scandal. He has wiped out all the fame and the adulation he has received over the years through a deliberate act that threatens to destroy the sanctity of the game.

I remember writing about him in 2010 as Australia’s rising leg-spinner. He was a No 8 batsman then, but soon rose to become the No 1 of the team — in just about five years. Once Smith became the captain, I had many opportunities to interact with him. His boyish looks fooled everyone as no one thought he could carry such verve, to emerge as one of the world’s finest batsmen.

Was it the sudden rise to fame or associated opulence that turned him into a bad loser? Did he, at some point, consider himself bigger than the game? A look at the number of ugly incidents that he was involved with in the past could lead us to believe that a big fall was imminent.

Smith was involved in an ugly war of words with James Anderson during the Adelaide Test that had forced umpire Aleem Dar to separate them. He was fined 30 per cent of his match fee for dissent after an obscenity-sprinkled rant against the umpires over a decision review during the second Test against New Zealand in Christchurch in 2016. He questioned the International Cricket Council’s appeals process after a ban on South African bowler Kagiso Rabada. During the Bengaluru Test against India in March last year, when he looked towards the Australian dressing room for assistance on whether to go for a review of the umpire’s decision, he described it as a “brain fade”. And now, as part of the leadership group that devised the plan to tamper the ball, he has confessed that it was a “big mistake”. This “big mistake” has proved too heavy for Smith, who has crashed from fame to shame in no time.

— K.R. Nayar, Chief Cricket Writer