From Dale Steyn to Steve Smith, and back

With golden sunshine and the sweet brashness of the brass band all around, Steyn looked like he could bowl forever. But cricket is a cruel bastard of a game.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

ON particular afternoons at unarguably the world’s finest cricket ground, otherwise known as St George’s Park, the slowly setting sun becomes one with the bits, blobs and bulbs of brass bobbing tunefully near the northern end of the Grandstand to the west.

When that happens, often during a riff on the intro to Stand By Me — originally eight bars of, essentially, boom-boom-boom-boom — that is not much extended as extruded far beyond what Ben E. King had in mind, it’s difficult to know where the music ends and the sun begins.

Sound and light melt into the senses oh so smoothly, and before you can catch yourself you’re lulled into a peculiarly Eastern Cape state of mind where nothing moves too quickly and no-one is anything but a firm friend.

February 23, 2014 gave us just such an afternoon. Pity Dale Steyn went and ruined it.

When he steamed in, moving too quickly, too urgently, too violently, to Steve Smith, he was anything but friendly.

His previous delivery, laced with reverse swing, had hooked towards Michael Clarke through the air, spat away off the pitch, taken the edge and flown low and dipping towards a slip cordon stationed unsafely close to the bat.

Faf du Plessis, at second slip, had found the snap and skill to dive forward to snare the catch on his bootlaces.

Here Steyn comes again, flying towards the forever fidgety, ever itchy, always agonised Aussie at the other end. Another inswinger, this time past the bat and bang — straight into the pad. And plumb in front. Thank you, Mr Smith, and good-bye.

Then a flailing Brad Haddin could do nothing to stop a delivery from swinging illegally late into his middle stump.

Ryan Harris wasn’t up to anything beyond getting his pad nailed by a ball that pitched on the line of off-stump and was destined to hit the top of leg.

When he started that spell Steyn had bowled 11 frustrating overs for no reward — Chris Rogers, as close to a nobody as anyone who has opened the batting in a Test, hit him for three fours in his first two overs — and Australia were 155/3.

In his remaining nine overs Steyn took 4/16, and when he was done Australia were 214/8 on their way to being bowled out for 216 — which earned South Africa victory by 231 runs with a day to spare.

There, with golden sunshine and the sweet brashness of the brass band all around, Steyn looked like he could bowl like that forever.

But cricket is a cruel bastard of a game. The next December Steyn left Kingsmead clutching at his bowling shoulder. We all know what happened next.

Having played in all but 20 of South Africa’s 101 Tests before his injury, Steyn has featured in only a dozen of their last 36. He has gone from a fixture in the side to a rarity, and now he has gone completely: retired. From proper cricket, anyway.

Expect to still see him charging in holding a white ball. But the story of Dale Steyn, Test fast bowler, is now legend.

Smith has made the opposite journey. Four years on from that day at St George’s Park he was exposed, at Newlands, as complicit, acquiescent or oblivious to a ball-tampering plot. None of those options would have saved his tenure as Australia’s captain, which duly ended to start what rapidly became the dark night of his soul.

Smith was cast into the wilderness of the unreal world of vicious stupidity, and treated accordingly. Deeply unfairly, that is.

Yet there he was at Edgbaston last week, reinventing himself as his old self by scoring damn fine centuries in each innings of the first Test of the Ashes. England had no-one anywhere near as good as Steyn to stop him. And thank the gods for that: only the most sour of hearts wouldn’t have wanted the still fidgety, still itchy, still agonised Smith to still be able to bat forever and score piles of runs in some of the awkward ways known to cricket.

Smith and Steyn crossed paths in three other Tests — in Centurion, Cape Town and Perth — in which Smith scored 254 runs, including efforts of 100 and 84, and Steyn took eight wickets, half of them in one innings.

But only on that honeyed afternoon in Port Elizabeth was Steyn able to put Smith’s wicket in his pocket. Don’t ever tell Dean Elgar, but he has dismissed Smith twice as often as Steyn. Keshav Maharaj has done so three times as much.

Would that, somewhere, somehow, Smith and Steyn will see each other again with time enough not only to talk about that afternoon at cricket’s finest ground but to laugh, and cry, over what this damn fool game has done for them and to them.

They will be travelling in opposite directions along life’s corridor of uncertainty, but they will have plenty in common nonetheless. Not least the opinion that, like we said, cricket is a cruel bastard of a game. But a beautiful bastard for all that.