Ashes 2019: Steve Smith, Jofra Archer and a reminder how sometimes cricket really can be life and death

There isn’t just a bespoke rhythm to Test cricket, there’s a specific sound to it too. If you are tuned in to the frequency, you will know the low level, simmering hubbub to which I’m referring. It’s the sound of a lot of lives colliding at the same time, sometimes because of, but, more often despite, a game of cricket. It’s sprawling. It creeps outside of the grounds, into people’s lives, through radio and television.

You are free to do with it what you will. A lot nap to it in the background. Others equate it to water torture.

However one absorbs it though, it’s unmistakeable. Wherever there is that sound, there is cricket. At Lords, it is one totally of it’s own. The component parts of it are ever so slightly deeper in timbre than the usual, a wash of layer upon layer of conversation, decorated usually with a male cackle.

The chatter is so permanent it’s as if it has been piped in through the walls, haunting the grounds when the last person has left and still audible when the last light is turned out. That noise, diversifying in subtle yet tell-tale margins, housed almost every type of Test cricket calling card known to mankind during this dizzying, thrilling and strangely paradoxical five days in St. Johns Wood.

On Ruth Strauss Foundation day, giving the cricket itself an air of genuine insignificance for a moment, the noise, in the aftermath of wash outs and imminence of more, was one loaded, in truth, with not much more than Ashes ennui; a collective cricketing fatigue. Presented with a Test unlikely to find any kind of conclusion, a collection of voices, each absorbed in their own story, could be over heard pointing to the seats they were sat in during the World Cup final, reminiscing like they might have left a part of themselves there then too, but couldn’t specify anymore whether it was ten years or a month ago.

This is the issue when the cricket drifts at Lords. It’s really hard to focus on the game in front of you itself. This is a place of preserved extravagances, like a museum that has by some quirk of tradition facilitated couples to drink rose straight from bottles, one each, at 1pm. People genuinely pop champagne corks onto the outfield here, which have to be constantly retrieved by Australian fielders. The Nursery ground, a space resourcefully used for picnics and socialising during match days, was absolutely full beyond capacity for much of the opening exchanges.

With the game being shown on a large screen with a slight delay, congregations milled about with it in the periphery, only turning to look using cues from the sound in the ground, alerting them that something might be worth watching. You begin to know the noises. Australian wicket. Misfield. Four. Six. Each has it’s own specific noise and it triggers an odd game of audio intuition. Everyone turns to the screen to see the boundary or wicket they know is coming but haven’t seen or have any proof of yet.

With the game poised in tantalising, if placid, balance on Saturday at 2.30pm, something shifted. Steve Smith, as usual, very well set, was confronted by the only simultaneous debutant and all-time great in English history, Jofra Archer. The noise inside Lords swelled in a striking shift in concentration. Those banked out in apathetic anticipation of said inevitable draw were transported inside, almost out of morbid fascination. Word had got around the playground that there was a fight happening and you had to see it. Within minutes, the Nursery ground was empty. If you’re at Lords, that’s when you know what is happening out in the middle is really, really worth watching.

The session, immediately folkloric in it’s cricketing lineage, produced some of the most high adrenaline, terrifying sport you will ever see. A unified focus suddenly gripped the ground, all present in the moment, all baying for blood. Maybe they could be momentarily forgiven. England haven’t possessed a genuine quick like Archer capable of fear inducing trauma since a comparatively erratic Devon Malcolm over twenty years ago.

Though being on the receiving end of many over the years, it’s easy to forget how much having your own genuine fast bowler changes, well, everything. They once came in polyester shirts with holes cut out of their big toes, chains rattling, with wild hair as they ran in. Nowadays they tend to come with ever-so-slightly visible support sports bras, aerodynamic haircuts and sensitive dispositions.

Archer though has his very own brand of eerily laconic approach to the crease, disturbingly creating unmanageable pace on top of a backdrop of genuine skill and consistency. Smith was hit on the arm then, in a sickening twisting of the narrative knife, misjudged another short ball and was struck flush on the neck, contorted helplessly in half-turn.

The blow, it won’t have been lost on anyone on impact, looked to land in exactly the same place that had fatally accounted for his team-mate Phil Hughes almost five years ago. Whilst commentary froze as if any voice onto the moment might add complicity, the country outside were presented an aerial view of him splayed, arms wide open, face up, motionless.

This was the man who was being wished out by any means necessary. This was the man who had been roundly booed. This was the man who has more time than anyone else in living memory to react to a cricket ball, eventually being escorted off the field.

In Archer’s next spell of serious note, another visceral barrage of terrifying proportions that fell just shy of helping England to a improbable victory, he hit Smith’s ultimately brave concussion substitute, Marnus Labuschagne, flush on the helmet second ball.

Lords cowered, suddenly still. It was poignant that in a week where we had cause to reflect that cricket isn’t in fact life and death, to also remember that, sometimes, underneath all the noise, it is.