Every Christmas at my mum’s place, her two sons fight over who gets the second bedroom.
And every year she makes the same joke: we’ll both be out on our ear when her third son, Steve Smith, is finally able to visit for the festive season.
We are “cricket people”. My parents met at a second-grade game in Newcastle. Mum was the scorer for her older brother’s side. Dad had a mop haircut and one scoring shot, a hoick over deep square leg. Their sons had no chance: cricket tragics to a fault.
Sports fans – the rain, hail or 2am kick-off variety – attach themselves to players for all sorts of reasons. As a girl, Mum loved the rogue Doug Walters. Dad still talks about how fast and scary Jeff Thompson was. My brother can recite Steve Waugh’s career statistics.
When I was about 15, Adam Gilchrist became my hero. I saw him play for New South Wales long before he made the international scene and felt it gave me a claim to being a real fan, like someone who saw Bruce Springsteen before 1975.
Favourite players come and go. Some get replaced. Others can never be.
About the time Gilchrist retired, my brother started talking about this young kid who had made his debut for NSW, and who would end up breaking all sorts of scoring records. Just imagine how many runs he’d make by the time he retired. He’d be the Best Since Bradman.
Phillip Hughes was from my the same part of the world as my wife. We all rode his career highs and lows. Mum was on her computer at home, streaming the Sheffield Shield, when Phil was hit. I cried in the middle of a newsroom.
We grieve more profoundly for people who have been part of our lives. Phil was part of my family. He died living my own dream. Not just living it, but fighting tooth and nail for it. The only way he ever responded to setbacks, to being dropped three times, was by going back to the crease and scoring runs.
Smith took Hughes’s mantle in a lot of ways. As the talented young bloke from NSW, the Best Since Bradman, on track to break every record in the book. And the object of Mum’s devotion, her “third son”. “My Smithy.”
Steve Smith owes my mum an apology. Stuff the ICC and Cricket Australia and the South Africans and his team-mates. It’s the fans he has so badly let down, everyone who spent hundreds fronting up to the Ashes this year just to see him bat, in the same way they once came to watch Bradman.
I’ve spoken to Mum several times about it this week. She was getting text messages from gloating friends and colleagues, as if she harboured some maternal responsibility. And she was ashamed in the same way she would have been if one of her actual sons had been caught cheating. It’s not the way she brought us up to play or respect the game.
Sports fans can be one-eyed. Football supporters notoriously loathe diving but can find shades of grey when one of their own heroes stumbles at a phantom touch. On Sunday morning our first instinct was to search for a grey area in Smith’s actions. Anything that might somehow deflect some of the criticism or salvage his reputation.
But it seems clear there were no mitigating circumstances and we’re left with a hollow feeling.
