Slip has turned into a silly position this week. And because cricket is such a contrary sport, this means it’s become a very serious business indeed. Old salts say there’s no such thing as an easy catch in there, and there have been some hellish difficult ones at Lord’s. Most of them have been taken, too; there have been a cupped handful of brilliant catches in the position. But as the World Test Championship final has gone on, more and more edges have been falling short, and the two teams have started creeping closer, and closer, and closer to make sure they can have a shot at every last chance. It’s as if they’ve been playing Grandma’s Footsteps with the batters.
It’s a game of diminishing returns. At a certain point you’re so close that you’ve no chance at all. By the time South Africa were batting in the fourth innings, Steve Smith at first slip was standing well in front of the wicketkeeper, Alex Carey, and had decided he needed to wear a helmet. He wasn’t the first man to do it – Aiden Markram had been wearing one too during Australia’s second innings – but it still looked unusual. Smith had practised catching in one on the outfield for 15 minutes first thing in the morning, which tells you in itself that the unfamiliarity must have been a bit disorientating.
When the chance came, it came like fat from a hot pan. It was on Smith so quickly that he barely had time to get his hands up in front of it. Mitchell Starc banged the ball in back of a length, and Temba Bavuma tried to drive it down the ground off the back foot; it flew off the edge into Smith, cracked his fingers back, and knocked him flat down on to the ground. He got immediately to his feet, and then doubled over again in pain, and swallowed the vomit that must have come rushing up from his stomach. His little finger was sticking out sideways, and the bone had broken through the skin.
“Pain’s all in the head,” Brian Close said, after one of the innumerable occasions when a catch had ricocheted away off his bonce while he was fielding close in. Smith’s looked real enough. He did well to make it off the field on his own two feet. It was tough enough to watch, God knows what it must have been like to live through.
Australia’s medical team diagnosed it as a compound fracture and sent him over the road to the Wellington hospital for an X-ray. The game of chicken had cost Australia their vice-captain, and while it’s unlikely he would have made too much difference to the way the day played out, they missed his tactical guidance and leadership.
They moved Beau Webster in to replace him at slip, and kept a one-man cordon for much of the rest of the day. I say one-man, but Webster does the work of three.
As well as heights, weights, batting and bowling averages, the Cricketers’ Who’s Who likes to list every player’s ideal slip cordon. I haven’t checked his entry, but it’s not immediately clear that there’s room left for anyone else in Webster’s. Big Beau, the Slug from Snug, doesn’t stand in the slips but he spans them like the Chaotianmen Bridge does the Yangtze. If this was the late 2010s again, he’d be had up for manspreading.
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Webster fields with one foot at first slip, one foot at third, a straddle like he’s just kicked in the saloon doors spent after six hard days in the saddle, and a stare like he’s daring someone to look at him funny. He decided he could do without the extra protection. A Baggy Green was all Big Beau needed. Trouble was that he didn’t get a sniff of a chance for the rest of the day. Maybe he just scared the ball into staying out of his way.
Odd thing was, Marco Jansen had dropped a chance off Starc in similar circumstances on the second evening, when, creeping in at gully, he was caught out by a delivery from Wiaan Mulder that came hot off the bat and clapped him in the chest. Starc had 14 at the time, and as he batted through to 58 not out the next morning it felt like this would be the misfield that defined this final. But as Bavuma rattled on to stumps, building what may well be a Championship-winning partnership with Markram, it became clear that it was the chance which went down off Starc’s bowling, rather than the edge of his bat, which had decided the match.
