A quarter to midday, after two days and eight hours of play, the crucial stretch of the second Test was finally under way. Steve Smith was in again.
This series is going to ebb and flow with Smith’s form. If he carries on batting like he did in that first Test at Edgbaston, then the tide is only going one way.
Jofra Archer is England’s first, best, freshest hope of fixing him and he was ready and waiting at the end of his run, weight all on his right foot. He tossed the ball from one hand to the other and smiled to himself as Smith scratched and fiddled and worried and twiddled and took his guard. Archer has all the self-confidence of a young man who has not yet met a batsmen he could not beat for pace.
Archer had just taken the first of his many Test wickets, Cameron Bancroft, beaten with a delivery that nipped back in past his dangling bat and hit him high on the back pad. It had been coming, although it had taken longer than he would have liked. He was five overs into a spell, and five balls into an over, which he closed out by firing a short and straight welcome delivery just wide of Smith’s off stump.
It came through at 93.5mph. Smith dragged his bat back down away from it like he had been scalded by the heat of it as it flew through.
The same people who had booed Smith cooed in admiration of Archer. His second delivery was shorter and straighter, angled in towards Smith’s hip. He flicked it down to fine leg for a single.
That left Travis Head on strike. He looked vulnerable. Archer whipped through two deliveries that bit on the pitch and broke off the seam, past his outside edge. Then followed up with a wild bouncer that shot through so high that Jonny Bairstow had to leap off his feet to fetch it down again.
Archer was enjoying himself and shot Head a happy grin. It was not reciprocated. Archer had bowled six overs in a row, though, and you could feel Joe Root wrestling with whether or not to keep him on for another one. There was a foreshadowing here of a problem Archer is going to face throughout his career. England will always want more from him in Test, one-day and Twenty20 cricket. Root could not resist the temptation, not while he had two new batsmen in. They looked jittery, too. Smith always starts like a kid who has eaten too many sweets and twice changed his mind after starting off on quick singles.
Which meant Head was stuck up Archer’s end. He was bowling fuller now, homing in on the left-hander’s off stump. Head groped blindly at the ball, in a fuddle about whether to play forward or back.
Chris Woakes, meanwhile, was hanging the ball out beyond Smith’s reach. England have obviously decided that they made the mistake of playing to his strengths by bowling too straight at him at Edgbaston. Here, there were two deliveries in the first 30 he faced that would have hit the stumps. The flip side was that a lot of them were so wide that Smith was able to leave 15 of the rest of them well alone.
It gave Smith a chance to run through his entire repertoire of eccentric leaves, presenting a cricketer’s tribute to the great choreographers of modern dance. There was a Bob Fosse flick and a Martha Graham arabesque and a Twyla Tharp pirouette.
Woakes, as if in irritation at all these ridiculous antics, decided to try to knock his head off by banging one in back of a length. Smith stood up and swatted it disdainfully away through square‑leg for four, a swift, crisp and ominous assertion of authority that suggested the precarious moment had passed and England had missed their chance.
The bouncer would have been better coming from Archer but he was finally pulled out of the attack after seven overs in a row, three maidens, eight runs and the one wicket.
England would have loved to have gone out for one last blast later in the day but did not get the chance. There was a break in the rain around five o’clock but it did not last long enough for the groundsmen to take the covers off. Instead, they will start it all over again in the morning, round two in a contest that is likely to define the rest of the series.