TUESDAY 20 AUGUST 2019

Smith, Archer and how cricket

can be life and death

Jofra Archer’s bouncer hits Steve Smith on the neck (Getty)

FELIX WHITE

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

Sport /Cricket