’ve seen plenty of great fast 0000bowlers fling ‘em down 0000against England. The first I remember were an aging West Indian pair by the name of Curtly and Courtney in 2000. Then there was the artistry of the metronome Glenn McGrath and the sheer pace of the tearaway Brett Lee a year later. They were the ones who captured the imagination. Since, I’d seen the likes of Zaheer Khan and Shaun Pollock beguile and Dale Steyn and Shoaib Akhtar blow my beloved England away.
We’ve had some pretty handy quicks ourselves. Steve Harmison and Freddie Flintoff’s bromance provided some mighty memorable moments, all loose limbs and steepling bounce, while Jimmy Anderson, over the course of a decade, and Simon Jones, he of the creaking body that left us longing for more, mastered that most mysterious of arts, reverse swing.
I’ll never, ever forget what I saw this summer, though. I’ve never seen a man bowl the way Mitchell Johnson did. And, despite the fact that it brought about the most humiliating, most heinous result cricket can offer, an Ashes whitewash, I bloody loved it.
On the surface of it, Johnson’s bowling took 37 English wickets at an average a shade under 14, which is remarkable in itself. That doesn’t tell half the story, though.
Over the years, David Warner has said some stupid stuff, and rightly been ridiculed for it. At the end of the third day in Brisbane he had a wholly undignified poke at Jonathan Trott, who, it emerged two days later, was in a world of trouble off the field that dwarfed his more obvious travails on it.
In that same press conference, though, Warner told the world that the English team, after their first Mitch-induced mauling had precipitated the summer’s first battering with the bat, had “scared eyes”. Warner is no wordsmith and “scared eyes” is not a phrase that’s likely to catch on in sporting body-part parlance, in the way that say, “dancing feet” or “snakelike hips” have, but somewhere in there, the feisty southpaw had a point.
England were scared. This was the kind of fear that can only be produced by a really, really rapid bowler. When Sir Viv batted, twenty fielders, let alone ten, weren’t enough to hem him in. When Warnie rolled his arm over, no bat seemed big enough and no brain sharp enough to keep him out. These guys scared the bejeepers out of many a cricket team but this summer England’s batsmen had to fend the ball, which was regularly traveling at 150 clicks per hour, off their faces, their hips and their feet. They weren’t just protecting their wickets, they were protecting their bodies, too. I’ve little doubt that the sight of Johnson breaking Stuart Broad’s toe in Perth and hitting Gary Ballance’s helmet in Sydney, an incident that would have spelled disaster in a bygone age, will feature highly in the long list of highlights for Australians this summer.
While England were scared, Johnson’s team mates were, naturally, buoyed. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just his bowling happening at 100 miles an hour, but Warner and Brad Haddin’s batting and the whole team’s fielding, too. In the field, they were all chatter, all confidence, George Bailey, who barely scored a relevant run, was under the helmet at bat-pad with all the talk in the world. Threats were issued, of cricketing and of physical violence. They knew they had the weapon to carry them out. Only proper fast bowling provides that safety blanket that Mitchell’s team-mates were wrapped up in.
Coming into the summer series, I thought I knew where I stood with Mitchell. Despite possessing rare pace, speed that I knew no English bowler could match, I was comfortable enough with his inclusion. After all, in the past he literally did bowl to the left, and to the right. I expected him to win at least one match for Australia, as he’d done in his two previous Ashes series, at Headingley in ’09 and at Perth in ’10, but I also thought that trademark waywardness would lose them one, too. He’d always seemed so fallible, so close to a meltdown and with a significant sensitive side that betrayed the snarl his craft required of him. He’d seemed so close to the complete package, yet so far from it, too.
In the end, his wicket tally across five Tests read 9, 8, 6, 8, 6. That’s five match-changing contributions.
Suddenly, this guy who’d seemed to stumble his way to a couple of hundred test wickets through a few brilliant performances amid plenty of crap was held up as a world-beater who could stand next to the hairy-chested, moustachioed, maverick myth of Lillee, Thomson and the rest. It felt like he’d been sent back from the age of real fast-bowling, when quicks were rockstars and the crowd screamed like groupies. This was no novelty throwback, though. This was a throwback who was now in Australia’s top ten wicket takers ever, and with an average that barely sits above 28 to boot. All of a sudden, he belonged in the pantheon of Australia’s great fast bowlers. Across this series, Mitchell Johnson was the complete package.
There are so many magical moments. Several thousand words have already been written about Mitch in the first innings at Adelaide. There was the sight of Alastair Cook’s off stump leaning back on the second evening and of Broad’s leg and Anderson’s middle peg being upended to create two separate hat-trick balls within an hour of each other on the third afternoon. In 2014, this stuff is unheard of. In an age of bowling machines that sling it down at light-speed, players aren’t often beaten for pace by full balls.
We have to go right back to Trott to find the moment that Mitch changed though. Some say it happened half a world away in the stale September
How Good is He?
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