The travails of Xavier Doherty

The cap did not fit. Away went the drinks cart and off came Xavier Doherty’s baggy green headgear. That’s when you saw it: an angry-looking red stripe, slightly curved, imprinted across Doherty’s forehead and just above the eye-line.

An hour’s play was up. It was time – the worst of times – for Doherty to have a bowl. England were three down and as good as a thousand in front. Batsman Kevin Pietersen had taken to tiptoeing low across his crease then leaping bolt upright, pummelling ball after ball into the midwicket fence. This was off a fast bowler, Peter Siddle, who had a trio of men guarding that fence. What chance the spinner Doherty – especially on this, his last chance?

With bucking arms and his tongue peeping out he bustled in. Three dot balls: a long hop and two fuller ones. Keeper Brad Haddin let out an encouraging growl. “Good start, Doh.”

Or perhaps Haddin was murmuring something more prescient; a whiff of Homer Simpson, even.

“Good start.”

Pause.

“D’oh!”

For the next three balls were not good at all. Two of them – a wristy Pietersen sweep; a trademark Paul Collingwood shovel to leg – went for four.

Doherty’s second over started off flatter through the air and finished up flatter still. A pair of twos he gave up. A week before, on the Saturday of the Gabba Test, Richie Benaud had detected something peculiar about Doherty’s eyes at the point of delivery. Instead of peering down at the spot where he wanted the ball to land, Doherty was staring at the ball itself and the sky beyond. Shane Warne, sitting next to Richie, seemed gobsmacked by the wisdom of this 80-year-old dinosaur munching on the grassy tufts of cricketing know-how.

Neither Richie nor Warne revisited the subject in Adelaide. Presumably it felt too cruel. What good could it possibly do the boy now? Soon the boy was staring up at the sky again. Pietersen, with a flutter of baby steps down the pitch, had sent the ball zooming high, straight and onto the plastic beige seats behind long-off.

The second ball of that third over spun. So did the first two balls of Doherty’s fourth over. One of them kicked up a puff of dust. All of them were pitched into a small hole. The hole was the thing that made them spin. The hole, alas, was located wide of off stump – far too wide to bother the batsmen. Doherty’s trajectory, all the while, was nothing other than maddeningly flat.

He’d bowled flat the day before, as well. It hadn’t gone unnoticed. The most illustrious of the world’s crickerati invariably gather in the Adelaide Oval press box when an Ashes Test is on. Probably Doherty had spotted the headline on a Peter Roebuck column: “Doherty Simply Not Up To Scratch”. Probably he hadn’t the time to detour down Fleet Street and read what Mike Selvey (“little more than a clubbie who has found himself at the wrong match”) or Scyld Berry (“not up to red-ball Test cricket, just white-ball one-day containment”) wrote about him.

Probably, though, he could guess.

Later in the day, before the rain, Doherty would be granted four token overs. But this morning’s spell, that was the one on which everything hung: if Australia were to stay within cooee of England, if Doherty was to remain a Test cricketer ... His first four overs had gone for 22. If there was to be a sixth over, his fifth one had better be good.

It was, as things panned out, a nothing-much sort of an over. It was also – let there be no mistake – flat. The second and fifth balls hit the fence: another Collingwood shovel-drive, then a dainty clip off the pads. By the sixth ball Doherty would have felt his captain’s chocolate eyes fixed on him. A stray thought might have dropped down from the sky: maybe I’ll give this one a bit of loop?

If it did, he pushed the thought away. Doherty bowled, Collingwood blocked and Mike Hussey, in big sunglasses, came hurtling across from gully and slapped the bowler on the arse. Doherty lingered a while, glancing about from side to side, at the plastic seats, perhaps, the grassy mounds, so timeless and graceful, and then he pulled his too-tight green cap back on.