There are few things in sport as exciting as pure speed. Remember the stodgy start to the Rio Olympics? The empty seats, the greasy drizzle, the sense of an entire Games drifting into the arena of the unwell? Usain Bolt fixed that, instantly and without argument, by turning up, goofing about waving at people, and then running as fast as humans ever have for a combined total of one minute and 40 seconds, erasing everything else outside that brilliant, luminous moment.
In his American football novel End Zone, Don DeLillo spends a lot of time marvelling at the speed of his fictional running back Taft Robinson. “Speed is the last excitement left, the one thing we haven’t used up,” DeLillo writes, and you kind of get what he means. For all the cladding, the fine points of craft and tactics, there will always be some part of us tapping our foot, a little glazed, nodding politely as the coffee is passed round, just craving a little bump of the pure stuff.
Speed: it’s a kick. At which point, enter Pat Cummins, still the most interesting young fast bowler in the world, and now back playing cricket again for Australia after endless strains and twangs. This week Cummins took four wickets against New Zealand in Canberra, the best of them a zingy lifter to Martin Guptill that took a lovely crunchy edge – Cummins gets great edges – and gave another thrilling, teasing suggestion of the pure speed wrapped up in that corkscrew action.
Cummins is still just 23. Strange to think he made his Test debut for Australia almost exactly five years ago. Back then he was basically a lovely idea, a lithe and coltish teenager able to bowl over 90mph while floating in, springing up like a bouncy cartoon tiger and slingshotting through the crease in a blur of fast-twitch limbs.
The thing about Cummins was his clarity. From the outside he had come from nowhere, making his T20, first-class, ODI and Test debuts within the space of 10 perfect months. Five games into his professional career he was the leading wicket-taker in the Big Bash. That November he made a dreamy Test debut against South Africa at the Wanderers, taking six for 73, the youngest Australian to take an international five-for. He even hit the winning runs.
Australia swooned at a cloudless, very Australian kind of talent. The future was wide open.
Cummins has not played a Test match since. Last year he was out for 14 months with a back strain. A series of doomed, maddeningly bitty cameos have brought a combined 69 international wickets at 21 apiece. He still bounds and springs, hair lopping, like some cinematic ideal of limpid Australian athletic vitality. He still bowls with real pace at a wildly attacking length. He is also still basically an idea.
Something is happening, though. I don’t want to jinx it. But Australia’s lost boys, the ghost attack that cricket fans have muttered about vaguely for the last few years, is quietly assembling around him. Something seems to have stirred in late 2011. James Pattinson, also prodigious, rapid and fragile, made his Test debut two weeks after Cummins. Mitchell Starc, currently the fastest bowler in the world, made his a week later. Josh Hazlewood, steadier but hugely effective, had played his first game for Australia 18 months before.
All four are in their shared sporting prime. Between them they have exactly 300 Test wickets at 26 since that explosive dawn in 2011. And yet Starc, Pattinson and Cummins, three genuinely scorching mid-20s fast bowlers, have played one game together for Australia. Hazlewood, Starc, Pattinson and Cummins – in and out, crocked, dropped – have still never played together in any format. Not once.
There is hope, though. This week Cummins, Starc and Hazlewood got on the field together for just the third and fourth occasion in five years of shared timeline. Pattinson could be back for the Big Bash. The Ashes are a year away. That ghost attack is beginning to hover once again at the edge of things, flickering in and out like Victorian garden sprites. It is a seductive idea for many reasons. Despite the concertina-effect of looking back, a long-term fast bowling unit is a pretty rare thing.
Cummins, Pattinson and Starc are all properly quick, of an age and, on the face of it, a fine tessellation of skills and angles. This really does not happen much. Plus, of course, they are Australian and in many ways Australian speed is the best speed. If only because, like baseball in America, Australian cricket is an aspect of how that country likes to see itself, part of some half-imagined shared pastoral soul, something pure and sun-bleached and essentially youthful.
Cricket matters in Australia, just as the idea of an Australian fast bowler has a genuine vitality, an energy that seems to come out of the soil and the sun. Just walking into the Waca in Perth, the mottled, streaky patterns of the desert grass under those great alien concrete lights, is a thrill in itself. Seeing England’s batsmen shaken by the sight of Mitchell Johnson gliding in, moustache writhing, arm winding back behind him like a man about to throw the javelin, you admired them more for being able to stand there at all.
Like all kinds of myth-making, I am aware there is something obviously deluded and soppy about this. The idea of a long-term Test pace attack is old-fashioned in itself. Cummins and Pattinson will, with any luck, get a good run at things now, but this is likely to be in white-ball cricket, short spells that preserve that brittle fast bowler’s frame.
This is just what sport does, keeping us coming back in search of things that probably never existed in the first place. Just as watching Cummins and Starc this week it was hard not to be caught up again by that same quality, the dream of pure, frictionless speed.