Johnson acting like a clown

OPINION: THERE HAS long been a theory that in order to become a truly successful cricket fast bowler, it is first necessary to disengage the part of the brain responsible for reason and logic.

All the greats had madness in them. Fred "The Demon" Spofforth. Michael "Whispering Death" Holding. You think Fred Trueman was called "Fiery" because of his accommodating nature?

Even the coolest of heads can be melted in the white-hot furnace of international expectation, and you would have found no greater evidence than in last week's one day international in Napier.

Australian cricketers always arrive here with a sense of entitlement. That's just who they are and, to be fair, mostly this is because their historical record empowers them to do so.

Our overall record against Australia speaks of a team which has over-achieved only in under-performance.

Australia's expectation of success can only have been more acute towards the tail end of its domestic summer, in which the green and golds never once tasted defeat. Against Pakistan and the West Indies, every test, every one-dayer, all the Twenty20s were just a collection of ticks in the win column for skipper Ricky Ponting and his men.

Their New Zealand tour opener won't have surprised them greatly. They had never before lost to the Black Caps in a Twenty20 international and Wellington seemed an unlikely venue for a revolution.

But Christchurch was something else. Brendon McCullum bludgeoned the Aussies, Tim Southee starved them and a previously perfect record was dissolved in almost 42 overs of complete, perfect, madness.

Ponting made all the right noises, of course. I particularly liked the "you learn a lot more from a defeat than you do from a victory" line. He even looked like he believed it, but when actual push came to genuine shove in Napier, they proved they had learned nothing.

New Zealand isn't the only team in world cricket to believe that if the Australians could be put under the right kind of pressure for the right amount of time, they would be as vulnerable as anyone. And so it was proved.

WHICH BRINGS us to Mitchell Johnson.

Until he arrived here, the greatest competition Johnson had faced all summer had really only been with himself and the gaggle of fast bowlers he'd been fighting, for a place in the Australian attack.

So by the time he discovered, towards the end of the Napier one-dayer, that he was finally knee-deep in a genuine competition, it was already too late.

Scott Styris has been battling demons of his own. That he was even playing in Napier was an accident of fate, so the fact that it was he who provided the furnace for Johnson's meltdown was simply one of those glorious ironies upon which the game perpetually thrives.

I have watched their Napier confrontation several times now. I have slowed it down. I have viewed it from several angles. And honestly, I have yet to reach the end without a laugh.

Let's just acknowledge that if there is a line across which sportsmen probably should never wander, both Styris and Johnson found themselves slightly on the wrong side of it.

Let's also just say that a head-butt, whether intentional or not, whether full-flavoured or not, is way beyond the boundary of acceptable behaviour on a cricket field.

Keeping that all in mind, and recognising that no one was in the right here, just varying degrees of wrong, could you ever imagine that the player delivering this actual head-butt, would be the one NOT wearing the helmet?

What, precisely, did he expect the result to be?

The Black Caps learned many things in Napier last Wednesday night. They found an able deputy, and the proof of resourcefulness in adversity.

They proved their long-held theory that under relentless pressure, even Australians crack.

And they discovered that in the heat of battle, Johnson can be relied upon to provide unexpected comedy.

eric.young@star-times.co.nz

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