Fast and ferocious, Mitchell Johnson brought excitement to cricket the old-fashioned way

Mitchell Johnson’s bowling was perhaps one-dimensional, but the Australian paceman’s refusal to sacrifice his pace made the game so much more entertaining to watch, writes Osman Samiuddin.

Mitchell Johnson, centre, finished his Test career as Australia's fourth-most successful bowler of all time. David Gray / Reuters

Now that he is gone, did we ever really work out what Mitchell Johnson was? Or, at least, to any bare minimum degree of majority opinion? Was he a reminder of the days when the game was less affected, somehow rawer and its fast bowlers quicker, its batsmen less protected?

Or was he the cautionary tale of what happened when truly fast, frightening bowling butted headfirst into the modern cricketing age and was neutered by its sensibility, like some watered down remake of a searing classic film?

Was he really, as Dennis Lillee said of him, a “once in a generation bowler”? And if so, which generation? Was he the last of that great generation of Australian cricket? Or was he the first of this current faltering generation, not so blessed? Was he an Australian great? Or was he an Australian nearly great?

Was he a monster, as he was at home sometimes? Or was he fodder, as he was so often in the subcontinent?

Right now, we are still dizzied by the trails of smoke from those four and a half months across the winter of 2013 and spring of 2014. That smell of fear lingers, an image too, of the ball rising undeterred, at the ribcage or armpit if you are lucky, but the face and head otherwise. Duck? Fend? Sway? Hook? Run? Live? Die?

Those two series, the Ashes first and then South Africa, brought out from Johnson some of the most thrillingly physical bursts of fast bowling in years. This was exactly the kind of stuff that we had read about – the West Indians, the bouncer wars of the 70s, Frank Tyson, Harold Larwood and ‘Bodyline’. It was the kind of bowling that, years from now, batsmen would write books and tell tales about: “I was pinged by Mitchell Johnson and I lived”.

It was one-dimensional sure, but so vivid, so technicolour that it did not matter. And then, as happened so often with him, it was gone. The smoke vanished and we remembered.

Was it the lack of atmosphere around him, or the lack of contest in front of him? Maybe it was the loss of Ryan Harris, an essential foil at the other end. Quite likely it was just the way his career always rolled: unmissable some days, unwatchable others.

And who knows how much the death of Phillip Hughes took out of him? It cannot have been easy for him to summon the fierceness and uncaring to bowl a bouncer after that tragedy, especially as, early in his career some wondered whether he was too nice to bowl them in the first place.

Because even when he was snarling his way through that Ashes, with ball in hand it never looked like him, not in the way that meanness and nastiness came to Lillee, or the West Indian Sylvester Clarke. Johnson could be nasty in what he did with the ball, but he never looked like a man for a confrontation, a rose inside the stone.

Instead, insecurity and some doubt, that seemed a pretty real mien for him, as if he was never fully convinced either of what he was, or of what his gifts meant. Those days were impossible to understand.

How could he be as lost as he looked in the 2010/11 Ashes, or even in 2009? How could he be reduced to shortening his run-up mid-Test in South Africa towards the end of 2011?

It was as if even he believed that he did not have much going for him other than pace. Once in Perth, mysteriously, he started curving the ball back in and then it is difficult to remember another occasion when he did.

That pace though, that was something right? Right through his 73 Tests, there barely seemed a spell when that flagged too much. Has anybody sustained it for so long at such high levels, not only on the great days when everything was working, but on the bad ones when nothing was? In the final counting, that will count for something.

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