Australia's Brett Lee began this Ashes series as a possible sub, but will end it a star and deservedly so.
Brett Lee is a remarkable bowler. He's very fast, maybe only a yard behind Shoaib Akhtar, and surely the owner of the most bruised torso in international cricket.
Few tailenders (if that is what he is) have taken more blows to the ribs, fingers, elbows, etc than Lee has this summer. Not once has he flinched. No fast bowler has hit Steve Harmison further. And no Australian has smiled as much into the teeth of an oncoming gale.
You get the impression Lee would come up grinning if you poured a bucket of three-year-old lard over his blond head. He is irrepressible.
Yet he started the series a marginal proposition. He'd been out of the Test team for nearly two years and was, it seemed, here on sufferance. Everyone, rightly, reckoned Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie would lead the attack, backed up by Michael Kasprowicz and augmented, spectacularly, by the wrist spin of Shane Warne. If Lee were to make an impact, it would be as a supersub, just ahead of Shaun Tait.
As it turned out, he's carrying the rest of them. McGrath, still brilliant, has been sidelined with injury. Gillespie, sadly, has faded, despite the best efforts of the Australia cricketing machine to rehabilitate him. Kasprowicz hasn't really done it. Warne has. And, there in technicolor, Lee has steamed in from the other end.
He's taken 19 wickets at 33.68. Incisive and not too shoddy. Weirdly, he has contributed as much with the bat as the ball in Australia's stuttering Ashes campaign. He will go home remembered for a magnificent rearguard action at Edgbaston and two wonderful sixes at Trent Bridge, both of them leaving the ground.
He's scored 152 runs at 30.40, better than some of his established batting team-mates. They didn't pick him for his batting, but they're glad he's slammed away like he has. He almost saved them in Birmingham and just about did at Old Trafford.
No Australian has established such a sound rapport with the Barmy Army. No Australian deserves to have done so. Lee found a place in their hearts on the last England tour to Australia when, no-balling like a millionaire, he was the subject of their peculiar brand of sarcasm.
'No ball!' they shouted in Melbourne, a day after it was alleged he might be a chucker. On he smiled. Wicketless.
It was too much for Justin Langer. Peeved that the English cricket writers had failed to acknowledge fully his wonderful 250, he went on the front foot, as The Guys say. Langer, who has a black belt in macrami or something or other, singled out a tabloid enemy he had jousted with previously and said he reckoned the Barmy Army were fat and ignorant and not nice to his mate Brett. Lee could care less.
The following day, fired up by Langer's daftness, the Barmy Army camped on the fence near the Australia dressing room and those who had enough skin acreage plastered their bellies with 'Fat Bastards'. To his credit, Langer went over to them at the close of play. Not such a bad bloke after all.
But to Lee, such rapport comes naturally. He doesn't need to be coaxed or provoked into mingling. Lee is one of nature's garrulous souls and the fans love him.
He has had his hard times. His action, beautiful but flawed, put his body under the most extreme pressure a few years ago as he swivelled like a wind-up toy to get maximum speed. If he'd carried on like that, he would have ended up in the fast bowlers' knackers yard long before this tour.
He was smart enough to adapt and keep his pace. He's now also a smarter bowler than he was when tearing in like a man running out of a burning house. He's not quite mastered reverse swing, or any swing for that matter, but he cuts it at 90 miles an hour, in from the off mostly. It did for Andrew Flintoff at Nottingham when England closed nervously on their winning score and, if any Australia bowler was going to win it, Lee was that man. He didn't and they didn't. But he gave it a hell of a try.
WHAT MARKS LEE out from the herd besides his blinding pace is his almost supernatural sunniness. He probably smiles in his sleep. His mien is at 180-degree odds with some of his taciturn pals, notably his captain Ricky Ponting whose churlishness in the last Test has, in my opinion, been passed over by the team management with cavalier disregard for the facts.
If anyone in the Australia team had a right to be annoyed it is the fast bowler with the bruised rib cage. Yet Lee has not once complained. He is a fair bat with a limited, but potent arsenal of shots and not afraid to play them - that, combined to return the blows foisted on him by Flintoff, Simon Jones and Harmison, makes him a dangerous opponent. You don't put a stick into a bull if he's capable of chasing you down the street.
Lee was accused at Lord's of bowling a couple of deliberate beamers - a charge also laid against him on Australia's tour of New Zealand. It's hard to believe he did it deliberately. He said he slipped. Let's leave it there. A bowler capable of hurling a cricket ball at nearly a hundred miles an hour is not someone to start an argument with, even from the press box.
A COUPLE OF years ago, Lee aspired to be the fastest bowler in the history of the game. He has come close.
'The secret of bowling fast? It's all about rhythm. And angles,' he said when I asked him the question on the eve of Australia's series against India three years ago. 'And staying fit and getting your body to click. There are certain things that will come naturally - your general coordination, for instance, and snapping your wrist at the point of delivery - and there are other things you can learn about and change. But, deep down, I think bowling fast is something you have to want to do with a passion because it's very hard work.'
To his credit, he has put craft before raw speed. He has grown up. He looks at Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen 22 yards away and he doesn't see potential mincemeat; he sees a batsman blocking the stumps. Lee's strengths are simple: speed and straightness. If he's on, he keeps it full and fast. If he's not, it's full, fast and headed to the boundary. This Ashes series, he's been more often on the right side of the ledger.
But what Lee will be remembered for, unless he produces a match-winning performance at The Oval, is hunched over his bat and receiving the commiserations of Flintoff after just failing to win the match for his country at Edgbaston. He's one tough customer, the smiling blond.
- KEVIN MITCHELL