In just about every field of life, when you hear the word “champion” delivered with a certain tone, you know you’re in for a good time. Then you hear it on the field at the Gabba.

“Champion” can mean a few things. If Jofra Archer was, hypothetically, part of an England team to win the 2025 Ashes series, he might be a champion because he is a victor. If he was standing up for or defending a cause, he’d be a champion in the advocate sense.

Unfortunately for the fast bowler, Steve Smith meant neither of these things in the dying minutes of the day-night Test. Not because Archer’s England team is highly unlikely to win the 2025 Ashes series from 2-0 down (well, maybe a bit because of that), but because the delivery from Australia’s interim captain was coloured by a sarcasm reserved for only one possible definition of champion: as a code word for douchebag.

If you knew about the history between this pair, you might have picked it just by reading the words alone and not hearing them. Because although Smith might have played dumb after the game (“What history?”), he knows that everybody else knows that

© The Sydney Morning Herald