After a decade at the top and everything that has happened, Steve Smith’s batting still manages to fascinate.
His ‘new’ batting technique was under forensic examination on the first day of the Frank Worrell Trophy series on Wednesday.
The upheaval in Smith’s footwork has been so widely analysed and picked apart that you would think Australian cricket obsessives have themselves been up all night in front of the mirror and can’t get by without picking at their shirts, patting themselves on the helmet and going the full fidget, as if over-thinking were a virus.
When Smith bats with Marnus Labuschagne, as he did for several hours in Perth, there is an added dimension. That 2019 day at Lord’s when Smith was sconed by Jofra Archer still echoes. Labuschagne, famously, revived his career as Smith’s concussion replacement.
In the three years since that Ashes tour, Labuschagne has overshadowed Smith both in batting and as a batting idiot savant. Up to this week, Smith had scored 1200 Test runs at an average of 40 with three centuries post-England. As if witnessing his own obsolescence, like a petrol model still on the road when the EV zips past it, he has seen Labuschagne score 2085 runs at 65 with eight centuries.
It’s a team game, but cricket is cricket and it probably doesn’t sit all that well with Smith to be the support act.
Steve Smith batting in Perth.Credit:Getty
Was there some supernatural transference of powers, some stranger thing, in England in 2019? Maybe this is over-dramatising it (which would also be a very Smith thing to do). His career Test average is still 60.
His decline hasn’t been all that apocalyptic, and the technical revamp is not like he’s suddenly playing with two left feet. Instead of deploying idiosyncratic footwork to mess with a bowler’s head, his line and his length, Smith is standing still at the crease and moving his feet late.
He is bringing the bat down a straighter line and accessing different parts of the field. ‘New’ technique? It’s more like Classic Coca-Cola, where the most radical innovation imaginable was to go back to the basic formula.
Smith had appeared more comfortable in the recent 50-over matches with England, and in the Test arena in Perth he looked happier still.
He had everything in his favour: a batting strip made to order, a sound platform set up by Labuschagne and Usman Khawaja (who obligingly got out before tea), and a bowling attack that was as honest as a school librarian and slightly less dangerous.
The West Indies tried some of the tricks other teams had used to block Smith’s exits in the past two years, but this time he was ahead of them. Having spent two years out-thinking himself, he is now back to out-thinking opponents.
Smith’s technical adjustment more likely reflects a mental change than being a solution in itself. Seen through a long lens, Smith’s career has been some story. He was building a name as Australia’s best since Bradman before his year of disgrace in 2018. He came back in England with performances, under crushing pressure, that really were Bradman-like.
The ensuing emotional let-down was long and slow, mirrored by Labuschagne’s rise. The internal journey bottomed out with Smith watching last month’s T20 World Cup from the bunker.
This no doubt caused humiliation and self-examination that was not visible from the outside. The crisis was inner, and the resolution had to be interior as well. By changing something as fundamental as his footwork, Smith looks like he has given his mind a productive focus.
Both of these master craftsmen were at their best in Perth. The West Indies bowlers pitched the ball a little short, but this is always so in Perth, where the bounce leaves no margin for error between too short and too full. When the West Indians bowled full enough to hit the stumps, Labuschagne and Smith punched them down the ground.
With Labuschagne, this has become customary. Smith, meanwhile, has rediscovered all the old places where bowlers cannot put the ball.
Whether this is a turning of the corner, and Smith is about to resume the scale of achievement of his earlier career, lies ahead of us. This Test match is the beginning of a very long road that winds through Australia, India, and back to England.
If this is a new start, Smith has left himself plenty of time to travel back to his old ways.
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