Is Steve Smith finished? No, you won’t get an answer on that – not when a lucky bounce, a dropped catch or a fluke deflection will take all the science out of it.
It’s not the most interesting question anyway. The question is how long Smith intends to stay in Test cricket, and it becomes more pressing the longer his dry run continues. There is also the matter of how long such a towering senior player’s performance is allowed to affect their teammates.
It is 13 matches since Smith passed three figures, at Lord’s in 2023. In that time, he averages 29.55. His past seven Test innings (picked selectively, since his unbeaten 91 as an opener against the West Indies in Brisbane) have been 31, 0, 11, 9, 0, 17 and 2. Including that innings in Brisbane, his 2024 tally is 232 runs at 23.20. No amount of slicing and dicing can prettify it.
Smith’s intention becomes the sole factor because the current selection panel has a proven record of not being able to drop Australian Test players. In three years on the panel, George Bailey, Tony Dodemaide and Andrew McDonald have not dropped one single player on a performance basis. The nearest they have come was omitting Marcus Harris at the fag-end of the 2021-22 Ashes series, but that was a reshuffle caused by Travis Head returning following a positive COVID test. Harris was subsequently selected for ongoing Cricket Australia contracts.
You have to go back to 2019, before any of the current selectors were on the panel, when Cameron Bancroft was the last Australian player to be dropped. It’s quite a record. It also shows why the chatter around Marnus Labuschagne’s place after Perth was idle speculation. I just wish these selectors were corporate executives given a list of redundancy numbers to fill.
Smith’s future, like David Warner’s before him, is in his own hands. His record of 9704 runs at 56.09 gives him that grace, and the selectors’ forbearance means it is a grace that will last as long as Smith wants it.
Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:
Few have ever been able to guess what goes on inside Steve Smith’s idiosyncratic mind, and it would be folly to start.
A couple of observations from the outside. First is that his singular technique never looked like it would age well. Moving so far across the crease, front-on, required two outstanding qualities of the eye. One was to be able to hit every single ball on his pads, because otherwise he was lbw. The other was to have the clarity of mind to judge balls that might be coming in from his off side. This required a quickness and instinct that cannot be taught or imitated. They were Smith’s own. But they were always abilities requiring a young, supple mind.
There’s a reason batting isn’t taught that way. Orthodoxy is coached because it survives better. It compensates for other weaknesses. But even masters of orthodoxy such as Greg Chappell, Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting declined after 35. News bulletin (send it to Washington and Moscow, please): ageing is a thing.
Smith’s motivations are opaque. It wasn’t a good sign when he selected himself as an opener this year because, in his words, he wanted a new challenge. It didn’t start well and it ended with 51 runs in four innings in New Zealand. Then came the reversion to No.4. The whole escapade was a minor humiliation for one of the greats of the game that wouldn’t have been allowed if the selectors had any authority.
Steve Smith hasn’t scored a Test century in 2024.Credit: AP
On the field, Smith doesn’t give away clues, and only his closest circle would have much of an idea how he is thinking and feeling. You would expect he is aiming at the 296 runs he still needs to pass the magic 10,000, or a last Ashes campaign next year, but these are only guesses.
Making the battle harder still is that the Border-Gavaskar series is a bowlers’ one. Dr Grace said the crowd had come to watch him bat, not someone else bowl, but Australia and India have bedazzling attacks.
All the Australian pacemen have been outstanding, but the results in Perth and Adelaide have been determined pretty much by Jasprit Bumrah’s first spell on the first day. In Perth he was sublime. In Adelaide, affected by injury or not, his first spell was poor. The Australian top order, again trying to leave everything, was there for the taking, but Bumrah could not find his accuracy. Nor could his back-ups, and India did not have Australia’s bowling depth.
In Adelaide, Labuschagne and Nathan McSweeney survived that day-one session, setting the match up for Travis Head on day two. Not Smith, whose technique again showed signs of age and the bad luck that comes with it.
Simon Katich has made the astute observation that although Smith might have a big innings in him – something to answer the critics, to reassure himself, to reprise his glory days – but his era of dominating bowlers with consistent plunder is over. He is far from alone. In recent times, only Brian Lara (nine), Kumar Sangakkara (eight) and Usman Khawaja (seven) have continued to score Test centuries consistently after turning 35. All three played with orthodox methods. The hunger remains sharp, at times, but every other part loses that fraction of a per cent that makes the difference at the highest level.
A last hurrah is nobody’s entitlement, but cricket is a sentimentalist’s game that doesn’t want to see its highest achievers fade away ingloriously. I don’t think any genuine cricket fan would not wish Smith well. Same for Khawaja, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. But no matter how they go in the middle, they share one certainty. They won’t get the chop. Today’s players can retire on their own timetable.
