At 12:24pm in the middle of a sun-soaked SCG, Steve Smith was doing very Steve Smith things.
Staring up into the MA Noble stand, gesturing with increasing frustration at a couple of spectators apparently in his eyeline, a couple of four-letter thoughts kept to himself.
Already he’d done the same at the opposite end, taking umbrage at unwanted distractions in a similar fashion to last year, when that pesky piece of tape next to the sightscreen prompted him to delay play for fully five minutes.
Then, at 12.25pm, Steve Smith did a very un-Steve Smith thing.
Nicking off to Prasidh Krishna’s first ball of a new spell, Smith’s concentration had been broken. His customary post-dismissal hangdog look included a glare toward the stands.
For the rest of us, Smithwatch hit pause. With Test cricket’s 10,000-run club calling, the 35-year-old had begun the day needing 38 to join the 14 men already in it.
In front of his home crowd, on an SCG deck where he has plundered more than 1000 runs at almost 70, spearheading an Australian fightback from 4-39.
As leading member Allan Border mused before day one, a far more fitting scenario than his own milestone at Christchurch’s Lancaster Park in front of 50-odd people.
Between 12:24 and 12:25, cameras panned to Smith’s wife Dani accordingly, sitting in the same stand her husband was gesticulating in the direction of.
Having seen off the early threats of Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj, Smith’s uncharacteristic lapse sees him join one of Test cricket’s most exclusive clubs – a quartet of batting greats (Brian Lara, Mahela Jayawardene and Alastair Cook) to have been dismissed in the nervous 9990s.
Brian Lara, the only man to fall in the nervous 9990s twice.Credit: AP
Lara even managed to do it twice, just months after plundering his world record 400 not out against England in 2004.
The West Indies maestro limped across the five-figure line at Manchester in the return series, hitting his 10,000th Test run after a first-innings duck thanks to Andrew Flintoff. Lara made it to seven and his milestone in the second dig before Flintoff nabbed him again.
Just as rare as Smith’s lapse in concentration was his falling short of the roundest of numbers.
Of the nine times Smith has passed a thousand-run mark in Tests, six times he’s done it with a century. Each of his 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 and 5000-run milestones were marked with a triple-figure score.
The last of those 1000-run blocks, which saw Smith move from 5000 to 6000, was Smith at his absolute peak, scoring those runs at a Bradmanesque average of 90 between March 2017 and January 2018.
Unsurprisingly, Smith’s first 1000 runs and the most recent four-figure block have been the toughest of his career. Questions over his form and possible retirement date in Test cricket abounded before back-to-back hundreds this summer.
Smith’s march from 9000 runs – passed at Lords during last year’s Ashes – to 9995 have come at an average of 37.03.
Not since starting out as a leg spinning No.8 more than a decade ago has Smith averaged less than 40 over a 1000-run period.
Given the fall of both batting line-ups in Sydney within four and a bit sessions, Smith will be back at the crease with 9995 runs to his name soon enough.
He will almost certainly become the 13th member, and fourth Australian, of Test cricket’s 10,000-run club in front of a home town crowd.
The nervous 9990s will be no more. And with a low-scoring Test sitting on a knife’s edge, Australia might just need every single one of Smith’s milestone runs.
