Steve Smith’s dominant Ashes performance this year is further proof that he is redefining what a dominant test batsman can be.
For all that I want to hold back, to maintain an eye of unbiased perspective, Steve Smith allows for no such recourse. His performances in this year’s Ashes reads less like batting scores and more like that episode of The Simpson’s when Drederick Tatum pummels Homer. Unfortunately for England, there has been no Moe to rescue from the relentless torture.
Statistics can paint a pretty clear picture of the carnage Smith has wrought. He’s amassed 774 runs at a shade over 110, missing essentially one and a half tests for good measure. Though he fell short of Bradman’s series run scoring record it never felt delusional to seriously think he could. He’s hit as many centuries as fifties (3–3). Before he ran out of steam at The Oval, his lowest score was 80. England’s lowest score is 67. His strike rate is the highest among all batsmen who’ve played more than one innings.
A neat little stat that I dig is that he’s scored 35.3 percent of Australia’s runs in the innings he’s played. There’s little doubt that if you extrapolate that out to the innings he missed due to injury it would remain in the same spectrum. Or this one – of the 2192 runs Australia have scored in matches involving Smith he’s been at the crease for 1257 of them. That’s a touch under 73 percent. Just let that settle in. He’s a goddamn bulwark. Video game scores made ludicrously real.
More than the statistics though is the method of how he’s produced these runs that has continually left fans in awe, and every Englishmen having nightmares (I’m pretty sure Joe Root has not slept much this series). Each innings has felt like the defining one, single handedly keeping England at bay. It would seem at first glance that his titanic performances masks some glaring weaknesses in the Australian batting line-up (which is not NOT true), and that the strain placed on his shoulders to carry the load could pose more questions for the team in the long run (though I would hazard the encouraging showing of Labuschagne helps).
But it ignores the steady support of the order at various times, in particular that of Labuschagne, that has allowed Smith to dictate the measure of his innings. If anyone could hang around long enough, Smith would make sure things worked out.
It also ignores the voracious, single-minded hunger that Smith has in the pursuit of runs. Like the T-800, he does not cease, he does not stop, he does not rest. His posture doesn’t wilt at all. The natural order of the universe, to Smith, is to be out in the middle, endlessly accumulating, regardless of the situation, bowling attack, the conditions, the crowd, or whoever’s down the other end. It’s as if he doesn’t see the dependence on him as a burden, nor as a point of humble appreciation. In fact, he may not even see it at all.
Nowhere is this exemplified more than in the unfolding of the Fourth Test at Old Trafford. Ben Stokes miracle of an innings at Headingley provided what many thought would be the catalyst for England to mow down Australia and take the Ashes back on home soil. A perfect capper to a magical English summer. How could any team regather after such a devastating defeat. Australia had victory in the palm of their hand and it was snatched away from them by Stokes and the inanimate carbon rod that was Jack Leach. The brittle nature of the side would be put to the sword. The echoes of the Newlands ball tampering scandal to be layered upon this most shocking of losses. The darkest hour would continue for the national team.
But Smith would have none of that.
True, he wasn’t available for the Headingley test due to concussion. And luck played as much a role in England’s win as did Stoke’s swashbuckling play, but it was the momentum England needed to wrest control of the series away from Australia. Broad would impose himself, Archer would shake off his inert showing, Stokes would haul the side to glory. So has fate decreed after their World Cup win.
But Smith would have none of that.
Here was the true return of the king. He arrived at the Old Trafford wicket in the familiar spot of two for not many, and then proceeded to do what is probably more natural to him than breathing. All that momentum, all that belief and fire that the Poms had from Headingley was ripped away by this… machine. His double century — the third of his career and second in England (Bradman never did that) — reasserted the natural order of the universe.
I will not stop using that term.
This was not vengeance. This was not retaliation. This was not retribution. This just is. You get a sense that even if he makes 500 in an innings he wouldn’t be satisfied. Like Thanos says in Avengers: Infinity War, ‘Dread it, run from it. Destiny arrives.’ Steve Smith is that destiny. Stokes’ innings now merely a footnote in the towering epic that is Smith’s Ashes. For it is his, more than anyone else’s.
Dominance in T20s and ODI’s have a certain fleetingness to it, a product of the rapid succession of matches, leagues, competitions that cause the eyes to glaze over. Test match dominance looks resolute, stretching beyond the horizon. An entire series dictated by the will of one man. The cast of the shadow all consuming.
Hilariously, Smith was touted as this generation’s Shane Warne — as much for his loopy wrist spin than it was for his meme-worthy pudgy figure. It was at once a woefully misjudged and also an oddly erudite call. Warne was the destroyer of worlds, and so too is Smith. They approach with different weapons of mass destruction and different attitudes but the result is increasingly becoming the same. All the hurt and derision, the hurling of insults in the wake of his suspension were non-existent to Smith. He batted and batted and batted, operating on a plane out of reach of such petty, impotent attacks. His eyes never settle in between deliveries. But when they do, it’s absolute — the focus on the ball and nothing else. Like he was built for it.
What can be seen in the way Smith bats is the ideal encapsulation of the modern test batsman. Smith is an unceasing knot of movements that perfectly reflects the constant motion of his own generation. From the moment he reaches the crease he’s a bouncing, frantic, jittery, supremely in control being that projects in all the best possible ways, how to play a test match innings in this day and age. His actions and quirks are already mythical. In it you can see an army of kids who will grow up attempting to emulate not so much his unique style but whatever feels natural, whatever makes a mountain of runs. The concentration, the whip like swing of his bat, the pace and positioning of his feet. His natural game is like a new kind of purists dream. He understands the nuances of a test innings and yet he’s firmly a post-modern player. Crafting shots that no one in their right mind would consider playing. That square drive off Stokes in the waning, windswept moments of the first day of the fourth test where he ends up reaching, falling, scrambling and yet, somehow executing whatever the hell he was trying to do so perfectly may be the defining image of his entire career.
It is both difficult to explain and so very easy to understand. It harkens back to the backyard of summers past. Where a malleable and adaptable technique was paramount to combat the feisty unpredictability of brothers, parents, sisters, relatives and cousins who would steam in off a forty pace run up and fire thunderbolts on a ten metre wicket in failing light, with tape covering half the tennis ball to extract such menacing swing that fights were routinely the result of such actions. It’s do or die. You start at first light and don’t stop until the last rays of sun have disappeared behind the makeshift boundaries. Where the byzantine rules were constantly changing. Where a favourite bat or ball would be the difference between pain or glory.
Smith bats in this amplified world of the backyard on the game’s biggest, most revered stage. He is a product of it, and yet he stands apart, alone at the top of the mountain. As it has been for the last six years.
Steve Smith is my age, born only a month later than me. He stands as both an icon and one of us. It may sound delusional but for people of our generation we see ourselves in Smith. He’s ours. Where legends like Ponting, the Waugh twins, Hayden, Warne, Hussey, Mcgrath, Gilchrist and Langer from the previous generation were seen as larger than life gods emerging from another realm to bring us all to victory, Smith more than any other player in the last decade — I mean it’s not even a contest — exudes a relatability, a sense of pride in watching his astonishing accomplishments unfolds. We’ve been in those situations in the yard. Facing seemingly insurmountable odds and yet somehow prevailing. This must be how it felt to watch Bradman eviscerate attacks who simply had no answer to his otherworldly ability. The certainty, the inevitability of it all.
And maybe it’s as simple as that. He dominates. More than any other player on the planet. More than Kohli or Williamson, Pujara or Stokes, troubling out of form Warner (and for that matter, Root). Surely he must be a victim to a dip in form at some point. He can’t keep scoring at least fifty every time he wields his rapier. That his average must drop from heights where the idea of him continually averaging over 70 is somehow not the craziest idea ever. But even as I write that, a hesitancy slows my fingers. Like Lebron James, Mike Trout or Lionel Messi, Smith’s prowess towers over such menial things as the relentless march of time, convincing us mere mortals that what eventually grinds us down has no effect upon him. Distorting a perception of what should be, what history has shown us time and time again, to what he has constructed it to be. He stood in front of a cocky English side and pronounced that they will go no further. Bradman cannot have an equal. He’s the ultimate outlier, maybe in any sport, but to even have to remind ourselves of that is enough to give pause, to truly appreciate what Smith is doing.
We are subservient to the natural laws of the universe. With this triumph in England, the first time an Australian team has done so since 2001, Steve Smith’s awe inspiring, once in a generation brilliance has now become one of those immutable laws.
Swish Collective 