A Suitable Case for Treatment

GH on the Steve Smith experiment

Gideon Haigh

For the last few years, Steve Smith has presented a strangely fascinating study, like a singer who has unexpectedly lost the drift of a favourite song.  He looks the same in his stance, forms the same shapes in motion.  But there’s something missing - the confidence of permanence that once rendered his dismissals so momentous.  

Like the singer, he hums a few bars, drops in a line or two from a verse, waits expectantly for the song to form itself, and somehow it does not.  Talent regularly gets him through.  But you can feel his exasperation as another innings ends, according to his lights, prematurely: the toss of the head, the fretful gesture with the gloved hand, coupled with the effort of pretending he is not disappointed and that his day will come, ahead of more penitential nets and throw downs.

My memory has often returned to the Gabba in 2019, the Test off the back of that year’s Ashes when Smith had been all but unassailable.  Toting his batting average of nearly 65, Smith emerged at two for 351 with Australia already comfortably in the lead against Pakistan.  The day was balmy.  The bowlers were tired.  The crowd  was sitting up, grateful and expectant.  And Smith played the most peculiar cameo.  He skittishly defended or left eight balls from Yasir Shah and Naseem Shah; came down to hit Yasir airily over mid-wicket then was bowled next ball.  It was as though he’d just been roused from slumber in the dressing room, and was still rubbing sleep dust from his eyes.  

It hardly mattered.  Smith’s protege Marnus Labuschagne ground out 185 and Australia prevailed by an innings.  But it heralded something of a baton change in Australian batting.  Labuschagne surged ahead in the next relay; Smith jogged off the track, into a four year phase in which he has averaged 45, compared to 73 in the four years before that.  It would be enough for most; it is clearly not enough for Smith, who has now seized at the opportunity to audition for the opening vacancy left by David Warner’s retirement.

In a summer short on news, this has been regarded rather as if the prime minister and governor-general had swapped jobs.  The response evinces what a strange mix of specialisation and superstition cricket remains, contra our modern conception of the game as dynamic and rational.  In days of yore, batting orders changed almost constantly.  Victor Trumper is recalled as one of history’s great openers, but started forty per cent of his innings in the middle order.  Donald Bradman is permanently identified with number three, but started thirty per cent of his innings from other grooves.  First-class cricket’s highest scorer Jack Hobbs, it is true, accumulated almost all his runs at number one, but only circumstances prevented first-class cricket’s second-highest scorer Frank Woolley from doing so before he finally got the chance in his last season for Kent.

“In many quarters surprise was expressed that at the age of 51 I went in No.1. Until then I had never been in first regularly, though I had always preferred that place. Beginning as a bowler made Kent place me four or five in the order, and moreover the county were always rich in opening batsmen. Consequently my wish to start the innings was denied until 1938.” 

The kind of analysis we now do reinforces the idea that one tampers with an order at one’s peril.  Remember the weird taboo around Michael Clarke’s moving up the order: how he averaged 60 at number five but only 30 at number four, which became, I suspect, a kind of mental block for him, despite his being at the time the country’s premier batter.  It was instructive that in advocating his promotion, Smith sought to reframe the case statistically, pointing out that he averages 106.2 when walking to the wicket in the first two overs.  Numbers can prove almost anything we want, the bigger the sample size the less meaningful: after all, the average person has one breast and one testicle.

The biggest challenge may be rhythmic.  Geoff Boycott was once demoted to number ten in a run chase.  ‘It feels very strange,’ he said while sitting round the dressing room.  ‘Normally I go in with someone else and come back by m’sel. Now I’m going out m’sel and coming back with someone else.’  But you suspect that Smith will work it out, and with some relish.  Everyone points to Smith’s curious travails with the short ball as the reason for his relative decline; my feeling, based I admit on nothing at all, has always been that something more holistic is at play, perhaps the weight of the mantle he wears as ‘batting’s number one problem solver’.  Making your world into a set of ‘problems’ to be ‘solved’ is a short cut to multiplying and extending them, diffusing your energies and destroying your enjoyment.  A promotion restricting him to a single problem, that of getting through the new ball, might be a way out of such mechanical modes of thought.  It is also the kind of experiment a strong team can undertake, with the side benefit is resolving the Australians’ all-rounder log jam and lowering the team’s average age by reintroducing Cameron Green.  It might not remind Smith of the drift of that old song, but might teach him a new song we can all learn the words of.