[Sports] Steve Smith’s 100th Test: The Original among clones

[FRIDAY THE 13]

 

A dream that Steve Smith thought would remain just a dream would be fulfilled in Leeds on Thursday. He would play his one hundredth Test for his country, one that he had imagined and visualised all his life. In his boyhood siestas, in backyard cricket with friends, at the childhood club in Sydney suburb, in the corridors of hotel rooms, he would imagine himself walking into the rippling applause of the audience for his one hundredth Test. And here he is.

His one hundredth Test is primarily a triumph of his imagination, his quest to reproduce the imaginary world in real life. There are other virtues too, the buzzing problem-solving brain; the unalloyed love and devotion to the art of batting, the infant-like joy in playing the game, the dextrous wrists and hands, the hawkish eyes and twinkling feet, the steel of his will and the flexibility of technique. But at the heart, at the deepest core, every Smith milestone is a conquest of his power to imagine.

Only someone of such superlative imagination could bat so originally. He is for that matter an original among clones. This is a world where everyone looks like someone else, where everybody wants to be someone else, or everyone is portrayed as someone else.

It could be safely assumed that there has not been anyone quite like him; not could there be anyone like him. Not among his batting peers, where he sits at the pinnacle; not among the three batsmen of his country who has, at this juncture, scored more runs than him; not among ten other luminaries who have collected more hundreds than him. He might not end up stacking a crate of imperishable records, but he would walk away one day with the calm swagger of having produced something irreplaceably, and irresistibly, original.

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Smith’s batting could be an acquired taste; it’s seldom love at first sight. It’s the reason hard-nosed cynics continue to torment him. But once you cultivate the taste, he becomes inexorably addictive. Like watching Shane Warne conjuring wrist-spin illusion, like a ball of leather reciting verse at the wrists of Wasim Akram, watching Smith bat is the most distinct experience in the contemporary game. He is a theatre unto himself, a ringmaster of his own circus. He is a multi-part spectacle—he is not just about what he does to the ball, as with both batsmen, but what he does before the ball has been bowled and after the shot has been played. With other batsmen, these are mere routines. But at the hands of Smith, it transforms into an event. A sui generis so to speak.

Meeting the ball, the central purpose of the game, seems incidental, almost an excuse to accommodate his pre-ball manoeuvres and post-stroke mannerisms. As the bowler hits his strides, he is flinching and flapping, as if he had worn sticky clothes before he leaps rather than shuffles across, all splayed feet and whirly limbs, taxing your eyes. The flourish is equally over-elaborate. He scowls, grimaces, gasps, growls, retraces the trajectory of the ball with his hands and often parts a soliloquy. But everything had a purpose, a rhythm. He is like reading the finest prose, take a word or sentence out, the whole paragraph falls apart. The purpose of the trigger movement itself is a reaction to what he perceives is biggest weakness, outside the off- stump. In his doctrine, there is nothing as sinful as nicking behind. “For me it’s about trying to minimise the ways that you get out. If guys get me out lbw, I say well played, congratulations but, if I nick one off, that’s when I get upset at myself.”

But freeze-frame the moment he plays the ball. Everything before and after is for that precise moment, when the ball meets the bat, right under his eyes, head magnificently still like a bronze statue and in line with the ball. All that build-up and release is for that exact moment of certitude. He is where he wants to be and how he wants to be and when he wants to be, with plenty of time and space to choose the gap and the stroke, to decide to leave the ball or not. Crunched in the unorthodox and ornate is a sparkling simplicity, steadfast application of batting’s holy fundamentals of staying still and balanced, meeting the ball with the full visage of the bat, the batting descending in a straight-line, from its crooked pre-delivery projection. When he is facing the ball, he is often chest-on, the vision two-eyed, as opposed to convention. But in turn, the approach, facilitated by supreme hand-eye coordination and mastery of judging lengths early, helps him sweet-spot the ball more than most batsmen. He thus makes batting look at the same time both complex and simple. Steve Smith is best Test batter of this generation: Virat Kohli
The simplicity and adherence to fundamentals are the reasons, contrary to first impressions, he hardly gets out leg before the wicket, despite all visual suggestions. Only 26 times in 175 outings (just 14 percent) has he been caught in front of the wicket. To strike a comparison, Virat Kolhi has been lbw-ed 40 times in 185 innings (21 por cent). And in those innings he had been out lbw, Smith averages 59.84.

The shuffle tempts the bowlers to target his legs. But as they have often discovered, and still the search for his front-pad goes on, they end up feeding his greatest strength, the onside, where he would essay those gunshot on-drives and whiplash flicks with ridiculous comfort.

More than any real flaws, he creates an illusion of being flawed. It’s the reason, again nonconforming to cricketing wisdom, he is an exquisite cover-driver of the cricket ball. The set-up would make you believe that he could be vulnerable when cover-driving, He is not. Even as the ball is being delivered he is going the other way, the top of the left-shoulder is winking at the mid-on fielder. The feet are close together, the bat’s shoulder is sweating in the fierce grip of his bottom hand, and all the weight is coiled into his back-foot. Yet, when the ball is full and wide, that front-foot glides out, the bottom-hands whirr and the bat makes a cracking connection with the ball. The wrist does its role in coaxing the stroke, but it’s not all wristy-drive. The front-foot strides right to the pitch of the ball, the head, the elbow and eyes follow, obediently like marching soldiers. More than the flicks, the cover-drives reveal his real touch and frame of mind.

The temptation is to label him a freak. He is not. A freak cannot be conquering every condition he is exposed to. Swing and seam, spin and bounce, he has subdued them all. He has scored runs against the finest bowlers of his time in the most hostile conditions. Runs against Stuart Broad and James Anderson in England, Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel in South Africa and Ravindra Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin in India. He averages 61.82 in England; 50.32 in India; 131 in New Zealand. Barring Bangladesh, where has batted four times, he aggregates 40-plus in every country, and over 44 overall. The average of 59.56 in 99 Tests, the third best for anyone who has played more than 50 Tests, cannot be purchased with sheer freakishness. It’s the reason Virat Kohli has hailed Smith as the “best Test batsman of this generation”.

AshesIt’s a career built on his love of batting, devotion to the game, sweat and tears, hurt and pride, and beyond it all, his limitless power to imagine.
It’s a career built on his love of batting, devotion to the game, sweat and tears, hurt and pride, and beyond it all, his limitless power to imagine. And a dream is fulfilled. His batting is not an ode to nonconformity, he is not an apostle of the rebellious, rather he is one of cricket’s true originals.

 

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