Ashes: Steve Smith joins the Australian batting greats

Well, whether you like him or not, we should all be grateful for Steve Smith. In an innings of great character and skill at Edgbaston, he has reminded us why Test cricket is the finest form of the game. For a long time, while wickets were tumbling around him, he kept his head and batted slowly, aware that if he got out, Australia would be dismissed for a very low score. His strike-rate for much of his innings was around or even below 40 runs per hundred balls, miserable by the standards of our dashing moderns. But he trusted that he would eventually find a partner able to stick with him, and this trust was justified when that admirable cricketer Peter Siddle joined him. Then, accelerating gradually, Smith went to his twenty-fourth Test hundred, his ninth against England and, in doing so, dragged Australia out of a deep hole and put them back in the match, even on top. His was a remarkable innings in which he displayed a steely nerve, fine judgement and considerable skill.

Nobody is going to describe Smith as an elegant batsman – though, as he showed in the latter part of his innings, he can be a mighty destructive one. He offers little in the way of aesthetic pleasure. Nor is he what used to be called correct. You might not advise a young cricketer to model himself on him. But there is one lesson that not only youngsters but England’s present lot of batsmen might learn from him: the vital importance of concentration. Smith is not a batsman who co-operates with the bowler. In this respect he is like one of his great predecessors, Allan Border. I don’t remember people babbling about the beauty of Border’s stroke–play, but he stayed at the wicket, the runs came and he could dishearten even the best bowlers. Just as Smith does.

He’s not far behind Bradman with 24 Test hundreds. The Don hit 29 centuries, admittedly in fewer matches and in only 80 innings, as against Smith’s 117. Still, it’s impressive and I would guess that he is almost as important to Australia now as The Don was in his day. When Bradman played what he often said was his greatest innings – 254 at Lord’s in 1930 – he came out at the fall of the first wicket with the score at 162, joining his captain Bill Woodfull who went on to make 155. Steve Smith hasn’t often had that sort of luxury, Australian batting in recent years having often been as flaky as – well – England’s.

Smith came into this series with a dark cloud still hanging over him. The sand-paper, ball-tampering incident in South Africa was shabby, and the shabbiest part of it was that Smith and his vice-captain David Warner delegated the execution of the plan to the youngest member of the team, Cameron Bancroft. But all three have been punished and humiliated. The self-righteous booing with which Smith and Warner have been greeted in England this summer is itself shabby, even shameful. You can’t re-write the past, but the time often comes when you should set it aside. I hope the standing ovation Smith received when he was at last out on Thursday evening indicates an acceptance that the time for oblivion has arrived. If the sand-paper incident was against the Spirit of Cricket, spectators should remember that they too should respect that spirit.

Steve Smith must now sit high in the pantheon of great Australian batsmen. He does so not only on his figures, remarkable though they are, but also on his ability to play a big innings when it is most needed, as was the case yesterday. Few games are as deluged in figures as cricket. Many of us have spent more hours than we might care to confess poring over the Records pages of Wisden. Yet even this obsessive interest in statistics doesn’t, or shouldn’t, blind us to the fact that they tell only part of the story.

There is nobody alive now who saw Victor Trumper bat and at least twenty of Australians have scored more Test runs, with more Test centuries at a higher average, than Trumper. Indeed one of them was his own team-mate Clem Hill. But people who saw Victor Trumper bat never forgot him, and, even as Bradman built his skyscraper of runs there were middle-aged Australians who said “ah, but you should have seen Victor”. More recently figures might suggest that Neil Harvey was only a very good batsman, but those of us who saw him play know better. I’ve only read about what may have been his greatest innings, one comparable to Smith’s yesterday, at Sydney in 1954. In a low-scoring match Australia were set 223 to win and were bowled out by Frank Tyson and Brian Statham for 184, Harvey 92 not out. The next highest score was 16. There’s a wonderful account of this gripping Test in Alan Ross’s book Australia ’54.

Luck plays a part in all sports, and Steve Smith had one piece of good fortune at Edgbaston. The recurrence of Jimmy Anderson’s calf injury deprived England of their leading bowler and deprived us of the pleasure promised by the prospect of a duel between Anderson and Smith. It also imposed a heavy burden on Stuart Broad and Chris Woakes. They responded magnificently, but with Ben Stokes wayward and Moeen Ali not very threatening, some pressure was off Smith and his admirable late partners, Peter Siddle and Nathan Lyon. Still England took what one must assume was a calculated risk in selecting Anderson whose injury had prevented him from bowling in a match for more than a month. In retrospect one thinks they should have kept him in reserve for the second Test at Lord’s.

Broad eventually hit Smith’s stumps with a fine piece of bowling, his hundredth wicket against Australia. He bowled beautifully yesterday. Broad, like Smith, has endured a spell of unpopularity, being loudly booed in Australia a couple of visits ago. Like Smith, he shrugged it off. He has been a wonderful bowler for England, and we need him fit and raring to go for quite a bit longer.

Thursday was a great day for Smith and a pretty great one for Broad and Woakes. It was also, just as importantly, a great day for Test cricket. Writing this perforce before the first ball to be bowled on Friday, I can only hope that the rest of this match and the series lives up to it.