People talk about the ways in which they don’t understand Steve Smith. They detail the idiosyncrasies of the cricketer, his peculiar approach to the game, the things he says that don’t stack up with the way others might use the language.
The bewilderment about Smith “finding his hands” as a batsman before the current one-day series against India was the latest example. But it wasn’t a new sentiment. Smith has spoken in the past about the bat not feeling right when he picked it up, in a way that he can’t define, and the need to rediscover it.
Perhaps the difference is in his head, or perhaps his head picks up on a fine physical distinction. Given that Smith’s socks and pads and taped-up shoelaces all have to be just so for his batting mind to be at ease, it makes sense that his batting grip would be likewise.
Making extremely fine distinctions, after all, is what Smith does. He picks up on minute differences in a ball’s trajectory, adjusts for that in his timing, and then changes the force and the angle of contact to find gaps in the field with a precision that few can match.
He is almost peerless when it comes to judging the length of a ball, most notably when coming down the wicket to spinners, his preferred option regardless of whether he intends to attack or defend.
He can focus on his hands, but it’s the relationship between hand and eye that defines his batting: the ability to pick up the ball even when he’s nowhere near the conventional position of having his head in line with it, or his foot to its pitch.
Making clean contact from outside the line of his body has long been a trademark. Not to mention his infallibility when the ball angles at his pads, or the mid-air work that he so often does when taking a catch. For all the talk about Smith’s technique, it’s all built on his eye.
Exactly how any of this creates his batting displays is what the rest of us can’t understand. Smith probably doesn’t really either, and can’t explain it if he does. There are plenty of composers who couldn’t tell you why their piece of music made you weep, or painters who couldn’t explain why you lost an hour in front of their canvas.
Part of what defines genius is the mystery of its provenance. And that’s alright. There are the things we can’t understand and there are the things we can. We understand the runs that Smith makes without understanding how.
For all that his batting has the touch of genius, Smith the white-ball player has been an afterthought.
For several years, at least in Australia and England, there was a broad view that Smith the Test batsman had the edge on India’s captain Virat Kohli. Starting in 2013, Smith did set about piling up Test centuries more prolifically.
But in subsequent years Kohli found a groove that caught him up on that measure, where he currently leads 27 to 26. Like Smith, he has compiled a substantial body of Test work on every foreign shore that has traditionally confounded his countrymen.
Which means that in debates as to who is the better player, there is really no arguing with the tie-breaker of the one-day format. Before this current series Smith’s tally stood at nine ODI centuries to Kohli’s 43. India’s captain has played twice as many matches, but in them he had made more than four times as many hundreds, three times as many runs, and an average close to 50 per cent higher.
Raised in the Indian Premier League, Kohli has never had a problem hitting a faster tempo. Smith at times has struggled with that adjustment. He too has made IPL runs but mostly as an anchor. He has had patches of white-ball brilliance but hasn’t consistently dominated.
In the main he has played something like a hotted-up version of his Test batting. His first one-day century for Australia came off 115 balls, his second from 109. During his hottest-ever streak across formats he brought up a hundred from 93 balls in his first ODI as captain, and what for a long time was his fastest from 89 balls in the 2015 World Cup semi-final.
His subsequent hundreds were made from 97 balls, 104, 120, 97, and 117. Fine one-day batting, but nothing that prepared an audience for what they saw last Friday night when he came out and scorched a century from 62 balls, the third-fastest by an Australian.
Even less so for him to come out two nights later and do the exact same thing, 62 balls once again, this innings even more outrageous in its range of shots and its scope of ambition.
The Sunday hundred was like a series of time-lapse photos. It flowered in fast forward, starting with Smith barely moving at the start of his innings while steering Jasprit Bumrah for four, merely placing the bat in the path of the ball, and ending with Smith zooming around the crease like an action figure made of high-bounce rubber.
He made the best deliveries from India’s best bowlers look ordinary, like using fast feet to make room outside off stump and driving Mohammed Shami’s yorker off the line of the wicket through cover for four.
When his partner Marnus Labuschagne hit a flat sweep from the leg-spinner Yuzvendra Chahal, Smith immediately followed by getting further across the line of the ball, allowing him to lift the sweep for six. An object lesson to a younger player.
When India had no deep backward square, Smith square-drove Jasprit Bumrah to that boundary. As soon as they moved a fielder there, he glided finer past the short third man.
When he felt like it, he galloped at the spinners to hit straight sixes, or stayed put in the crease to slog-sweep them.
Upon raising his century, he anticipated that Hardik Pandya would bowl wide. Smith had already tried and failed to play a scoop shot earlier in the day. So he threw himself across to the line of the ball in the manner that he lunges in the field, got his scooping bat under it, and sent it through fine leg. That was the last garnish, caught next ball for 104.
In the space of three days, Smith’s two hundreds have helped drive two of the eight highest one-day scores ever made by an Australian team. And given how well the Indians have batted in the chase, it was just as well for Australia that he helped make so many.
This is a refined version of Smith: all hands, all eye, no fear. Perhaps a lack of recent Test cricket has freshened his batteries or sharpened his approach. Whatever the cause, it is the best he has batted in Australian gold.
It may not be a permanent change, because maintaining this level would be a huge ask. But it was interesting on Sunday night that Kohli had to play the classy but sensible 89 from 87 balls in response to a bigger flourish. For a weekend at least, Smith slipped the leash and ran free.
