So at last we know the fatal flaw in Steve Smith’s batting: he keeps getting out in the 140s.
There were points on a humid, enervating Sunday at Edgbaston when Smith was doing all the Steve Smith things he’d been doing on Thursday – flicking deliveries from outside off to hidden holes in the leg side, leaving others alone like a man fighting wasps, berating himself for some
invisible fault in his display – and then doing something more devastating yet: sucking the life out of the England team, then the stands, then their supporters far beyond.
England 385 runs behind, a day of the first Ashes Test to survive. No Test team has ever got close to a fourth innings target like that here. Ten years on from the Miracle of Cardiff, England require the Great Escape of Edgbaston.
It is Smith who has fenced the new world champions in. In these moods he bats like an evil spell cast upon his opponents. First he takes their energy, then he takes their hope. He makes fine bowlers lose their line and solid fielders let the ball slip through their fingers.
He takes the mind of the opposing captain and sends in the fairies and the unicorns. Before lunch, already past his century, he looked up to see that Joe Root had stuck Jos Buttler six feet away at silly point. Stuart Broad was bowling wide of off stump. As plans go, it was like trying to crack a
safe by putting a begging bowl by the hinges.
You couldn’t really blame Root. Denied his most potent bowler by injury, watching his premier spinner struggle to find rhythm and control, let alone wickets, he had tried all the sensible stuff and watched it bounce off Smith like pebbles off a tank.
Nothing could slow his relentless progress, let alone bring him to a halt. You’re meant to feel the pressure when you’re a shot away from an Ashes century. Smith had reached his off Broad with the sort of dreamy cover drive that you feel pleased with if you’ve pulled it off in the nets against a
part-timer.
He broke England with his attacking and he broke them with his defence. A few runs later he killed a Chris Woakes ball outside off with both his feet pointing straight back at the bowler and his bat in front of his toes as if playing French cricket on the beach.
Woakes gave him a look that combined incredulity with resignation. How do you come up with an answer when even the question doesn’t make sense?
The statistics to this first Test have all been Smith’s. Only Don Bradman now has more Test centuries against England than Smith. Only Bradman has scored more runs in a span of 10 Ashes matches. Smith now has more Test runs in the last 16 months than Moeen Ali, and he spent 15.9 of
them banned.
This series may be his too. It should logically be far too early to make that call, with four Tests still to come, but after a mere four days he is already the main plot-line and its narrator too.
