Steve Smith's Weakness
How the County Championship exposed a flaw in the Australia star's method | #11
Australia’s win in the World Test Championship final against India, by 209 runs, was built on the back of a fabulous partnership between Steve Smith and Travis Head during their first innings. Over the course of the rest of the match, the two teams were actually reasonably well-matched, but Australia had got themselves so far ahead of the game on the first day that even-stevens was never going to be good enough for India.
While Head took the man-of-the-match award, Smith’s anchoring hundred was vital in providing him with stability and piling overs into the legs of India’s seam attack, which was never going to be able to go blow-for-blow with Cummins, Starc, Green and Boland. But Smith’s heroics are not the focus of this piece; instead, we will consider a weakness that’s appeared in his game and was apparent during his first couple of innings for Sussex this summer. A piece later in the week will address his attempts to combat this weakness, and a technical shift that looks (for the moment, at least) to be paying dividends.
Dawn of a Problem
There has been something of a waning of Smith’s powers over the last few years. The graphic below shows his returns in Test match cricket between the 2019 Ashes and the start of the WTC final last week.
Between the 120th and the 169th innings of his Test career, Smith made his runs at an average of 52.43, standing in contrast to a career average of 60 in Tests. In this period, Smith has performed essentially 12% worse than over the rest of his career, and the odd low score has become more frequent, albeit still punctuated by big hundreds as reminders of his class. There has been a definite slump since 2019, but before we go any further it must be remembered that this ‘slump’ is to an average of 52 - one which many Test players would kill for, but for now comparable to that of mere mortals.1 But this is significant - if teams can turn Smith into a great, rather than Godlike, batsman, Australia become a hell of a lot more beatable.
I’ve chosen 2019 for a couple of reasons: first, if you substitute Steve Smith for any other batsman Australia had to choose from, I think England would have won the series comfortably, rather than drawing it. One of Australia’s two defeats came in a match when Smith was injured; his obdurate resistance at Lord’s took enough time out of the game to secure a draw; and his hundreds at Edgbaston and Old Trafford were vital in winning those games for Australia.
Second, it was at that game at Lord’s when Smith finally seemed to meet his match in Jofra Archer, felled by a short ball. And since then, Smith has seemed to have something of a weakness against the short ball, as Jarrod Kimber expands on in his excellent piece here.
All of this will have been of interest to Leicestershire, Worcestershire and Glamorgan, Smith’s opponents in the Championship as he warmed up for the WTC and the Ashes. There has long been a school of thought that, because Smith shuffles across his stumps so much, the correct approach must be to bowl straight and wait until he misses one, to pin him LBW. As fine an idea as this is, it has one key flaw: Smith just. Doesn’t. Miss. Straight. Ones.
Until, that is, he started to. He doesn’t miss many, but it just takes one.
That started at Lord’s in 2019 when a concussed Smith shouldered arms to Chris Woakes and was out LBW. Teams started to see a weakness - force him back by bowling short and then slip in the fuller, straighter one.
So it’s no suprise that Worcestershire welcomed Smith to the crease with a couple of short balls in his first knock. As the analysis in the gallery below shows, Smith struggles to get his weight in the right position, as he is forced to counteract his trigger movement across to off stump by swivelling on his back foot.
Contrast this with a pull by Virat Kohli, who takes a much more orthodox approach, below:
Kohli’s balance enables him to roll his wrists over the ball and place it exactly where he wants, whereas Smith’s momentum takes him in the opposite direction to where he’s hitting the ball, making it much more likely he’ll balloon the ball in the air, as he does in the third image of the gallery above.
Having seen his fellow bowlers push Smith back with the short one, Josh Tongue (now of England) bowled a ball much fuller and straighter. Smith, whose movement in his stance led to him planting one leg directly on the off stump, missed the ball and was adjudged LBW by the umpire.
Now, it’s hard to argue this would have been out in a Test match, given the ball appears to hit Smith above the pad and outside the line of off stump, but you can see in the still above just how off balance Smith is, with his head and bat way outside off but his feet pinned to the crease in line with the stumps. He is just not able to bring the bat around his front pad in time to hit the ball.
Smith’s struggles continued in his second game against Leicestershire. Again, notice how ‘crossed’ his legs are, with his feet in line with one another but his head generally a long way over to the off-side. This causes a lack of balance that makes it much harder to hit the straight ball. Smith’s great strength off his pads in the past has always been that, despite taking an unorthodox stance and moving well across the stumps, he is beautifully balanced at the point of delivery and able to hit the ball from a position of strength. Not so in these early-season encounters.
There can be little doubt around Smith’s dismissal in this game. If you can’t see the ball in the still, it’s hit his left leg just above the knee roll, shielded from view by the bat - again, the issue is timing. Smith is a little more balanced here, but his feet are still trapped on the crease and he has to play around his front pad, which prevents him from getting bat to ball, while he still falls over a touch to the off-side.
So, what can England take from this ahead of the Ashes starting this week? Well, Smith’s feet are absolutely crucial. If they are moving quickly and in sync, he can reach balls bowled anywhere on the crease, and he has the attacking options to put most of them away. The key is to unsettle that foot movement, which England could do with changes of pace and short-pitched bowling (Mark Wood, for instance, will be crucial in this series) and with some seam movement if the wickets are helpful.
But don’t go thinking Smith’s weakness has been unlocked here. I was watching him carefully during the WTC final and it looks to me that he’s made a change which might nullify this apparent weakness. What was that change? You’ll have to come back later in the week to find out…
In the same period, for instance, Joe Root has made 3,961 runs at 55.01 against a career average of 50.24