Opinion The true original
The game has thrown up someone like Steve Smith after years, and the cricketing fraternity doesn’t know how to respond.
Cricket has thrown up a true original after years, and it seems the cricketing fraternity doesn’t know how to respond.
How to get Steve Smith out” is the cricketing question of our times. Should the bowlers give up trying to get him out lbw? Should they abort the bouncer tactic? Should they give up bowling around off stump? That most experts reckon the best way to bowl to him is at the fifth or sixth stump, way outside off stump, with monotonous regularity, hour after hour, is ridiculous, to say the least. But that’s the effect he has had. In just his third game after the comeback, he has already become the highest run-getter this year in world cricket.
Cricket has thrown up a true original after years, and it seems the cricketing fraternity doesn’t know how to respond. If the conclusion is now to abandon the game’s age-old wisdom, gained over 130 years, of either attacking the stumps or teasing the edge by bowling in the off-stump corridor, then there can be no greater compliment to Smith. The soul of his art seems to be a distraction. It’s an effect that bowlers with unusual actions usually have on batsmen. The lack of rhythm in a strange action puts off batsmen. Smith seems to have that effect on the bowlers, who can’t find a rhythm to his batting that they can prey on.
He can drive off the back foot. He can pull off the front foot. He can hit the ball on the legs inside-out to the off if the mood seizes him. The English, in particular, seem to have given up and are waiting for boredom to get him out. The best ball, probably, is still the leg cutter from the off-stump line that paid them rich dividends last time he was in England. But caught in his whirlpool of distraction, they have abandoned that weapon and are bleeding runs. The English crowd came to boo him. They leave the arena in a daze.
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