Determined Smith will find his answers: Ponting

When Steve Smith last played a Test in Hobart, the peak of his Test career was nigh and Australia's batting stocks were in turmoil.

"I am embarrassed to be sitting here, to be perfectly honest with you," then-captain Smith said after a fifth consecutive Test defeat, to South Africa, in November 2016. "The boys have got to start being a bit tougher … because right now it is not good enough."

Fast forward a little over five years and there were a handful of Australian batters who lifted the Ashes urn at the same venue on Sunday who can say they answered Smith's call.

Travis Head scored two centuries on seaming pitches either side of a bout of COVID-19 to earn player-of-the-series honours, Cameron Green has emerged into the most promising allrounder in a generation and Marnus Labuschagne is the world's top-ranked Test batter.

So it is in significant contrast that it is now Smith, no longer required to carry the Test team on his own, who is searching for answers.

As noted by Ricky Ponting, among the cricketers to have played this century who could claim to rival Smith as an equal as a Test batting force, it is a nicer problem to have than the one Australia faced back in 2016.

"The standards that he'd set himself for so long, for that three- or four-year period where he took batting to another level, to try and maintain that for four or five or six years – no-one's ever done it, and no-one will probably ever do it," Ponting told cricket.com.au.

"You're going to have your ups and downs and if he's averaging (in the thirties) in Australia on the back of a couple of lean years, most other batsmen would take that."

Smith's succumbing to Mark Wood's bouncer trap with a wafting pull shot on Sunday marked the end of the batting maestro's worst home series (having batted at least three times) of his Test career with 244 runs at 30.50.

It also marks his least prolific Ashes campaign, with his average a touch lower than the 31.80 he recorded from six innings in the lower order when England first glimpsed him more than a decade ago, in 2010-11.

Of all the things that England needed to go right for them this summer, keeping Smith as quiet as they have would have been priority number one.

Given the right-hander had entered this summer having plundered 1,461 runs at 121.75 including six hundreds over his preceding two Ashes campaigns, Joe Root's side's inability to even come close to a Test victory across the first four Tests highlights how far off the pace they have been.

While Smith will be heartened the Test side has found new standard-bearers, Ponting suggested his former teammate will be desperate to recapture something close to his best.

"The other interesting dynamic with (Smith) is the Marnus factor and even other guys that have come in and have dominated like he did," said Ponting. "There are other guys that are helping out now.

"There's lots of things that we can probably think about and ask questions about, but it's not going to be long (before Smith bounces back).

"I know what he's like and he will look back at this – even though Australia has won the series …  he'll look back at his own game and break it down and ask himself those questions as to why things haven't worked out as much as he would have liked.

"He will come up with the right answers because the best players are the best problem solvers, and if he has got a problem … then he'll work it out pretty quickly."

And while Smith may never be able to scale the heights of previous years, Ponting is certain this series will not be the start of a permanent decline.

Smith will now enter his (and the Australian Test team's) first overseas tour since the beginning of the pandemic, a planned trip to Pakistan in March, with a sub-60 average for the first time since before the 2017-18 Ashes series.

Since the end of the ensuing campaign against England in 2019, when he elevated his game even higher by taking his career Test batting average to 64.56, he has managed 811 runs at 36.86 in Tests, all of them played at home.

His only century in that period has come against India at the SCG last summer, though his 93 against England in Adelaide last month underlines that Smith remains an invaluable part of the current side.

And another contributing factor to his and other batters' struggles this summer, Ponting believes, is the immensely challenging nature of pitches prepared for this Ashes series.

"I've never seen a series of wickets in Australia that have been anywhere near as conducive to seam bowling as what I've seen here," Ponting said.

"The fact that we're about to finish a Test match and Nathan Lyon hasn't bowled a single ball – that's pretty remarkable as far as I'm concerned.

"So I think some of it's got to go down to that. (Smith) hasn't looked like he's been out of touch to me. All the things that he normally does – his mannerisms, his footwork patterns – have been as they would normally be.

"I think England's tactics have been pretty good to him as well, they haven't really allowed him to come out and dominate. He's had to work hard for every run that he's got."

HCL VANTAGE POINT – Ricky Ponting on Australia's willingness to hook and pull Mark Wood

"You know what, I actually don't mind seeing them get caught on the fence. I'd rather see them caught on the fence than getting caught down the leg side, or at short leg, or trying to evade one.

"Cam Green will learn from his first innings dismissal because he probably only had to get through another couple of balls and that might have been the end of (Wood's) spell.

"But I was critical (in 2019-20) when they didn't take (Neil) Wagner on and they just stood there and let him dictate.

"If you're going to play the shot, you've just got to play it well. It's no different than any other shot. It's no different to a cover drive. When there's three slips and a gully waiting for you and you play a cover drive and you nick it, there's not ever much attention paid to that.

"But when you play a pull shot and get caught at deep square leg, there's always a bit more attention paid to that.

"So I don't mind seeing it."

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