Eye of the storm: Steve Smith is still finding answers

Somewhere during the aftermath of Australia's first-innings disaster in Perth, as the first of the hit pieces was filed and the countless hot takes began flooding social media, Steve Smith gathered his batting group together.

There was no stirring address. Just a simple call for calm. At the centre of the Perth storm, Smith was the eye.

"I actually said to the boys in the room, 'We're playing on some tricky wickets at the moment, and this was an innings where we all missed out together'," he tells cricket.com.au.

To the group, he continued: "'Normally we have one or two batters that step up and change the momentum, or get through a period and help us get a total on the board. It just happened to be a day where we all missed out'."

Smith was composed. Matter of fact. More than a century of Test matches and recent vicissitudes of fortune and form have helped him develop this perspective.

In Adelaide, he was proven right. Normality was indeed restored, as Travis Head, Marnus Labuschagne and Nathan McSweeney all played important hands. 

Smith sensed Perth was an anomaly in the way he described to his teammates. But equally, he has been looking at some numbers of late, and the way that first Test unfolded more broadly was also a telltale sign a couple of related shifts in the game he has noticed.

For a batter on a seemingly endless quest for perfection, they have been interesting discoveries: part relief that perhaps his powers haven't deserted him after all; and part concern that this new reality is here to stay. 

"In a way," he says, "I think it's almost lowering expectations."

* * *

There was another important conversation Smith had in Perth. During the Test, he did some work with hometown legend and his former Australia teammate, Mike Hussey. As one might fairly assume, the pair soon found themselves deep in the weeds discussing batting. Hussey and Smith share common traits on that front; both have approached their training at different times with a near fanatical zeal.

Well aware of Smith's recent struggle for runs, Hussey thought back to his own playing days. It was at the back-end of his career, after his 35th birthday, that he began taking a different approach to his preparation.

In Perth, utterly bereft of ego, he was loathe to impart advice to one of the game's great batters. But on the flipside, Smith was willing to receive it from a Hall of Famer – particularly one who clocked up eight Test hundreds and averaged in excess of 50 in 29 Tests after turning 35.

"I just really observed his preparation," Hussey tells cricket.com.au. "It's well documented that him and Marnus in particular, they hit a lot of balls, they practice really hard and they do a great deal of preparation.

"And I just said (to Smith), 'It's worth just thinking about how much you hit, and is it actually helping you, or is it slightly detrimental?'

"I think as a young player, volume is really important. But as you get older, I certainly found from my own perspective, it wasn't about hitting more balls and working yourself into the ground. It was more about coming into games as mentally and physically fresh as you possibly can.

"My concern was, especially over a five-Test series, is he doing more harm than good by just maybe losing a little bit of mental or physical edge? In Test match cricket, against a good attack, you're going to get found out.

"And look, he was unlucky in Adelaide … and I'm not saying that was the reason he missed out, but just more something to think about moving forward."

Smith is, by his own description, constantly tweaking his batting – between Tests perhaps as much as any other time. Yet he says he has taken Hussey's wisdom on board. In fact, it struck a chord, reaffirming to him the meaning behind a newer facet of his preparation: the taper.

"Last game, for instance, I didn't train the day before," Smith says. "I felt good. It was a hot day, so I didn't want to fatigue myself mentally, and I wanted to give myself every chance of having enough in the tank to go and hopefully score a big one, which didn't happen (laughs).

"I do that every now and again, if I feel like I'm batting well and I've got everything that I need out of my sessions.

"In an ideal world, I probably wouldn't hit as many balls as I do in the lead-up … it's just if I need to feel a bit better with something or work on a certain movement, or whatever I might need that last session."

Hussey understands that mental wrestle. As Smith also attests, the challenges that comes at this point in a Test career aren't about reflexes or skills. The battle is played out between the ears. For Hussey, it was about convincing himself that a fundamental shift in his approach was necessary. Ultimately, it worked.

"I just felt like I couldn't train at that level for that long anymore, so I had to be smart," he says. "And that's not an easy adjustment to make, because you want to feel like you're ready to go, and that you've done all the work so you're fully prepared.

"But I must admit, there were certain series I went into that I was mentally drained before I even started, and that affected my performances.

"By the end, I became smarter with my training. Like Steve, I knew my game inside and out. I knew what I needed to do and what I needed to feel like to be ready to go, and as soon as I felt like I was ready, then that was it, I was out of there.

"I remember Justin Langer was our batting coach at that time, and one day he threw me a handful of balls, and I walked out and said, 'Thanks mate, that's it'. And he goes, 'Are you sure?' He just wasn't used to me being like that."

For now, Smith seems to have landed somewhere in the middle. As Hussey points out, such significant change is hard. Smith's cricketing identity is tied in with his obsessive approach to training, during which he looks for solutions to whatever problems might have arisen, or those he is expecting to come his way. It is what he thrives on.

"It can get a bit exhausting at times, definitely – particularly the older I get," he says. "But no, look, I think the day that I don't want to work out certain problems and try and solve them is the day that I'll say I've had enough."

* * *

Not since he was shedding his tag as a leg-spinning allrounder has Smith gone such a stretch without a Test century. He remembers that search for his elusive maiden hundred as a time of many uncertainties compared with what he is going through now. Through this ton-less run (which does include an unbeaten 91 against the West Indies in January), his assuredness in his own game has led him to seek other causes for his declining output.

"I've played a lot, I've experienced different conditions, I know the differences now from 10 years ago, in terms of the wickets and how difficult it can be at the moment," he says. "With these Kookaburra balls, with the grass that's on the wickets, you're not seeing those scores of 450, 500 in the first innings.

"I'd love to score more runs, but I think particularly for the top order, it has been a lot more challenging – those first 35 overs, I think, are as challenging as it's been in the game since I started playing, no doubt.

"I even looked at the seam numbers (in terms of degrees of movement off the pitch) from 10 years ago to now on average, and they've gone up dramatically. That was just to back up what I was thinking, and it sort of proved it right."

All of it might seem to an outsider like a negative cycle; some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that Smith has tumbled into as he strives to climb back up to that rare air he occupied for all those years.

He repeats his assertion that batting was easier through that 2014-19 window – due to those aforementioned external factors – and the numbers do back him up: in the five home summers from 2014-15 to 2018-19, Australia averaged a whopping 80.71 runs per wicket in the very first innings of Tests. Since, that figure drops by 40 per cent to 48.73.

Smith's statistics mirror that change; from averaging 112 in the first innings of Tests in Australia through that initial window, his average drops 42 per cent to 'only' 65.35 since the 2019-20 summer.

Ever the problem solver, he has picked up another clue as to how he might arrest that slide.

"I think on these wickets, you do need some luck – everyone – to get runs," he says. "And in the last two years or so, while the wickets have been tricky, the guys getting runs are probably the ones going harder at the ball, almost keeping their bodies out of the way, giving themselves room in a way, and hitting hard and scoring quickly. Travis (Head) and Mitch Marsh are two prime examples there.

"For me, there's a balance. Obviously you've got to try and put the bowler under some kind of pressure and try and dictate terms a little bit. But that can be tricky on those sorts of wickets as well, so it's finding that balance.

"So I'll just play what's in front of me as much as I can – I think that's what I've done well for a long time. If I feel I need to be a little bit more aggressive, then it's having the courage to just go up a gear. Or if I need to absorb a bit more, do that. But I think for me, just never stop looking to score. The moment I do that, then I'll miss out on anything that's loose.

"I think that's just the way to go about it. And, yeah, just trust myself."

With 30 Test centuries under his belt and almost 10,000 runs, Smith's self-belief isn't easily dented. These past couple of weeks, some within the Australian set-up feel he is batting as well as he has at any point in the past five years. In assessing his recent run of outs with Australia batting coach Michael Di Venuto, Smith went back to a maxim Di Venuto first imparted to him more than a decade ago.

"I said to him, 'I don't feel like I'm out of form – just out of runs'," he says. "There's a difference there."

Hussey too, can sense a sizeable score on the horizon.

"I watched him pretty closely in Perth, and the (practice) pitches weren't that easy for batting on and at various stages, he made it look pretty easy," he says. "I still think he's moving well, he's still picking up the ball well, he's still making good decisions.

"He's obviously a class player and those sorts of guys don't stay out of the runs for too long. So if the conditions are good at the Gabba and he gets in, let's hope he's mentally sharp, and he can bat a long time."

NRMA Insurance Men's Test Series v India

First Test: India won by 295 runs

Second Test: Australia won by 10 wickets

Third Test: December 14-18: The Gabba, Brisbane, 11.20am AEDT

Fourth Test: December 26-30: MCG, Melbourne, 10.30am AEDT

Fifth Test: January 3-7: SCG, Sydney, 10.30am AEDT

Australia squad: Pat Cummins (c), Sean Abbott, Scott Boland, Alex Carey (wk), Brendan Doggett, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Mitch Marsh, Nathan McSweeney, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Beau Webster

India squad: Rohit Sharma (c), Jasprit Bumrah (vc), Yashasvi Jaiswal, KL Rahul, Abhimanyu Easwaran, Devdutt Padikkal, Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, Rishabh Pant, Sarfaraz Khan, Dhruv Jurel, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohammed Siraj, Akash Deep, Prasidh Krishna, Harshit Rana, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar. Reserves: Mukesh Kumar, Navdeep Saini, Khaleel Ahmed, Yash Dayal