History shows that when Steve Smith starts a series with big knocks, he continues in the same vein and puts the opposition to sword.
Dwelling on the idiosyncrasies of Steve Smith’s batting technique has become passe. To eulogise his match-winning abilities has become repetitive. It’s time we just marvelled at his batting genius and worry less about what makes him a batting colossus. For such has been his success, consistency, mastery of bowlers, surfaces and situations that he’s the closest to batting perfection in contemporary cricket, closest to inhabiting the rarefied space of all-time greats.
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He’s already being talked up as the greatest Australian batsman since Donald Bradman, if not the most influential since him. The twin hundreds against England at Edgbaston only ratified such claims, though such temptations to compare and classify could be kept aside till he calls time on his career. But as of now, he is a notch above the other members of the holy quartet of contemporary cricket that includes Virat Kohli, Kane Williamson and Joe Root, as far as Test cricket is concerned.
He might be the least classical of them – he has made a business of non-classicism — but in the last five years, his methods have helped him net more runs, conquer more shores and fashion more wins than any of them. That he achieved all these by being different, by not being governed by convention, by taking residence on off-stump, by fidgeting and twitching at the crease, by hitting the ball to unorthodox places, is merely incidental.
Some of his numbers, though numbers aren’t the most instructive tool to gauge the greatness of a batsman, have a transcendental value.
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