Steve Smith’s form is beyond just a blip — it is now a genuine concern

Not necessarily just because of statistics, but also due to the perfunctory ease with which these athletes have historically attained success - to the extent that seeing them fail is pretty much unimaginable. So if and when they do flounder, the impact is Brobdingnagian; it leaves you dumbstruck. 

On watching the replays, Smith would be the first to admit that he was dismissed to a nothing delivery. There was no chicanery from Ashwin, and Smith pretty much clipped a regulation full, in-drifting off-break straight into the palms of the leg-slip fielder. It was a fidgety shot that you usually don’t see from the eccentric right-hander, particularly in the embryonic stages where there are fielders in the bat’s vicinity. But while in the past he, and those watching, would have ostensibly shrugged it off as a freak one-off, there is now a developing worrying underlying pattern. For over the course of the past 12 months, uncharacteristic has been the new normal for Smith in Test cricket. 

These traits were on display last summer, where he averaged 36.28 and went 5 Tests without a ton. In Brisbane against Pakistan, walking in to bat at 351/2, Smith perished after just 10 balls, having his timber rattled by Yasir Shah attempting a wild swipe. In Perth versus the Kiwis, he went for a wild slash off Lockie Ferguson on 19, which would be put down, after which he would go on to add just 24 more runs. 

Later at MCG, he fell short of a ton by 15 runs after being bamboozled by a Neil Wagner short ball and the SCG, he threw his wicket away on the stroke of stumps to an innocuous Colin de Grandhomme half-tracker, fending his bat at a fifth-stump delivery which he usually, at his best when he’s in the zone, would have let go. There were shades of that hastiness today, which resulted in him posting his first duck on home soil in four years. 

That this rut has been mutually exclusive to red-ball cricket will also worry the Aussies. Ironically or not, Smith has enjoyed a supreme run of form in limited-overs cricket since after Ashes 2019, a period where he’s pretty much evolved and revolutionized his own batting in the shorter formats. He’s averaged 63.11 in ODIs and 40.33 in T20Is  since October 2019, at a time when his stocks in the longest format - where he’s averaged 28.44 - have plummeted. For his sake, Smith will be hoping that this is a weird coincidence, and rather not something more deep-rooted, where his red-ball prowess dwindles proportionally as his white-ball mastery surges. 

The alarm bells have been ringing for quite a while, and that Smith has now gotten out twice in single digits to a bowler who, prior to the series, he averaged 116 against, in a country where he averages close to 70, is ‘CONCERN’ written in uppercase, at least by his own standards. Smith might have lost his hands which he discovered prior to the ODIs, but, along with that, it is of paramount importance - for both himself and Australia - that he also rediscovers his zone, which, in the process of regaining the urn, he seems to have dropped at Old Trafford.