It seemed fitting that even Steve Smith’s celebration of another brilliant, gripping sui generis hundred should become a little bit clipped and fraught and fussicky. The hundred had arrived in the right way too, with one of the thrillingly unbound, but still perfectly balanced cover drives that had decorated his innings.
Smith’s cover drive is a remarkable thing. It shouldn’t really be possible. He is already opening his body up the other way as the ball is delivered, closing his left shoulder, gripping the bat hard with his bottom hand, shaping for the default leg-side nurdle.
It helps that Smith has a preternatural grasp of the time and space of batting, the way the moment just slows and drags and stretches out as the ball is delivered, time seeming to bend, a trick of his own ability to judge line and length and swing so early.
From there Smith somehow has time to shift not just his grip, but his weight, his forward energy, and to bring his bat through in a perfect, withering arc, finishing with an almost parodically high elbow that got higher and higher as this innings progressed, so that by the end he was almost somersaulting off his feet as the ball scorched between the cover fielders.
Jimmy Anderson overpitched, that bat face came whirling through, and Smith had his helmet off straight away, raising both arms, drinking in the applause of a crowd that had booed him out, more in a spirit of red-trousered panto-banter than actual malice.
At which point Smith began to wave his bat more pointedly, running through a series of very precise shapes and patterns, taking in all relevant parts of the pavilion and the members stand, a little irritable, covering any missed spots, making the bat-pointing more complete and balanced; and basically celebrating as he had batted for the preceding 169 balls, like a man solving an extremely complex giant-scale sudoku puzzle.
The cover drive did for him shortly after the first drinks break, Smith reaching across, letting the hands – oh those hands – flay at a wide one from Josh Tongue and edging low to Ben Duckett. His 110 had come off 184 balls, and felt like an inevitability, an unspoken agreement between batter and fielders, from the moment he first appeared and began flicking and cuffing and gliding the ball into the spaces.
Australia’s first innings tailed off a little to end on 416. Later on Zak Crawley would provide the most exuberant batting of the day, striding about the sun-drenched lime green of Lord’s in June and reeling off a series of almost cartoonishly classical shapes, the easy drive, the leg-side clip.
But Smith’s hundred felt like a significant moment for various reasons. First, of course, the numbers, and the Smith numbers are always startling. This was his 32nd Test century. Only Ricky Ponting has more for Australia.
Plus, of course, there is the circularity. Smith made his Test debut on this ground in 2010 against Pakistan, batting at No 7, and was described by at least one keen-eyed reporter as the next Shane Warne.
Which wasn’t that far off, because in the event Smith has turned out to be the closest thing to the next Bradman, as much as this might pain those who only see his angular awkwardness, who have been waiting as the years stretch for this to be a blip or an oversight, a man having a very long, apparently endless day out.
Form is temporary. Smith’s ability to keep clipping that ball from under his eyes, a walking defiance of established tenets of the lbw law, is apparently permanent.
Smith and Lord’s is a story in its own right. This will be his last appearance here, perhaps even one of his final Test matches anywhere. There was the brilliant High Smith double hundred in 2015. The unforgettable theatre of that Jofra Archer spell four years ago, Smith batting on with concussion (“I felt like I’d had 10 beers”), a sequence it is now deeply uncomfortable to watch back.
And the numbers do matter, weirdly, crankily. Smith’s entire Test career has been a 12-year battle to end up averaging over 60. And of course above 60 is next level, above the routine everyday generational greats, still way, way, back from that neat, flannelled, sepia man in the green cap, but undeniably great in a way nobody else in the modern age has managed.
Smith needs an implausible 461 runs, in his remaining seven innings in this series, to get above 60 again. And again this is more than simple number fetishism. Late-stage Test cricket has needed him to be great, to convey some idea of ultimacy in this form. Will anyone ever bat like this again, or even have the chance to be great like this, as the longest form erodes and dissolves and sinks back into undercooked two-match series, a heritage tribute grudgingly endured.
This was at least classical Smith, all angles and space, the basic maths of ball and grass and obstacles, batting as an algebra problem to be solved. It came with a tinge of sadness too. Lord’s may not get another look at a batsman quite like him. But then, there has, to date, only ever really been one.
