When Steve Smith started the recent Test series against India not far from 10,000 career runs, there was no guarantee that he would make 315 more across five Tests. Centuries in Brisbane and Melbourne narrowed the gap to 38 for the Sydney Test. Broadcasters ran recorded interviews with teammates reflecting on his career in the context of the milestone that hadn’t yet arrived. The other Australian members of the club – Ricky Ponting, Allan Border, Steve Waugh – were all on hand in Sydney with a presentation planned. Until Smith nicked off for 4 in the second innings, stuck on 9,999.
Assuming he can score a single across four potential innings in Sri Lanka, the moment will soon arrive in far quieter environs, with a small crowd and no hall-of-famers on hand. But there he will be, alongside the aforementioned countrymen, along with 10 other greats: Younis Khan, Sunil Gavaskar, Mahela Jayawardene, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Brian Lara, Kumar Sangakkara, Alastair Cook, Joe Root, Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis, and Sachin Tendulkar.
It’s interesting to consider what constitutes greatness on that list. Cook, with the lowest average of the bunch, but more innings than all but Tendulkar? Root, who Darren Lehmann said doesn’t deserve the status unless he makes hundreds in Australia? It’s also interesting to consider the place of Smith, with a singular career compared to all of the others.
For much of an Australian audience, even raising a question about Smith and greatness would get you marched off the end of Circular Quay. Fair enough, the numbers don’t bear argument: more centuries than any Australian but Ponting, at an average near 56 that has him 16th all time using the 20-innings qualification. A vast career already that may have years to run.
What about a player’s range? Smith’s tally is built on one peak of intensity. Start with his first hundred at The Oval in 2013, go until his suspension in 2018, then after a 16-month hiatus, add the first three Tests of his comeback in the 2019 Ashes. You get 56 Tests, 26 hundreds, an average past 73. That density of scoring is almost unprecedented: Don Bradman made 29 centuries in 52 Tests, but that was over the course of 20 years. Smith had four and a half years plus a postscript.
Even by now some people forget how unbelievable that peak was. There is a tendency, especially among English spectators basing it on the Ashes, to call Smith dour, even unwatchable, based on the long innings he built stepping across his stumps and working runs through the leg side until they were beside themselves with frustration.
But Smith’s early years of dominance were also years of attack, innovation, energy. His second Test hundred also against England in Perth in 2013 was a masterclass of pulling the short ball. India’s visit in 2014 was one of laser hand-eye reflexes and rubber wrists, smacking a line outside off stump through square leg, forehanding down the ground, even essaying scoop shots before they were all the rage. 2017 brought three tons in four Tests touring India, the toughest away assignment. Brisbane 2017 was a shuttered Ashes innings, but Perth to follow wasn’t. Manchester 2019 was full of shots in the second innings, at one stage sweeping a beach ball that had blown across the ground in a perfect manifestation of a commentary cliche. Smith changed his game to suit each assignment, his range as wide as it could be.
Either side of that peak, the inevitable flipside is that his returns are lower: 58 Tests, 10 hundreds, averaging 39. Solid, not superstar. His peak is roughly half of his career matches but produced two thirds of his runs. None of the others in the 10,000 Club shone so brightly for as long at their best, but conversely they were more consistent across careers. They had good years and bad years that tended to be interleaved. Does one assess greatness based on a shorter period miles in front, or a longer period near the head of the field?
Another division in Smith’s career is even more stark, a split that remains reflected in both peak and off-peak phases. Of those 34 Test hundreds, 24 were made in the first innings of a match. Nobody in the history of the game has more tons batting first, even Tendulkar who leads Smith by 17. Smith’s first-innings average is an absurd 83. Of the 10,000 Club, the closest is Lara on 70. The furthest are Cook and Gavaskar on 41, less than half.
Simply, Smith may be the greatest first-innings player ever. Bradman did average 113, but across 22 innings compared to 67. Smith is not far from catching Ponting and Tendulkar for overall first-innings runs, and they each had more than 20 additional innings. He does the most immediately useful thing a batter can for a team, fuelling huge scores that don’t let opponents close. Of those 24 hundreds, Australia won 22 times.
Then, comparatively, Smith goes off a cliff. His innings averages cascade from 83 to 49 to 40 to 31. Twenty-four hundreds batting first becomes six when batting second. That’s one fielding innings before output drops to a quarter. The third innings drops again to four centuries, all in unusual circumstances: Pune 2017 moving so quickly that the third innings began on day two; Perth 2015 and Melbourne 2017 on pitches so dead that Mitchell Johnson retired mid-match and the MCC replaced their wicket square; and Smith’s best Test, the Edgbaston twin tons when he might have had more energy after such a long break from the game. Move on to the fourth innings of a Test, and Smith has never made a ton at all.
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Batters naturally decline over a match, with fatigue and the difficulty of conditions. But a marker of greatness is producing performances against those odds. Third or fourth innings are when players claw their way to unlikely leads, or pursue unlikely chases, or grind out hours to save a hopeless match. The stats are burnished early, the stories written late. The final hours of a Test match are when legends are made.
Of the 10,000 Club, everyone but Waugh has at least one fourth-innings ton. Younis made five of them, Ponting and Gavaskar four. Hundreds aren’t compulsory, smaller scores win games too, but only Waugh’s fourth-innings average of 25 is lower than Smith’s. Most of the club average over 40, Younis and Ponting 50, Gavaskar 58. You think about Ponting’s rearguard at Old Trafford in 2005, or Gavaskar nearly chasing 438 in London. Smith doesn’t have a masterpiece that hangs alongside these.
Two remarkable stats: Smith has never batted in the fourth innings of a draw. Not a ball, in 114 Tests. And only once has Smith batted in the final session of a Test. Partly this reflects his team: Australia in total have only batted out three draws since his debut, all when he was absent. That’s a team that tends to win big or lose big. But even in those cases, Smith rarely plays a part. His one half-century batting last in a win was 53 not out in a comfortable chase, Christchurch 2016. He has five fifties in losses, four of them ending miles before the match did.
His one close fourth-innings loss was his best effort, 91 not out against West Indies at the Gabba when Shamar Joseph got hot. Nine more runs would have given Smith the hundred and the win, and an entry to the pantheon of batting last. Again, though, late-match fatigue wasn’t a factor. Smith began his final innings on day three and finished after a session on day four. His only other score in a somewhat close finish was the 54 at The Oval in 2023, the lone time that Smith made it past tea on day five. That was after rain took sessions out of the game, and he lasted nine overs on resumption.
As to why Smith’s variance is so marked, the logical theory is the insomnia that he has mentioned having during matches. Nothing diminishes reflexes and concentration day by day like lack of sleep. He also comes across as emotionally exhausted after big series, like before the sandpaper tour of 2018 and after the comeback Ashes of 2019. Whatever the cause, the pattern is clear. The deeper a match goes, the less influence he has. Like an octopus dying after spawning thousands of young, prolific at the beginning and redundant when it’s done. Get him cheaply first up, and three quarters of the time he won’t much trouble you the second.
Smith is great, perhaps the greatest, at what he does best. So can greatness live within confines? Should greatness mean excelling across the broadest range? Smith has that range geographically, with his scores in India, in the UAE, in South Africa, in England, an impressive split of 18 hundreds at home and 16 overseas. He doesn’t have it temporally, across matches. It doesn’t change the fact that he is parked in the driveway of the 10,000 Club, checking his texts before he walks inside. There is no caveat for entry, just variety in entrants. That’s the reality of Steve Smith, a player who in so many ways has always been different to the rest.
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