'Genius at work': Steve Smith's unique road to batting greatness

March 2010. Ricky Ponting's Australians are in Wellington, New Zealand. It's the final day of the first Test, and the visitors are making light work of a meagre fourth-innings target.

As Phillip Hughes blazes away out in the middle, another young batting prodigy sidles up to batting coach Justin Langer.

"A bloke named Steve Smith says, 'Hey coach, can we go and hit some balls on the bowling machine?'" says Langer, who is himself a new face in this squad, having not long transitioned into coaching.

"I said, 'Let's go'. So we went over to the little synthetic net. It was first time I'd really had a hit with him … and he was so unorthodox.

"I'd say, 'Let's hit some cover drives'. And instead of hitting cover drives, he'd be smacking them through mid-wicket.

"Then I'd bowl him some pull shots, and everything I knew about pulls, you stay nice and still, but he would swivel himself like a ballerina.

"Then I'd say, 'Hit a cut shot', and he'd get across and smack them behind square leg.

"We hit for about 40 minutes, then we walked back, and I said to Ricky Ponting and (head coach) Tim Nielsen: 'Steve Smith can't bat. We're wasting your time'.

"Well, what a great lesson in coaching."

* * *

"As a young kid, I thought he was as close to a genuine allrounder as you could get." – Phil Jaques

Moises Henriques was in grade 11 at Endeavour Sports High when he first came across Smith as a pimply-faced teen. The reputation of the grade nine kid from Menai High had made its way across the Sutherland Shire in Sydney's south before the two future national teammates squared off in a school match.

"I'd heard his name, and a couple of younger kids in our team must have played rep cricket with him, and they pointed him out," Henriques tells cricket.com.au. "I went out to bat, he was at short cover, and he looked like an absolute grub.

"I let maybe my second ball go, and he said, 'This guy's got more leaves than a tree' – and that's my first memory of Steve Smith (laughs)."

Henriques was also playing first grade for St George at the time, and it wouldn't be long before he was again lining up against Smith, who from 2003 made his way through the junior rep sides and then the grades at local rivals Sutherland.

"He was this chubby kid who was a little bit awkward, but you could see he was class from the start," says Phil Jaques, the former Australia batter who opened with Smith at Sutherland in those early years. "He just flew through the grades, then debuted (in firsts) towards the back-end of that first season. He made runs in his first game and never really looked back.

"He had game, and he was fearless in his approach, but he was also a really good listener and learner."

Jaques could clearly see Smith's potential but knew he needed to put some rules in place to ensure the youngster's survival against good attacks. Never cover drive before lunch was one of those, which also represented the general approach the senior batter took with the wunderkind.

"He had all the shots, but at that point he probably didn't know what shots to play when," Jaques says. "That was the biggest lesson for him when he first came in – understanding that his best method wasn't to go out and just play every shot known to man in the first session.

"He learned to be more respecting of the new ball, to earn the right throughout the course of the day to then be able to open up and play his own way, and really cash in late in the day. And he did that really well as a young player."

The lessons stood Smith in good stead. In 2007-08, he debuted as an 18-year-old in all three formats for NSW. Yet despite his impressive showings at the top of the order in Sydney grade cricket, the jury was still out around what kind of cricketer he was going to be, particularly when he took nine wickets – including 4-15 against Queensland – in his first three trips to the bowling crease in the Big Bash that January.

"Honestly, as a young kid," says Jaques, "I thought he was as close to a genuine allrounder as you could get."

Smith was part of a confident and ultra-talented young group of Baby blues that also included Hughes, Henriques, David Warner, Usman Khawaja and Peter Forrest. All six players debuted within two years of one another, and to those within Cricket NSW, it was evident that a fierce competitiveness was helping to rapidly advance their games.

"You had a group of young cricketers who were highly skilled and that helped them really drive each other's standards," says former Blues batter Ben Rohrer, who turned 27 at the end of that summer.

"(Smith) was just a normal kid, I found him a bit more carefree in those days than what you hear now … but he just loved playing, similar to Hughesy, they just loved the game and were very much carefree. Maybe as he learned, he realised what was important to become the best in the world, and that was being a bit more analytical (in thinking about his batting)."

Before the analytical approach however, there was experimentation; a modus operandi that has stayed with Smith throughout his near 15 years at the top. Henriques can still feel in his right shoulder the hours upon hours in the nets, where innovation ruled.

"I remember at a young age when we used to throw balls to each other, he would just start playing these ridiculous shots, and I would say, 'Well, I'm not going to throw if you're going to keep being stupid, because you're just wasting my time and wasting my shoulder'," he says.

"And he's like, 'No, but I'm practicing – I actually want to practice this shot'. Then in a couple of years he'd bring that shot out.

"He's more efficient now, but back then, he probably didn't have the knowledge to know what he was actually doing wrong, so he'd keep hitting balls until he figured it out.

"He just hit for hours, which wasn't great for my shoulder, but it was great practice for me just to watch. Now I look back and go, 'Well, that was a genius at work, just learning his craft and figuring out what was safe and what wasn't'."

* * *

"I was kind of blown away, and I thought: Oh, he's way better than I thought he was." – Chris Rogers

The dam burst for Smith the batter at first-class level in 2009-10, when his four centuries and an average of 77 in the Sheffield Shield turned heads across the country.

Yet it was his leg-spin that was still giving him a leg up. On December 15 he received a last-minute call-up to the Test squad as cover for injured off-spinner Nathan Hauritz.

"Steve is a leg-spinning allrounder who has been identified as an exciting young talent capable of having a significant impact at international level for Australia," said selection chair Andrew Hilditch.

Others weren't so sure. Smith had hit his maiden first-class century – a run-a-ball 102 not out against Queensland that he later described to me as a "bit of a cowboy innings" – just days before the call-up (which did not materialise into a debut). But as a bowler, he was widely considered to be extremely raw, and with 11 first-class wickets at 75.18 from nine matches, his inclusion was perhaps justifiably labelled "bizarre" in the media (with the bat, he had scored 507 runs at 42.25). To those from outside New South Wales in particular, it was an eyebrow-raising call.

"He'd been pushed up quickly, and I don't think anyone really knew what he was," says Chris Rogers, who was with Victoria at the time. "Was he a leg-spinner? Was he a batter?

"And I guess, looking outside in, there was probably a bit of frustration around: Why is this guy getting games (for Australia)?

"I played with Dave Hussey and I thought they were similar kinds of players, and I used to think: Why isn't Dave Hussey getting these kinds of opportunities? 'Huss' was at the peak of his powers at the time."

Those "games" Rogers refers to came in February, when Smith was picked to make his ODI and T20I debuts, and went on to play six matches across 24 days. The 20-year-old had been NSW's leading wicket-taker in the Big Bash, while in the domestic one-day cup he had played a couple of match-winning hands, including one that left veteran cricket scribe Robert Craddock impressed.

"Young allrounder Steve Smith showed why Shane Warne considers him a boy with a future," Craddock wrote for News Corp. "He showed great poise with the bat to guide NSW through a pressurised run chase … Smith's 75 not out off 84 balls was full of invention. (Queensland) were full of heart before losing their poise in the face of Smith's unorthodox assault."

And nor did Rogers take too long to be won over. Smith returned from white-ball duties with Australia to pile on three more hundreds in as many Shield matches at the back-end of the summer. The first of those came against Victoria in Melbourne.

"He got (124) at the MCG, and it just stood out," Rogers recalls. "It was composed, and it just looked a really, really good innings. I was kind of blown away, and I thought: Oh, he's way better than I thought he was."

By that point, Smith was happily showcasing his outrageous talent at every level. For Sutherland, shortly after New Year's, he scored 305 runs off 196 balls across two innings without being dismissed.

"One of those games was at Mosman," says Jaques, who remembers Smith toying with his switch-hitting skills at the time. "He must've been on about 100 and he got a free hit off the spinner. The boundary was a bit shorter on the off-side, and we're all sitting there watching, including 'Stumper' (coach Steve Rixon), and we're yelling out, 'Do it!'"

"He faced up left-handed, the guy bowled a quicker ball into leg stump, and he picked it up and flicked it over the boundary for six, into the houses there at Allan Border Oval.

"It was a free hit, but just the audacity – I hadn't seen anything like that at that stage."

Smith's first-class performances earned him a plane ticket on Australia's Test tour of New Zealand in March 2010. Yet despite his 772 Shield runs trumping his 21 wickets at 44, with the memory of Warne's leg-spinning heroics fresh in the minds of selectors and supporters alike, pigeon-holing the bottle blond youngster as our next great spin hope still proved irresistible for most. Especially after he had bowled NSW to victory in a Shield game against South Australia with 7-64.

"He had some serious talent as a leg-spinner," adds Jaques. "I remember that game – the drift and turn, it was like watching a young Warne."

Smith graced the cover of that winter's Inside Cricket magazine, in which leg-spin great Stuart MacGill sang his praises.

"He's definitely got what it takes technique-wise," MacGill said. "He gets beautiful shape – more shape than I did – and he turns it a bit as well."

Yet in his heart of hearts, Smith knew that while his leg-spin had fast-tracked him into the national set-up, his future lay elsewhere.

And so he set to work.

* * *

"He can't bat. We're wasting your time." – Justin Langer

Though relayed in the context of his own coaching inexperience at the time, Langer's candid assessment of a young Smith's batting prowess was in some ways proven right before he began helping to prove it wrong.

After an initial foray into Test cricket – two matches against Pakistan in England in July 2010 – yielded him 100 runs at 25, the right-hander was badly exposed at home to England during the 2010-11 Ashes. Thrice he was dismissed nicking outside his off stump to James Anderson while going hard at the ball, and he also came unstuck with some technical issues relating to his back-foot play. 

"I was nowhere near close enough to being the finished article," Smith later wrote in The Journey. "As a batsman I simply didn't cut it, not at that stage of my career."

A 21-year-old Smith had played only a bit-part role in five Tests across six months, taking three wickets from 62 overs and flitting between six and nine in the order. Through that home summer he set to work on improving his batting with Langer, who found him a quick study. An unbeaten 54 in the second innings of the fifth Test was punctuated with some improved off-side stroke-play and a bite-size warning for England of what was to come. 

After that match – his first on his home patch of Sydney – Smith wouldn't be seen in Baggy Green for more than two years. But nor would he ever be picked again for his bowling, as a shift in focus at first-class level mirrored his ambition; his bowling high of almost 220 overs in 2009-10 steadily dwindled across the next three Shield seasons, to the point that in 2012-13 he bowled just 22 overs.

"Steven Smith was always a batsman," insists his longtime teammate Khawaja. "It was just that the selectors made a really silly decision by making him into a leg-spinner and batting him at nine; he was batting four for us at New South Wales and smacking them.

"I remember sitting next to my dad one day at the SCG and just being like, 'This guy, every time he goes into bat, he just doesn't look like getting out at the start of his innings'. It was just 'bang', middle of his bat straight away."

In 15 Shield games through those three summers, Smith scored 950 runs at 38; far from mind-blowing numbers, but Rohrer noticed meaningful change in that time.

"He'd gone away, played a few games for the Aussies, and then when he came back, he was a different player and at a different level again, just consistency-wise but also method-wise," he says.  

"I think what happened was, he was just learning on the job and problem solving in such quick time, because he is such a quick learner about the game."

Smith was also handed the captaincy of the Sydney Sixers for the inaugural KFC Big Bash League final, and the 22-year-old earned plaudits from his teammates for his authoritative approach and tactical invention as the team won the title.

"Trevor (Bayliss, head coach) obviously saw something there, and Steve just took that captaincy on," Henriques says. "And he'd decided, 'I'm not going to bowl as much because I'm not a bowler who bats – I'm a batter who bowls. And he put all of his eggs in that basket.

"It was like he wanted everyone to know that he wasn't a bowler, so out of spite, he stopped bowling as much as he did. He'd just decided that, 'You know what, if I get picked again, I want to get picked because I'm a batter'.

"And I think previous to him getting dropped, he was flying by the wings a little bit in Shield cricket – he was just out there having fun – but when he got dropped and came back to New South Wales, he came back with the purpose of winning games.

"He said, 'Well, if I want to be a batter, I've got to bat long periods of time like a batter – I can't keep batting like a bowling allrounder.

"He put a lot of pressure on his batting and I think he developed that determination, which is what set him apart from (how he had been) a year or two earlier."

* * *

"Steve Smith has matured a lot. This year he has played especially well, although he hasn't gone through to the big scores. We see him as a young player of the future, enormous potential and one thing in particular in his favour is he uses his feet really well and plays spin bowling really well. He will be there as a back-up batsman and certainly to gain experience." – Selection chair John Inverarity (January 2013)

For the national selection panel, Smith's recall to the Test squad for the 2013 tour of India represented something of a gamble; while his Shield batting average now stood at a healthy 44.21, he had managed just one hundred in his past 48 first-class innings.

But it was also that sort of time in Australian cricket. The 2010-11 home Ashes thrashing had drawn an emphatic line under a golden era, while ahead of the India tour, the retirements of Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey had left a gaping hole in the batting order. On the horizon for Michael Clarke's side was a nine-Test sequence without a win, with seven of those ending in defeat.

After Australia's batters misfired in the opening two Tests against India, and with Khawaja and Shane Watson suspended following the Homeworkgate saga, Smith, now 23, earned his long-awaited recall in Mohali. And for the first time in his fledgling Test career, he was batting higher than six.

In the first of his 27 Test innings at number five, Smith made 92 in four hours, surviving and thriving against India's three-man spin attack. Later, he put that success down to not only his quite natural aptitude against spin, but a fresh approach to training and diet that shed some kilograms and boosted his fitness, in turn enabling him to concentrate for longer periods in the middle.

It was also the tour on which Smith first joined forces with batting coach Michael Di Venuto, the man who he would work more closely with than anyone in two stints across the next dozen years. That, and endless hours in the Chennai and Hyderabad nets facing a host of enthusiastic local spinners as the first two Tests were played out, was another significant learning experience for the rookie Test bat.

After his 92 in Mohali, Smith added 46 and 18 on a crumbling pitch in Delhi to average 40 for the series. But for the national selection panel, it wasn't enough. Whether, like his friend and batting contemporary Hughes, his unorthodox technique might have counted against him, only the selectors will know. But 10 days after that final Test, Smith's name was conspicuously absent from Cricket Australia's men's contract list.

Three weeks after that, he was also a notable omission from Australia's Ashes squad, selected instead as part of the Australia A group for a British Isles tour in the lead-up to the main event.

And so it was that in June 2013 – shortly after his 24th birthday – Smith took his destiny in his own hands. With Warner excommunicated from the Ashes squad on disciplinary grounds, and question marks over Michael Clarke's ailing back, the selectors were in the market for a back-up batter.

Against an Ireland attack led by fellow NSW player Trent Johnston, on a dicey wicket in Belfast, Smith walked in on a green wicket at 2-22 and peeled off a counter-punching 133.

"(That) innings stands out a lot to me," Smith told me years later. "We lost the toss, got sent in and that first innings was hard work. They had some bowlers who could exploit those conditions well. I got a hundred and that's basically why I got picked in the Ashes squad."

The news surprised the local press. The UK Telegraph called Smith a "mercurial wrist spinner" and suggested his inclusion had come ahead of leg-spinner Fawad Ahmed – despite the fact he hadn't bowled a single ball on the tour.

Working in the 24-year-old's favour was the changeover in head coach. Darren Lehmann, the new man in charge, had watched the century in Belfast against Ireland. Six months earlier, while Queensland head coach, Lehmann had also been on hand at Manuka Oval when Smith blazed a season-high 90. According to Smith, the coach later told him the innings had caught his eye: This kid's a gun, he'd thought to himself.

Picked at five for the first Test, he made 53 and 17, and after a double failure of two and one at Lord's, he might have again come under the gun, yet a century in between Tests at Sussex – and Lehmann's reported preference for right-handers against the off-spin of Graeme Swann – ensured he kept his spot for the third Test in Manchester.

Smith overcame his own doubts to make 89 in that match, then broke through for a maiden Test hundred in the final match at The Oval, reaching the milestone with a six down the ground.

"Smith does not always look like a Test batsman," wrote Vic Marks in The Guardian. "(But) he demonstrated that he is prepared to graft even though he is patently not a natural grafter … Occasionally there was a flat-batted pull off the front foot, an effortless drive through the covers or a lofted drive against Swann, and when he played those shots the sweetness of his timing was eyebrow-raising."

Yet for Smith, the nagging doubts persisted. After missing out in the Brisbane and Adelaide legs of the return Ashes series, he went to Perth low on confidence. With just 14 Tests to his name, and while averaging 33.16, he was still to develop the iron-clad self-belief his teammates would later pinpoint as a defining feature of his brilliance.

In his book Bucking the Trend, Chris Rogers recalls having dinner with Smith ahead of that third Test at the WACA Ground. En route, the young batter "let out all his frustrations and anxieties about the way his series was going," writes Rogers. "He told me he felt like he might be dropped soon, as the most junior member of the top six, and was close to tears."

Famously, Smith literally walked into his now trademark preliminary movement early in his next Test innings. With Australia 5-144 at the WACA Ground and Stuart Broad peppering him, he stepped across his stumps into a pull shot for four and never looked back.

"Everything just sort of clicked into place," he said years later. "It felt like, 'Right, I'm here. I'm ready to do this now'."

Once again he was benefiting from having the awareness – and the temerity – to experiment on the run. On the South Africa tour that followed, Rogers recalls Smith noticing the way AB de Villiers performed a similar 'trigger' movement before the ball was bowled. It was enough to convince him to double down.

The changes in his step across in the years since have been regular – Smith said in Brisbane last month they happen virtually every innings – and some have been more successful than others. He found it paid dividends for him against Pakistani reverse swing in the UAE in 2014, but then, during the 2015 Ashes, when he was dismissed for four straight single-figure scores for the only time in his career, he realised his movement was coming too late, and corrected in time to make a century in the final Test of that series.

By that point, his dizzying rise had taken him all the way to the No.1 Test ranking, making him the second-youngest batter – behind only Sachin Tendulkar – to achieve the feat.

* * *

"He doesn't strike fear in you like the Aussies used to." – Graeme Swann (June 2015)

Smith later described his masterful 100 against South Africa at Centurion in early 2014 as "the moment I knew I'd really made it at the highest level". It was his fourth Test hundred and the end product of a game plan he had worked hard on, and one that was critical in the rapid evolution to batting greatness that was about to unfold.

Against the world's best pace attack – Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel and Vernon Philander – Smith knew he would need to adopt a more disciplined approach to his batting than ever, and so he faced thousands of balls with that in mind.

Patience and the minimisation of risk, particularly outside his off stump, became the cornerstones of his new strategy. He became obsessive about getting his head in the right line to know exactly the whereabouts of his off stump, in part to stop a temptation to wander across and drive at fuller, wider deliveries that he found difficult to resist. Gone for good was the cowboy kid of yesteryear.

That approach reaped its greatest dividends yet in the home summer of 2014-15, when cricket tragically lost the unorthodox talents of Hughes before witnessing the coronation of another unconventional batting genius. Smith hit four consecutive hundreds at home to India, then when Australia went abroad, he hit 199, 215 and 143 in the space of six Tests in the Caribbean and the UK.

For the English in particular, this new model Smith represented a staggering departure from the far less convincing young batter who had visited their shores two years earlier. Off-spinner Swann, not long retired, was typically outspoken about the Australian ahead of the series.

"I don't think he'll score runs at three if it's swinging," he said. "Weakness will emerge with Steve Smith. He's not like a Steve Waugh – a nugget with no obvious ways of getting him out. I hope for England's sake that he's a flash in the pan. He doesn't strike fear in you like the Aussies used to, with a Matthew Hayden or an Adam Gilchrist."

In three Ashes tours since, Smith has tallied six hundreds in 14 Tests, scoring 1,655 runs at 63.65.

"He just didn't get out," says Rogers, who shared a 284-run stand with him at Lord's during the 2015 series. "And that sounds silly, but he knew how to get through (tough periods) and pick off the runs – and he made it almost impossible to bowl to him.

"His inner belief by then was second to none. I mean, I went through my career – and I think most cricketers do – second-guessing myself the whole time. Whereas he just had this belief that, 'Yeah, I'm the best'. That's what separates the mortals from the immortals."

As much as the runs Smith was scoring, what stays with Rogers was how he was scoring them. The veteran batter had stood in the field as an unorthodox Graeme Smith piled on a triple century in a county game, thinking to himself: That's a weird way to bat. He had seen the unique approaches of Simon Katich and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, and the many runs it made them.

"But maybe not as much as Steve," he says. "He almost just stood on one leg – on that back leg – and I think because his eyes were perfectly level, he didn't fall over, and he just never missed the ball on his pads.

"Most people would get beat on the inside and get hit on the pad, but he just never did. You couldn't quite work out how he was doing that. It was freakish."

And so it went. Smith piled on six hundreds in his next 17 Tests, then became the first Australian to score three centuries on a tour of India, mastering the spinning conditions like few of his compatriots had ever done. His 499 runs at 71.28 represented the perfect union of planning and preternatural talent.

"We had really good prep in Dubai on some tough net wickets, which we hadn't done previously," Smith later told me. "I knew I was well-equipped for that series, and I knew how I wanted to play the ball spinning away; I wanted to try and concentrate on not getting hit on the pad or getting bowled, so it was about taking my ego out of play and being happy to get beaten … that was my strategy, to play the line and if it skids on, I've got it covered, and if it spins, it's going to spin too far."

By the time Australia's now infamous 2018 tour of South Africa rolled around, Smith had played exactly 50 Tests since his maiden hundred at The Oval, scoring 5,437 runs at 73.47 (23x100s, 18x50s). It was the fourth-most productive 50-match stretch in Test history.

"In the Ashes that (2017-18) summer we got runs (together) at the SCG," says Khawaja, who is Smith's most prolific partner in Test cricket in terms of century stands (10), runs scored (2,649) and innings batted (51).

"He got a million runs in that series (687 at 137.40), he just dominated, and I remember 'Broady' (Stuart Broad) bowling to him in Sydney, and all the (England) guys, and they had no idea what to do. He was just stepping across the stumps, they'd bowl, and he'd tap it on its head and block it. Then they'd bowl a fuller one, he'd drive for four, then he'd leave a few, hit another four. It was like, 'Jeez, this guy's in the zone – he just does not look like getting out'."

Having spent more time than anyone watching him from 22 yards, Khawaja has developed his own theory as to why Smith was so spectacularly successful through those years.

"Everyone always talks about, 'Oh, he's a great problem solver'," he says. "But it's not that. He's just one of the best decision-makers I've ever seen. His ability to decipher a good ball from a bad ball, from length … he picks the right ball more times than the rest of us do.

"Some of us will drive at a ball that's not quite there, fend at a ball we shouldn't fend at. He's just so much better than everyone else at that decision making. Especially at his height, when he was scoring hundreds left, right and centre, everyone wanted to talk about his open technique, his weird (mannerisms), but it was none of that – it was just his ability to judge every ball so well.

"At the peak of his powers, he could have a guy bowling 140(kph) at him, and he just made him look much slower than the rest of us made him look – he was just so clear and concise, and making his decisions earlier than everyone else."

Contrary to Swann's 2015 prediction that swing would cause Smith issues, Khawaja believes his teammate is "the best player of genuine swing that I've seen", attributing at least some of his success in the UK in particular to his uncanny ability to find the middle of the bat against a ball that moves in the air.

"No-one really did wobble (seam bowling) back then, it was all swing, and he was just unstoppable," he says. "He'd pick it up early, predict where it was going, and it would hit the middle of his bat. It was quite bizarre to watch at times."

For Smith, much worse – and then somehow, much better – was to come after that prolific 2017-18 home summer, as the lows of a ball-tampering scandal pushed him out of the game for 12 months, and the highs of the 2019 Ashes pushed his batting average to almost 65.

Owing to his role in the Cape Town affair, Smith had by then become a polarising figure in world cricket. But his 2019 Ashes – 774 runs at 110.57 – was objectively among the best individual series for a batter in Test history.

"This is a man operating at a pitch that no longer requires a nod to the records of the noble dead," wrote The Guardian's Barney Ronay. "Right now Smith is simply in a space all of his own … a sporting phenomenon to be treasured whatever your passport."

* * *

"It can get a bit exhausting at times, definitely – particularly the older I get." – Steve Smith (December 2024)

Smith turned 30 shortly before that 2019 Ashes campaign and time now reveals it was the highwater mark of an incredible career. Today though he stands as a very worthy addition alongside Ponting, Steve Waugh and Allan Border in Australian cricket's exclusive 10,000 Test runs club, which he has reached in quicker time than Border and Waugh, and a couple more innings than Ponting.

And while the output has inevitably slowed since those outrageously lofty years, the 35-year-old, who sits in ninth on the ICC Test batting rankings, remains very much a key figure in Australia's batting order.

"The thing about Steve is," says Rogers, "even at 75 per cent, he's still one of our best."

And statistically at least, that's roughly what this legendary batter's output has been across the past five years; since the home summer of 2019-20, Smith's average of 43.31 from 45 Tests is 77 per cent of where his overall career mark stood at the beginning of this Sri Lanka Test series (55.86); though his 37 runs across two innings in Sydney – where he missed the 10,000 runs milestone by a single – resulted in his average dropping below 56 for the first time in a tick over nine years.

Yet with these Sri Lanka Tests and an upcoming battle with South Africa in the World Test Championship final in June, there remains no question an Australia side that includes Smith looks more formidable.

It was revealing too that, in a chat with The Unplayable Podcast prior to the New Year's Test, he included two of his four most recent centuries among the top 10 of his Test career.

The first of those was his imperious 121 in the 2023 World Test Championship final against India at The Oval, and the second was his drought-breaking 101 against the same opponent last December at the Gabba. Both innings were made under serious pressure – albeit different kinds of pressure – and both showcased significant adjustments to his across-the-wicket trigger movement. In that way, they were evidence once again of Smith's appetite for finding answers to complex batting questions. It's an appetite which, for now at least, seems as insatiable as ever.

"It can get a bit exhausting at times, definitely – particularly the older I get," he told cricket.com.au recently of the heavy training workload he demands of himself.

"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."