5 minute read“I hate doing it,” claimed Steve Smith at the toss. “But as I’ve said, we keep producing wickets that we don’t think is going to spin.” As it turned out, the more accurate assessment came from Ben Stokes. “We try and act like we know what we’re doing when we’re
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2 minute readSteve Smith’s cowardly plea to be protected from the new ball has been meekly granted by Australia’s spineless management team, less than a year after he persuaded them he really wanted to make a go of opening the batting. No official comment has yet been made on whether there is
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2 minute readSay, do you ever try to grab hold of a thing only to be knocked sideways by the sudden realisation that you actually have nothing to grab hold of it with? You’ve lost your hands! Fear not though, Steve Smith is coming to the rescue… Smith has done a video
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6 minute readShould we all be opening batters now? What’s the official line? Some changes of position are just too noteworthy to serve as suitable subject matter for small talk. An example from another sitcom: in Friends, when multimillionaire software genius Pete Becker outlines to Monica his plan to change direction. “Well
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2 minute readCommentators often say that a ball has gone “straight up” but few have gone up quite so straight as the one that resulted in Steve Smith’s dismissal against South Africa in today’s World Cup semi-final. It is astonishingly hard to propel a ball straight up. Hit a ball any serious
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2 minute readSteve Smith’s run-scoring apparently depends on whether he does or does not know the whereabouts of his own hands. Given Smith didn’t make it out of the foothills in India but then made a hundred in the World Test Championship final, we can only presume he happened across them again
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2 minute readMountains crop up a lot in metaphors. They’re forever being scaled, climbed or conquered. Steve Smith has come up with his own way to reach the summit of the mountain that is a Test tour of India though. “If we are able to topple that mountain, that’d be huge,” he
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2 minute read“Cricket Australia basically said to us, ‘Okay, what can we kinda do to make your time in hotels for the next month better? So the boys just took it to the next level” – Pat Cummins The latest series of The Test outlines all the various toys and gizmos the
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2 minute readMop-up of the day is a thing we do when we can’t really be bothered writing more than a sentence or two about a bunch of different things. Sometimes we end up writing extra sentences though because it looks weird if the opening sentence, in bold, is immediately followed by
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2 minute readInternational cricket’s longest-serving stand-in Test captain, Tim Paine (oh come on, he is), has been talking about whether Steve Smith could one day replace him. Paine told Cricinfo that when he first came into the Australia Test team, Smith was, “growing into that role and getting better and better. Then
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