Tag: Steve Smith
Steve Smith (via @CricketAus)
Steve Smith was spotted having a beer in New York last week. Several newspapers ran really stupid stories about it with really stupid headlines. We were going to write about the stupidest one but then we forgot what it was and they also deleted the story.
Fortunately, we’ve now remembered, allowing this website to live up to its unwritten tagline: “Yesterday’s news… today!”
A whole family of newspapers headlined their stories: Disgraced Smith a sad sight drinking alone in New York
Based on this, we have devised The Steve Smith Headline Generator.
It goes like this…
Disgraced Smith a sad sight [doing what] [where]
That’s it. It’s that simple and it works for pretty much anything.
Some fictional examples:
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight reading his phone at the airport
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight watching a film at the cinema
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight scratching his nose in a post office queue
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight eating a pizza in a pizzeria
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight putting rubbish in a bin in the central business district
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight doing a bit of a half-run quick step thing while crossing a road in the South of France
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight swimming in the Ionian sea
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight speaking to the media at a press conference
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight pushing away photographers on his doorstep
- Disgraced Smith a sad sight sleeping in his bed
Sandpaper (via Sky Sports)
When we first saw Cameron Bancroft tampering with the ball using sandpaper, we thought to ourself: “That is sandpaper” – and so did everyone else.
We were therefore very much surprised when he later claimed that it was not in fact sandpaper but something akin to home-made sandpaper.
“We had a discussion during the break and I saw an opportunity to use some tape, get some granules from rough patches on the wicket to change the ball condition,” he explained.
It has since turned out that no, actually it was sandpaper all along because of course it was.
This revelation both made sense and also entirely didn’t make sense.
It made sense because the main thing sticky tape sticks to is itself, so it would have been a hell of a feat for Bancroft to keep it in his pocket all flat and rigid like that.
It didn’t make sense because why did Bancroft say that it wasn’t sandpaper? It was such a pointless distinction it literally didn’t even occur to us that it might not be true.
Bancroft and Steve Smith were in that press conference admitting what they’d done. Yet at the same time as coming clean, they also decided that they would tell an outright lie about that one specific detail. How did they hit upon that particular course of action?
Smith: We’ve been caught in what was clearly a premeditated attempt to alter the condition of the ball using sandpaper. What the hell are we going to do? What shall we say?
Bancroft: Let’s mostly confess but then say that we didn’t use sandpaper. Let’s say it was tape that we sort of made into sandpaper once we were out there on the field of play.
Smith: Yes, that’s an excellent idea. That should entirely negate everything we’ve done and ensure we sidestep any and all criticism.
Seriously, why would you lie about it? The question demands some scrutiny.
In that initial press conference…
1. Smith and Bancroft admitted ball-tampering. The nature of the material used to carry out the ball-tampering did not negate this, so this cannot be the reason why they decided to lie.
2. Smith and Bancroft admitted planning to tamper with the ball. They said they’d come up with the idea in the break. They weren’t claiming this was a spur of the moment thing, so this cannot be the reason why they decided to lie.
3. Smith and Bancroft admitted using something very much akin to sandpaper to tamper with the ball. The primary aim of rubbing the hypothetical sticky tape in dirt was to create a thing with a coarse side which could then be used to rough the surface of the ball – so basically sandpaper. The nature of the thing cannot be the reason why they decided to lie.
4. Smith and Bancroft did not admit to sourcing actual sandpaper. This is the only difference between what happened and what they said happened. It would seem that for Smith and Bancroft the threshold for wrongdoing lies at the very specific point between ‘making sandpaper’ and ‘purchasing or otherwise acquiring sandpaper’.
Conclusion
This no doubt sounds very much ridiculous to you, but it’s the nature of ‘ball maintenance’ that everyone has a slightly different but very precise idea about what is okay and what is not okay.
For example, a lot of people feel that sucking a sweet and then taking the resultant sugary spit from your tongue to shine the ball is okay, but that taking sugary spit directly from a sweet on your tongue and using that to shine the ball is not okay. For these people there is a critical ratio of sugar-to-saliva beyond which you become a massive great cheat.
You will probably have your own opinion about where exactly the threshold lies. That opinion will no doubt be mental.
Darren Lehmann has another opinion again. We don’t know what that opinion is, but it is so radically different from Smith and Bancroft’s that the poor man has had to resign from his job as Australia coach due to the extraordinary weight of disappointment he is currently feeling.
Absolutely the best recent headline about Australia’s ball tampering is the one on Fox Sports suggesting that David Warner has ‘gone rogue’.
The evidence for David Warner’s rogue-going is that (a) he was sitting on his own at one point and (b) he drank Champagne with friends who weren’t cricketers.
Based on this, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we have also gone rogue, because (a) sounds rather lovely while (b) is definitely something we’ve done at weddings and female birthdays.
What is however stated less explicitly is (c) a general vibe that Warner is distancing himself from the team and is also kind of furious. Unnamed players have warned that there could be an ‘incident’ (which, admittedly, could just mean that one or two of them want to lamp him) and there’s a sense that throughout the tour he’s been gradually drifting further and further into Davidwarnerland where David Warner makes the laws and David Warner enforces the laws and everyone else is somehow in the wrong.
If you’re reading articles elsewhere today, there’s a good chance you’ll come across a sentence along the lines of “there’s a growing feeling that Warner was the ringleader” and this probably feels fairly credible to you.
Let’s bulletpoint the circumstantial evidence.
- David Warner is an off-field arsehole
- David Warner is an on-field arsehole who likes to ‘get involved‘
- David Warner was until recently Australia’s ball maintenance guy
The third of those is probably the only one that’s truly of relevance because we all know there are plenty of arseholes who don’t tamper with cricket balls.
Several UK newspapers have run a story that Warner told England players how he used the strapping on his hand to knacker up the surface of the ball a bit during the Ashes.
Here is a picture of Warner’s hand during the Port Elizabeth Test (thanks to Darryl for pointing this out to us).
Warner’s hand (via Twitter)
This image raises three important questions in escalating order of importance:
- Does David Warner really need that much strapping?
- David Warner puts his wife’s name on his bandages?
- What the hell does it mean that David Warner puts his wife’s name on his bandages? That means something, right? There’s no way that doesn’t say something about their relationship. (His kids’ names are also on there, but very much as afterthoughts.)
It’s important to point out that Warner is right-handed, so he shouldn’t have required assistance writing the names. (Several of you will no doubt feel that he probably did require assistance writing the names anyway.)
There has also been a suggestion that Cameron Bancroft only became Ball Management Guy after a dressing room attendant spotted Warner putting sandpaper in his strapping during the second Test at Port Elizabeth. This claim has the general air of being not enormously true based on the vagueness of the source, but we mention it anyway because you never know. We certainly wouldn’t bet big money against it and not just because we already have a lot of outgoings and to do so would therefore be somewhat irresponsible as well as juvenile.
The most compelling case for David Warner as ringleader has been put forward by journalist Geoff Lemon. He thinks Warner’s smarter than he’s generally given credit for (which, in all honesty, isn’t actually all that hard given the public perception of him) but he says he’s also prone to wild mood swings and high aggression. Even never having met him, those qualities just seem instantly and 100 per cent believable.
Lemon doesn’t think Steve Smith can control Warner and instead just tries to accommodate him. He thinks the South Africa experience has got to Warner and that he’s increasingly been driven by what he perceives to be righteous rage. Under a weak captain and an indulgent and protective coach who lacks perspective and self-awareness, you can see how that kind of an attitude might lead Warner towards ever-darker parts of the grey area and incrementally on from there.
An alternative view, which we’ll put forward for balance, is that David Warner is a very convenient and beautifully appropriate fall guy.
We were in a police line-up once. It was when we were at university. We can’t remember exactly how it came about, but we think that someone from the police came onto the campus and said that they needed young men with short dark hair to make up the numbers. So we went down to the station along with a bunch of other short-dark-haired middle-class students and stood next to a lad from the estate with somewhat longer hair and then the person came in and said it was the lad from the estate and we all got a tenner and went and bought ourselves ten pints.
The point is, take almost any conceivable combination of current Test cricketers, line them up alongside David Warner and then ask people to guess which one’s been a dick. Doesn’t even matter what the crime is – who are people going to pick? People are going to pick David Warner because he’s a dick.
The idea that Australia did something wrong and that Warner was 99 per cent responsible is an easy thing to accept because it just seems so fundamentally plausible.
Warner too will be aware of this. He’s spent most of his career feeling like everyone’s got it in for him and while there’s a dash of paranoia and a soupçon of insecurity in that assessment, it’s also pretty much fully accurate and correct.
The man himself, you feel, will have a strong sense of the way the wind is blowing this week and might therefore have concluded that he might as well ‘go rogue’ before he’s officially banished. Why wait?
Australia have been caught ball-tampering. But what was the worst aspect? And what was the funniest?
Excuse making (all images via Sky Sports video)
Well this is very much hilarious but also reprehensible because saying the second bit is part of the unwritten contract we have all entered into as cricket fans.
Australia have been caught ball-tampering, a simple statement that doesn’t really do justice to all that’s happened and how people have reacted to it.
Australia planned to tamper with the ball, tampered with the ball, attempted to cover-up tampering with the ball and then, once they were flat out of options, admitted tampering with the ball and claimed it would never happen again (good luck taking 20 wickets in your next home Test match, lads).
It’s all a bit sordid. Let’s try and work out which was the worst bit (and also which was the funniest).
Altering the condition of the ball
The kind of cheating where you subsequently have to be incredibly skilful for it to actually have an impact is not, in our eyes, the world’s greatest crime.
The written law is that cricketers can only polish the ball. The unwritten law is pretty much: “Just don’t get caught, okay, because then we all have to feign outrage.”
Different people are happy with different things when it comes to ball “maintenance”. There will never be agreement, so the unwritten law becomes the pragmatic solution. Vithushan Ehantharajah wrote a truly excellent piece about reverse swing for The Cricket Monthly that features many of the common techniques. (In the lower leagues, a team-mate of Special Correspondent Dad’s used to apply lip balm to his trousers so that shining resulted in a sort of veneer.)
Surreptitiously altering the condition of the ball is like the ‘sticky bottle’ or ‘magic spanner’ in cycling, where a rider gets assistance from a team car under the guise of doing something else. There are circumstances where these things are considered okay and circumstances where they’re considered not okay. You do them at your own risk and if you cross the line, you just have to accept that everyone’s going to rip into you.
Verdict: Not the worst bit.
The rank incompetence
We don’t know whether it’s the worst aspect of this incident, but the Australians’ ball-tampering incompetence is certainly the funniest aspect. We’ll say that now. No real need to compare it the others.
Let’s first deal with the methodology. This is what Cameron Bancroft used on the ball.
Looks like sandpaper, doesn’t it? Looks pretty much exactly like sandpaper. That’s certainly what everyone instantly assumed.
But, no, it was not sandpaper. According to Bancroft: “We had a discussion during the break and I saw an opportunity to use some tape, get some granules from rough patches on the wicket to change the ball condition.”
Cameron Bancroft did not bring sandpaper onto the field of play to use on the ball. What he did was infinitely stupider than that. What Cameron Bancroft did was bring some raw materials onto the field of play with which to manufacture some sandpaper and THEN he used it on the ball.
Compounding this, he added: “Obviously it didn’t work, the umpires didn’t see it change the way the ball was behaving or how it looked or anything like that.”
So to run through the whole thing: Australia went to incredibly great lengths to try and alter the condition of the ball by manufacturing homemade sandpaper in full view of about 100 cameras and then they used it in full view of about 100 cameras and it didn’t work.
As risk-reward goes, that is not a great ratio.
Verdict: Not the worst bit.
The cover-up
Footage of an incident of cheating has been played on the big screen at the ground and obviously also broadcast around the world. Darren Lehmann thinks he’s probably the only one who’s spotted it though so he gets a message to the player responsible and lets him know.
Bancroft sneaks the offending material into his pants.
Now no-one will ever know!
‘Yes, yes, it was definitely this completely different bit of material that I was using,’ he told the umpires.
After he later came clean, Steve Smith said the plan was hatched by “the leadership group” but also informed the press that he was “not naming names.”
Verdict: Pretty bad.
The hypocrisy
Australia have in recent years very much positioned themselves as the moral arbiters of the game. As a rule of thumb, everything they do is fine and anything anyone else does crosses the line.
Darren Lehmann, in particular, has been roaming the world like some sort of sporting morality consultant, delivering lectures on what is and isn’t acceptable in cricket. More than that, in fact – like a judge, handing out verdicts and recommending sentences.
The whole time he’s been doing this, he – and everyone else in the team – has been going on and on and on about how the team plays hard but fair. There are so many quotes making reference to ‘the line’ and Australia’s respect for it that we honestly can’t pick out a favourite.
Verdict: This is probably the worst bit. It’s like the Team Sky thing, if you’ve been following that story (here’s a breakdown of it if you haven’t). If you set yourselves up as whiter-than-white, as moral arbiters of the sport, you will be judged against that standard.
Steve Smith fails to get stumped (via BT Sport)
Remember averages and strike-rates?
We do.
Let’s take a look at some of the meat and potatoes stats for England’s 4-1 one-day series win over Australia.
Steve Smith ate balls
The Australian captain ate up 148 deliveries over the course of the series and yet paid his team back with just 102 runs.
Steve Smith is a greedy ball-eater and not at all generous to his team-mates in his approach to run-scoring.
This is the danger when a one-day batsman’s defence is too reliable – he can actually fall back on it.
Australia took wickets
England had just three bowlers who averaged less than Chris Woakes’ 39. Adil Rashid averaged 29.90, Liam Plunkett averaged 30.00 and Tom Curran averaged 7.50.
In contrast, six Aussies averaged less than Woakes, and of those, five averaged less than 30.
Moral of the story: up until the tenth and final one, wickets have little intrinsic value in one-day cricket.
Plenty of batting to come
Steve Smith says that England’s habit of absolutely caning it until they run out of batsmen is risky – but it’s less risky than for most teams because of how they pick their side.
England’s batsmen are more disposable and each of their wickets is therefore less valuable to the opposition. With big biffer Liam Plunkett – a man with three first-class hundreds to his name – at number 10, the top order can afford to chance their arm that bit more.
The benefit of the approach (quicker run-scoring throughout the innings) is generally greater than the cost (greater likelihood of losing wickets) in large part because of the point made in the previous section.
Chris Woakes averaged 170
And scored 117 runs per 100 balls.
Chris Woakes bats at eight.
England won the run-outs 4-1
The same as the series score. Coincidence?
(It’s quite possible we just added this up wrong, because life’s too short for double-checking.)
Moeen Ali was economical, Adil Rashid was expensive (but took 10 wickets)
Different bowlers who go about things in different ways. It’s good for a captain to be able to call on both.
Steve Smith is not a good batsman. Not always. Very rarely, in fact.
As far as we can tell, he’s generally only half-decent at the moment bat strikes ball and only very rarely before or afterwards.
Here are the four stages Smith passes through for every single delivery he faces.
Stage one – obsessive-compulsive who’s never worn cricket gear
Before taking guard, Steve Smith likes to swiftly have a fondle of every single item of protective equipment affixed to his body. It’s clear that he feels very, very uncomfortable in all of this stuff and will have trouble standing still, let alone playing sport.
Stage two – young man who has seen a line drawing in a cricket textbook
Straight legs, bat against foot. This is not so much a batting stance as a child’s parody of a batting stance.
Stage three – the wanderer
As the bowler runs in, Smith sets off towards point, his bat seemingly dragging him along. He has the air of someone who has maybe played cricket at some point, but no-one ever properly showed him how to do it.
Stage four – basically Don Bradman
The final stage sees Smith middling the ball with his big fat bat with all bodily parts correctly aligned. He wasn’t even put off by the fact that Chris Woakes was supposed to be bowling but then James Anderson actually delivered the ball.
We could have added a stage five, but our will to take screengrabs from a tiny app that’s very hard to accurately fast forward and rewind has now entirely departed.
Stage five would have shown him awkwardly flapping about after contact like a flat-footed grandma with a bad hip and oversized pads.
More on Steve Smith’s ‘idiosyncratic’ batting technique here.
Like most wild animals, The Barmy Army are generally best viewed from afar – ideally on television or at the very least with some sort of robust barrier between you and them.
They can also be very funny.
Australians sometimes struggle to comprehend that the same bounce that can make life difficult for visiting batsmen also means that a lot of deliveries will go over the stumps.
Steve Smith frittered his reviews away, failing to learn this lesson. When Australia next appealed for LBW, the Barmy Army did this at him.
A reason why the The Barmy Army are the best fans in the world ????
Steve Smith has used up all of his reviews and they love it…so does Joe Root ????#Ashes
???? BT Sport 1 HD pic.twitter.com/2BBydfXJfM
— The Ashes on BT Sport (@btsportcricket) December 5, 2017
Steve Smith (via BT Sport)
Fans and pundits alike are agreed that Steve Smith will be the difference between the two sides in this year’s Magellan Ashes (movement rate of all ships is increased by two). He has therefore been named man of the series, even though we’re barely halfway through the first Test.
Some may feel that Smith is merely an extremely good player who put in the most recent strong performance, but there is a wider feeling that the future is known and the Poms might as well pack up now and go home for a nice Christmas with their families.
Australia fan Mitchell Frappuccino, who attended the third day in Brisbane, summed up the feelings of many when he put Smith’s clear superiority down to his innately Australian attacking mentality.
“You know you see these Pommy batsmen and they just prod and poke and leave it half the time. They’re happy to score at about three an over. It’s almost like they don’t want to win.
“But Smudge, you know, he just has this aggressive watchfulness about his play. His strike-rate was 43.25 today. That’s over 43 runs per 100 balls. I think their bowlers were just intimidated.
“That’s the way we go about our cricket over here. We play to win. If our batters can intimidate the opposition with some well-judged leaves, well that’s all part of the game isn’t it? It’s mental disintegration; bullying them with patience, restraint and a certain amount of caution.
“These Poms just don’t know how to handle it. And wait until we get to Melbourne. It’ll be even slower and lower there.”
When it was put to Frappuccino that 43.25 was pretty low as strike-rates go, he countered: “Well that’s down to the Poms’ defensive fields, isn’t it? There’s only one team playing to win here.”
For his part, Smith (quite genuinely) said that his hundred “meant everything”. This presumably means he’ll now be utterly devoid of motivation for the rest of the Magellan Ashes (movement rate of all ships is increased by two), which could prove an issue.
Photographs on this site by Sarah Ansell
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