At 12:24pm in the middle of a sun-soaked SCG, Steve Smith was doing very Steve Smith things. Staring up into the MA Noble stand, gesturing with increasing frustration at a couple of spectators apparently in his eyeline, a couple of four-letter thoughts kept to himself. Already he’d done the same at the opposite end, taking umbrage at unwanted distractions in a similar fashion to last year, when that pesky piece of tape next to the sightscreen prompted him to delay play for fully five minutes.
Then, at 12.25pm, Steve Smith did a very un-Steve Smith thing. Nicking off to Prasidh Krishna’s first ball of a new spell, Smith’s concentration had been broken.
His customary post-dismissal hangdog look included a glare toward the stands. For the rest of us, Smithwatch hit pause. With Test cricket’s 10,000-run club calling, the 35-year-old had begun the day needing 38 to join the 14 men already in it.
In front of his home crowd, on an SCG deck where he has plundered more than 1000 runs at almost 70, spearheading an Australian fightback from 4-39. As leading member Allan Border mused before day one, a far more fitting scenario than his own milestone at Christchurch’s Lancaster Park in front of 50-odd people. Between 12:24 and 12:25, cameras panned to Smith’s wife Dani accordingly, sitting in the same stand her husband was gesticulating in the direction of.
Having seen off the early threats of Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj, Smith’s uncharacteristic lapse sees him join on.
