It’s an old Fleet Street adage that any headline ending with a question mark is best answered with a ‘no’. It’s called Betteridge’s Law, after the journalist who made it famous, though it’s old enough now that no one’s sure who coined it. It’s not an absolute rule but a handy little tool, and one you may need the more you read about Steve Smith. Smith’s form in the first four Ashes Tests, with two hundreds, a double, and another fifty, has pushed him up to second in the ICC’s all-time batting rankings, beyond Brian Lara and Denis Compton, past Garry Sobers and Viv Richards, ahead of Jack Hobbs and Len Hutton. The only man in front of him now is Don Bradman.
The rankings are designed to measure the height of player’s peak rather than how long he sustained it. The algorithm says Bradman reached his at the end of India’s tour of Australia in 1948, when he made 185, 13, 132, 127*, 201, and 57* in successive innings. That pushed his rating up to 961. No one else in history has ever made it above 950. But Smith has just reached 947. And the comparison has become irresistible. Steve Smith, The New Don Bradman? asked Sport24; is Steve Smith the best since Donald Bradman, wondered the BBC; and ABC ran with: Is Watching Steve Smith Like Watching Don Bradman in his Prime?
Smith has been brilliant for four years now, apparently since he made a spontaneous decision to add a back-and-across trigger movement to his batting during the Ashes back in 2013. His average since is 75, in 46 Tests, and he’s been top of the rankings the past two years. English fans can be forgiven for thinking the trigger story is just a ruse Australians put around to disguise the deal Smith did with the devil, just like the one Robert Johnson did down at the crossroads by the Dockery plantation one night in the 1920s. A Faustian pact to make him the best in the world.
Because, like so much of the Ashes in winter, all of this still feels like a fever dream, something you imagined while you were half asleep on the sofa with the radio on. It’s Marley’s ghost. The work of an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. Steve Smith, sometime leg-spinner, old overseas pro at Sevenoaks Vine, a man with a home-schooled batting technique who made his Test debut playing at No8 in one innings and No9 in the other, has grown up to become the best batsman of his time, the next best, they say, to Bradman.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
