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Steve Smith may well become a good T20 player one day. But right now he is ordinary and his recent promotion to captain of the Australian T20 team at the expense of Aaron Finch was a major mistake.
It smacked of favouritism for there was no justification in ditching Finch, the world’s No.1-ranked T20 batsman, for a player in Smith who has minimal achievements or form in the shortest format.
Finch currently is slaying attacks in the Indian Premier League, with 191 runs at 64, whereas Smith has made a poor start to the season, having been selected for Rising Pune Supergiants seemingly based only on his excellence in the longer formats.
From his first five matches this IPL season, Smith had 78 runs at 19, with a dawdling strike rate of 123, after scraping together 83 runs at 21 in the World Cup. His record for Australian in the shortest format also is very poor – an average 21 at strike rate of 122 after 30 matches.
In the World T20 Australia required Smith to play a straightforward role and he failed. In a team brimming with power hitters, Smith needed only to turn the strike over consistently by picking the gaps and running hard.
This should be an elementary task for a batsman of his pedigree, who has an extraordinary average of 60 in Tests and has become an elite ODI player over the past two years.
Smith at times has seemed not to recognise his role in T20s. He is not required to destroy attacks for every side he has played for has had enough other batsmen to whom such dynamism comes natural.
For the moment, he is not suited to taking on T20 bowlers. While he has a wide array of strokes and a glut of natural talent, Smith’s efforts at bullying T20 attacks tend to look forced and awkward.
He would do well to model himself on Joe Root. Rarely does the England superstar arrive at the crease and immediately try to boss the opposition in T20. He works his way into innings, allowing very few dot balls, which itself puts bowlers under pressure.
In his first 20 to 30 balls faced Root typically looks to attack only those deliveries which are in his hitting zones. Only later in his innings does he seek to manufacture boundaries.
This is the type of batsman Smith could and should become – the modern-day anchorman.
But he should be honing this approach in domestic leagues, not in the Australian team, in which he has not earned his place. The way in which Smith bumped Finch out of the national team just before the World T20 was similar to Michael Clarke’s return to the ODI side at the expense of stand-in skipper George Bailey for last year’s 50-over World Cup.
At the time there was significant debate about the merits of this move. Many fans and pundits argued that Clarke had no right to the captaincy or even a place in the ODI XI. Yet Clarke had an astounding ODI record and was replacing a player in Bailey who was amid an extended form trough.
Compare that to Smith, who has an awful Twenty20 record and replaced a player in Finch who was amid an extended form bonanza. Having made such a big captaincy call, the selectors are unlikely to back away from it anytime soon.
Smith will have an extended run in the Australian T20 side. Perhaps by the time the next World T20 rolls around in four years’ time, hosted in Australia, he will have blossomed into the elite T20 player his talent suggests he can be. But, for the moment, he’s extremely lucky to be Australian captain.