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Steve Smith’s one-year ban from international cricket could have the positive side effect of making him a better, more dynamic white ball batsman thanks to his heightened exposure to T20 via domestic leagues.
Smith this week signed on to play up to 13 matches in the upcoming Caribbean Premier League, a strong competition which attracts some of the world’s elite T20 cricketers, having just completed a six-match stint in the Global T20 Canada tournament.
Given Smith is banned from Australian domestic and international cricket for another eight months, there’s a good chance he may play in other T20 tournaments. He can choose from the likes of the Bangladesh Premier League this October and November, and the Hong Kong Blitz next February.
It’s possible Smith could play 30 or more T20 fixtures during the period of his ban.
This would be a massive increase in T20 exposure for Smith, who has had limited involvement with the format. Over the past six years, Smith has played only 12 matches a year in T20s, with most of those games crammed into a short period each year during the IPL. In that six-year-period he has played a paltry ten T20 matches for Australia.
Such a lack of consistent game time in T20 cricket hampered his ability to adapt to the ever-changing demands of the shortest format. As I wrote earlier this year, Smith is no longer an automatic choice in Australia’s T20 team, despite being captain of that side up until his ban for ball tampering.
This is due to Smith’s lack of dynamism in T20Is, a format which demands batsman be capable of reaching or clearing the boundary regularly. The international version of T20, which is typically played on very flat pitches, has become extremely high scoring in recent years, so much so that a total of 200 is no longer an intimidating chase for the top teams.
Sides, therefore, cannot afford to accommodate batsmen who score as slowly as Smith, who has a strike rate of 125 across his 155 career T20 matches. That much is evident from the recent omission from the England T20 side of superstar batsman Joe Root.
Root has a very good average of 36 in T20s but his slow strike rate of 128 seems to have put off the England selectors, who instead chose more powerful strikers.
Root, like Smith, has been held back as a T20 batsman by his relative lack of exposure to the format, which requires very specialised skills. Both Root and Smith clearly have the potential to be very good T20 batsmen but they need more regular game time in the shortest format to develop the required power game.
If Smith does play 30 or so T20s during his year-long ban, that heavy concentration of short-form cricket will surely fast track his development. There is every chance he will return to international cricket as a more versatile and destructive batsman.
That would be great news for Australia’s ODI team, which is in need of becoming more dynamic with the blade. Since the last World Cup, ODIs have become a far higher scoring format. Australia in the past two years have been brutally exposed as having overly-cautious, outdated batting tactics in an era where massive totals of 350-plus are commonplace.
Since the last World Cup, Smith’s strike rate in ODIs has been unacceptably slow at just 84, which equates to a run rate of just five runs per over.
Smith remains a valuable ODI batsman, capable of anchoring and guiding an innings nicely but when he returns, Australia need him scoring at a strike rate much closer to a-run-a-ball. His glut of T20 cricket this year may just help him take that leap.
Smith’s ban may just make him become a better limited overs batsman.