One would have thought that Steve Smith, 13 days since his last competitive hit, would be bursting to bat. One would have thought that after waiting all morning for Marcus Harris, Usman Khawaja and Mitchell Marsh to go first, Smith would have come to the crease after lunch determined to stay for hours.
Instead, on the second day of Australia’s tour match at Derby, Smith looked distracted and erratic, playing as if he did not much care for being there at all. He duly was not, holing out for 23 before heading straight to the nets, leaving his teammates to run up a lead of 166 before declaring on 338 for five, then leaving Derbyshire 53 for three by stumps.
It was an innings out of character for the normally fastidious Smith. After long dry hours where the only wicket came from a run-out, Derbyshire had exhausted their frontline seamers and had partnered the off-spinner Hamidullah Qadri with back-up bowlers. Smith played himself in after Anuj Dal bowled Khawaja but grew agitated with spin at both ends after Matt Critchley replaced Dal’s medium pace with loopy leg-breaks.
Seeming to take this as a personal affront, Smith started lining up the spinners as though it was the back end of a 20-over match. He tried going over cover and smeared several shots to midwicket, dispatching a full toss for four before slicing an attempted straight smash to Qadri running in from deep cover.
His 40 minutes at the crease having ended anticlimactically, he walked to the sidelines, picked up his batting bag and walked straight into the nets with David Warner and a dog-thrower. It was hard to escape the implication that he believed his teammate could offer him more valuable work under training conditions than the local team could in the middle.
Smith’s approach was reflected by Matthew Wade, who made an attacking century in the second innings at Edgbaston but has also made four scores in single figures during the Ashes. Wade came out reverse-sweeping multiple times, was dropped at short third man off a top edge, then tonked a catch straight to mid-on. As the commentator Jim Maxwell observed on BBC radio, Wade was playing either like a man who knew he was safe for the next Test or who already knew he had been dropped.
Cameron Bancroft has already been dropped from the Test side and the usual opener cut a forlorn figure batting at No6 in a match that would have no bearing on his future. He rattled up 36 not out, while Marnus Labuschagne batting below him made an unbeaten 39.
Labuschagne is sure of his spot for the fourth Test, meaning that Wade, Harris and Khawaja are each potentially vulnerable.
That put an interesting spin on the opening partnership between the latter two, especially when Khawaja ignored Harris’s call for a single and watched his rival get run out for 64. Khawaja’s eventual 72 was far more leisurely and meant that neither made a decisive score.
Not that runs against this particular side would carry a whole lot of weight. Two green seamers in Alfie Gleadall and the debutant Dustin Melton joined Derbyshire warhorse Tony Palladino as the seam attack, which didn’t quite compare with Australia’s Mitchell Starc, Peter Siddle and Michael Neser.
Starc would be the other player hoping to impress, knocking out the off stump of Derbyshire’s captain, Billy Godleman, for 12 before pitching up again to trap Dal for one, before Siddle had Luis Reece caught at slip. With seven wickets to take on the final day, there is one last chance for a statement.
