The nervous 9990s: On way to one exclusive club, Smith joins another

At 12.24pm in the middle of a sun-soaked SCG on day two, 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, it was a far more fitting scenario than his own milestone at Christchurch’s Lancaster Park in front of 50-odd people.

Between 12.24pm and 12.25pm, 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 made this uncharacteristic lapse and joined one of Test cricket’s most exclusive clubs – a quartet of batting greats (Brian Lara, Mahela Jayawardene and Alastair Cook) to have been dismissed in the nervous 9990s.

Brian Lara, the only man to fall in the nervous 9990s twice.Credit: AP

Wouldn’t you know it – at almost the same time 24 hours later, Smith wavered once more, the cameras panning to Dani again, this time in the members, as he did so. One run, one measly, minor little run, shy of 10,000 for his career.

The nerves may well have been all too real as India refused to go away, Smith the third wicket to fall in their pursuit of a series-winning and generation-defining target of 162. It certainly looked that way as Smith survived a narrow LBW shout from Krishna before fending a difficult delivery to Yashasvi Jaiswal at gully.

A batting nerd of the highest order, Smith will take little comfort from joining Jayawardene in being dismissed with 9999 runs to his name. Or sitting alongside Lara in managing to fall twice in the 9990s, just months after plundering his world record 400 not out against England in 2004.

The West Indies maestro limped across the five-figure line at Manchester in the return series, hitting his 10,000th Test run after a first-innings duck thanks to Andrew Flintoff. Lara made it to seven and his milestone in the second dig before Flintoff nabbed him again.

Just as rare as Smith’s lapse in concentration was his falling short of the roundest of numbers.

Of the nine times Smith has passed a thousand-run mark in Tests, six times he’s done it with a century. Each of his 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 and 5000-run milestones were marked with a triple-figure score.

The last of those 1000-run blocks, when Smith moved from 5000 to 6000, was him at his absolute peak, scoring those runs at a Bradmanesque average of 90 between March 2017 and January 2018.

Unsurprisingly, Smith’s first 1000 runs and the most recent four-figure block have been the toughest of his career. Questions over his form and possible retirement date in Test cricket abounded before back-to-back hundreds this summer.

Smith’s march from 9000 runs – passed at Lord’s during last year’s Ashes – to 9999 have come at an average of 37.03.

Not since starting out as a leg-spinning No.8 more than a decade ago has Smith averaged less than 40 over a 1000-run period.

He will be the 13th member, and fourth Australian, of Test cricket’s 10,000-run club soon enough, with Australia’s next Test outing against Sri Lanka in Galle starting at the end of the month – which makes the tale of Smith’s twin dismissals in the nervous 9990s all the more memorable.

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