Ashes 2019: Peerless Steve Smith to defy Brits’ Lord’s prayer

Every figure has Steve Smith above his peers, and his Test average is the highest since the greatest of all.

Australia captain Tim Paine and Steve Smith in the Long Room at Lord's Cricket Ground in London, England. Picture: Getty Images.

It is a mark of Steve Smith’s ­impact on this Ashes series that English Sports Minister Nigel Adams sought him out to take a selfie with at the Australian embassy­ this week.

High commissioner George Brandis may not have Smith’s book, The Journey, or copies of Wisden on his expensive bookshelves, but he’d been briefed well enough to know that the cricketer who won the loudest applause at the event was something special.

“Can I particularly say to Steve Smith: you made every Australian heart fill with pride with those two magnificent knocks — 144 and 142: one of the greatest performances with the bat in the history of the Ashes,” he told the 300-strong crowd at Australia House.

The batsman is going so well in these parts you wouldn’t be surprised­ if the Queen asks him for an autograph if they should cross paths. Fast bowler Dennis Lillee infamously asked her for one once and, while she demurred at the time, she did have one mailed to him a little later.

Smith is keeping England awake at night as the two teams prepare for the second Test, at Lord’s. Last time he was there, he scored a double century in front of his proud parents.

On the eve of the match, he posed for photographs in the Long Room with a Don Bradman portrait above his left shoulder.

One day they will hang Smith’s portrait in those hallowed halls, too. Today, though, he will walk down its stairs and through throngs of its elite members as the greatest batsman to play the game since Bradman.

His metrics are amazing. The statistics-rich Wisden website ­recently tasked its numbers men to further mine his data after his twin centuries at Edgbaston.

He can never compare with Bradman, whose career Test ­average of 99.94 borders on the supernatural, but he can be ­compared with all others, espec­ially of his own era.

Every figure has him ahead of his peers, and Smith’s Test average­ of 62.96 is the highest since the Don’s, the greatest of all.

The rest of today’s “Fab Four” batsmen do not hold a candle to him in Test cricket. As captain, he averaged 70; India’s Virat Kohli and New Zealand’s Kane Will­iamson are in the low 60s, England’s Joe Root the low 40s.

If your team is in trouble, he is your man. His average of 68.45 when he comes in with the total lower than 50 is 18 runs better than his closest rival. And he is the only one of the four who contributes more than 20 per cent of his team’s score.

Former England greats Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Vaughan wrote yesterday of ways to get Smith out, noting in passing that England invented bodyline to deal with Bradman …