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For Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne, it's runs at first sight

Gideon Haigh
4 min read
5:55AMSeptember 05, 2019.
Updated 5:22PMSeptember 05, 2019
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Steve Smith (right) and Marnus Labuschagne leave the ground during a rain delay at Old Trafford overnight. Picture: Getty Images
Steve Smith (right) and Marnus Labuschagne leave the ground during a rain delay at Old Trafford overnight. Picture: Getty Images

Marnus, meet Steven. Steven, this is Marnus. Hey, I know you guys have never met, but I really think you’ll get on.

Two for 28 after seven overs of the Fourth Test, and the Australians look like strangers adrift. Though they have famously shared a number four groove in a Test match, the new Australian pair of Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne have never batted together in international cricket.

Not to worry: like the newly-introduced pair at party who quickly discover shared interests and mutual friends, they are soon conversing as though they have known one another for years.

People know Smith hereabouts. He has been to these parties before, though he missed the last. Labuschagne is finding his feet, but feeling increasingly comfortable. They’re happy to have found one another. They’re animated, rather particular, a little pedantic. They like to bat just so. They perform the batting equivalent of finishing one another’s sentences.

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Smith has dressed for the occasion, stem guard and arm guard offering the protection he had lacked at Lord’s. Off Labuschagne, pressure rather rolls. With his gum he blows himself bubbles, a little like the one he bats in: England cannot puncture it.

From a distance, they can look uncannily, jauntily alike, when they’re working the ball off the pads, making room to slash, letting the ball go, although Smith performs the full pivot on leaving, Labuschagne only a little curtsey.

Does the younger Labuschagne remind the older Smith a little of himself? Does the older look like someone the younger might aspire to emulate? Whatever the case, it suits them both. Marlene Dietrich was once asked if she minded being imitated by other performers. She replied: “Only when they do it badly.” Labuschagne does it exceptionally well.

It’s a partnership that unfolds like an acquaintanceship becoming a friendship. After Smith on-drives Stuart Broad, and Labuschagne leans back to cut Craig Overton, their mid-pitch exchanges look like toasts to each other.

For everyone else, the party’s a bit flat. Twenty overs in and the ball is as scuffed as a dog’s chew toy. The bowling is appropriately ragged.

The rain swirls and the wind sweeps through, disturbing bails and scattering litter. A beach ball crosses the ground from west to east that almost deserves to be clocked on the speed gun.

Jofra Archer spends a lot of time at mid-on wearing two sweaters with his hands in his pockets, a long way from Barbados. Kumar Dharmasena walks in from square leg like Monsieur Hulot. When the covers come on, the ground staff resemble Scott’s last expeditioners trying to erect their tent near One Ton Depot.

It rather accentuates the steadiness of the third-wicket partnership as it resumes from 4pm, the warmth of the batsmen’s communion, the ease of their chit-chat. The pair aren’t separated until they’ve added 116 from 194 deliveries by an inswinger from Craig Overton deserving of a wicket. On an occasion that could have been a little tiresome, Smith and Labuschagne have had a swell time.

Earlier, the party had ended rather too quickly for their openers. He likes a gathering, enjoys a jape, does David Warner. It was all good fun when he turned his pockets out at Birmingham to confirm them sandpaper-free. Now he’s searching those pockets for runs.

Warner’s involvement on the first day of the Fourth Test began at 11am and ended abruptly at 11.03am with him trailing off penitently having been caught at the wicket. The second-ball nought reduced his average in the series to 11.28 and meant he had now been dismissed by three of the last five deliveries he has faced.

Actually there are a host of similarly expressive statistics but they would repeat the same point — that Warner is suffering the least fun party of his decade in international cricket.

There exists a distinction between being “out of form” and “out of runs” but, in falling for a fifth time in the series to Broad, Warner is blurring it.

When he started his career, of course, Warner was the soul of indiscretion. If he had a vulnerability, it was to his own audacity.

Now he seems wracked by indecision. As twice at Edgbaston, first in the World Cup then in the second innings of the First Test, Warner played a backfiring party trick of a stroke, setting out to play, adjusting to leave, and ending up doing neither.

The average Australian opening partnership this summer, moreover, stands at 8.8 in 17.7 deliveries: in other words, number three has been exposed inside the first three overs.

Early losses stress test every order, not least in this series, where an army of bowlers is escorting a platoon of batsmen. Bearing the brunt has been Usman Khawaja, whom it has finally seen off — albeit that by averaging 27 in his last ten Tests, less than 25 overseas, less than 22 when Australia lose and less than 20 in England, Khawaja had made himself rather a hostage to fortune.

With his experience as a bona fide opener for Queensland, Labuschagne made at once a better fist of the role yesterday, compact in defence, decisive in footwork. He might be top of the guest list in future. Were he a visitor to your place, you’d like him. He is unostentatious, polite, no trouble — except now, increasingly, to England. “Good fun,” Labuschagne called the day afterwards. It wasn’t the first phrase that came to anyone else’s mind.

Smith? Well, when it comes to batting, he would happily do it at both ends. The only company Smith needs is his gear. But if he can strike up another fruitful conversation today, he might well double that fun.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/cricket/for-steve-smith-and-marnus-labuschagne-its-runs-at-first-sight/news-story/cfd8703fa8015ac98ba83402ed5b2e45