Steve Smith walking the fine line between genius and insanity

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity and Steve Smith is the man who treads it most often.

Australian batsman Steve Smith tries out new stem guards on his helmet in the nets at the Country Ground in Derby. He later discarded them due to discomfort. Picture: Getty Images

For a series between the fourth and fifth best sides in Test cricket, the Ashes series has an epic quality. It could be the weight history drags to these events, it could be just luck that has seen it play out with stunning individual performances in each of the games.

It certainly doesn’t feel like a series where so much relies on so few. Both teams have bowling attacks that would stand up at any time and any where.

The batting looks thinner. Steve Smith is one of the all-time best. Joe Root’s talents are rendered a little anaemic by comparison, but are undeniable. David Warner is yet to prove himself capable of showing the same dominance here he has at home or in South Africa. Ben Stokes is capable of cyclonic damage, he is chaos where Smith’s is a more calculating and reliable genius. The rest are either ill-suited to this format, finding their way in it or just holding until a Smith or Stokes takes up the task.

When Smith grabbed his equipment to have a net at the Derby country ground this week he left the packaging for a new stem guard lying on the grass.

“Additional protection for the back of the batsman’s head and neck,” it claimed. Adding, as if it had properties that could aid the incontinent, that it’s “absorption” was 5-star.

A quick check confirmed that the helmet nestled in the crook of Smith’s arm did, indeed, have the stem guard attached. He’d promised the day before to try and wear one in training, but didn’t sound all that convincing.

There’s a line in Tim Paine’s column in today’s paper that he had passed on to him by Steve Waugh. “Sport doesn’t build character it reveals it”.

It’s been attributed to a couple of people over the years, but the research tends to point to an actor turned sports commentator, Heywood Hale Broun, and the line comes from reports of a speech he gave at a Kansas University in 1974 and there’s a bit more to it than the aphorism that’s leapt onto the inspirational quote calendars.

“Sports do not build character,” he (Broun) says. “Sports reveal character and I enjoy writing of sports because, I think, madness — the fierce devotion to succeed competitively — is essential to greatness.”

If madness is essential to greatness then Smith’s is the easiest to identify. Before and after the moment he plays the ball he is the dishevelled man standing by a busy road, arguing with the voices in his head, given to expansive, involuntary limb movements.

In his moment of stillness, however, when those mental and physical energies are harnessed and focused to the job at hand, he has a serenity few achieve at the wicket.

Poprishchin in Gogol’s Diary of a Madman confesses that he “had begun sometimes to hear and see things no one had ever seen or heard before”.

There’s a sense of that when Smith’s at the wicket. What does he see when he points his bat at something not there, when compulsively he taps his helmet or twists his pad between balls? What does he hear that has driven him to score more runs than anybody in the game?

His is a talent robust enough to deal with changes of line and length, speed and swing, alternatives of spin, surfaces as different as Perth and Pune, crowds as hostile as Edgbaston and as supportive as Sydney’s. Changing balls doesn’t fuss him. Changing fields is another variable he can take in his stride. All of it is peripheral when he has his mind set on making runs.

Change his equipment, however, and he is gripped by an irrational anxiety. Attaching that stem guard, he claimed this week, promotes a claustrophobia akin to being inserted in the tube of an MRI machine, he estimates it pushes his heart beat up by 30 to 40 beats per minute.

It is a simple piece of rubber that sits on the bottom of his helmet. Something designed to preserve his life.

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. Between pleasure and pain too.

Smith reminded us again this week that he fights an eternal struggle with his hands and the handle of his bat. Those hours and hours in the nets might look like a way of tuning himself to a Jofra Archer short ball, or fine tuning a shot to fine leg, but mostly they are about trying to remember just how to hold a bat. When it feels right he is done, until it does he is agitated and searching.

Stokes strikes you as the sort of guy who would grip the bat with the intensity a strangler grips a neck. The allrounder doesn’t meet the eye as a man prone to introspections or subtleties. When Smith is shadow batting in his hotel room at night, old Ben is larking it up with the lads. Bit of a bovver boy if the closed circuit camera outside that Bristol nightclub is any guide.

His “madness — the fierce devotion to succeed competitively” is as different to Smith’s as his century in the third Test was to either of the Australian’s in the first.

The method might be different, but as Smith observed, the motivation was the same.

“You could just see the passion that he showed and the fight,” the Australian said. “He never gave up. You look at him, and I really admire this about him, when he scored a hundred he didn’t even celebrate, didn’t care. He had one thing on his mind and that was getting England over the line, and you’ve really go to admire that.

“When you’re in those pressure moments you’ve got to want to be the one to deliver and do what you can for your team.”

With two Tests left there’s a sense that the others are supporting actors as these two opposite and fiercely devoted characters fight it out for the urn unless a plot can be launched to nobble one or the other.

Who of the two will deliver the Ashes for their team?