Shakin’ Stevens was the biggest-selling British singles artist of the 1980s. It is probably worth remembering this fact the next time a man with a greying beard tells you the 80s were the last real golden age of popular music, a starburst of youthful creativity, artistic collectivism and sad, pale people standing behind synthesisers pretending they’re not surrounded by balloons on Top of the Pops.

Forget all that. The rankings don’t lie. In reality the 80s were characterised by an apparently insatiable thirst for a handsome middle-aged Welshman miming to country music and wobbling his legs.

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Stevens was a colossus of the times, racking up 14 top-10 UK hits. In many ways – and any BBC4 music-documentary commissioning editors out there should imagine this bit being said by a haunted-looking Paul Morley wandering past abandoned Welsh collieries – Shaky’s reworking of a boom-time 1950s American aesthetic captured best that era of plastic prosperity and existential cold war angst.

When Shaky’s legs wobbled, they wobbled for all of us. They wobbled like a nuclear wind fluttering the slatted blinds of an eviscerated yuppie wine bar, or like flags of industrial retreat across the de-skilled Western economies. Or indeed like the Berlin Wall, itself the object of bitter, salutary satire in Shaky’s own Green Door phase.

Anyway. There’s probably more of this if anyone’s interested. Although it seems quite certain no one will be. Just as in reality this is all just a suitably roundabout way of getting on to Steve Smith, another man with unusual footwork who scored a brilliant unbeaten hundred in the first innings of the third Test against India in Ranchi this week, in the process confirming his own unarguable and, indeed, rather unfashionable world No1 status.

Smith occupies an interesting position right now. When his score passed 74 Australia’s all-format captain became the seventh fastest batsman to pass 5,000 runs in Test cricket. Later a gunshot on-drive so violently bottom-handed on that it left him lurching across to the offside – Smith was born lurching across to the offside – brought up his 19th Test hundred. He finished on 178 not out, the highest score by an Australian in India.

No doubt Test bowling stocks have been higher than they are now, a standard objection to anyone who has the temerity to succeed in the present and not years ago when everything was better. But the fact is Smith’s numbers are genuinely breathtaking. Of the seven all-time giants to reach 5,000 runs in similar good time only Jack Hobbs, Garry Sobers, Steve Smith and Don Bradman – still out of sight above the clouds in his tiny, little, rattly space capsule, cricket’s own Yuri Gagarin – got there while averaging over 60.

There is always an urge to unpick these things, to detect the lurking flaws beneath the data. But there really is no way out of this, no way of spinning Smith’s numbers down. He averages more than 45 on every continent, scores the same weight of runs home and away and has a hundred against every opponent. This is not going to go away. In fact, he is getting better. Since his breakthrough in England in 2013 Smith averages 71 in 42 Tests. Right now the history of sustained elite Test match batting reads: Bradman; fresh air; more fresh air; Smith; everyone else.

None of which is going to go down that well in the wider world. Just mentioning Smith in such elevated company – suggesting he is a nose ahead of, say Virat Kohli, let alone the relentlessly lionised Sachin – will draw harrumphs of disbelief. Instead it is Smith’s lot to be asterisked, shrugged over, lumped in as up-there, a kind of make-do No1 while Virat or Kane or Joe get their engines thrumming, flex their photogenic shoulders and basically stop not scoring as many runs as the fidgety Aussie.

If Smith has a wider claim on some kind of ultimacy right now it is perhaps a minor role as the greatest ever Test match batsman to be nobody’s favourite Test match batsman.

Why should this be? Maybe it’s because, aged 27, he still has the agreeably pudgy good looks of the bad guy in a 80s teen movie who drives a convertible and bounces around with his goons looking mean at the prom. Smith can also be graceless, as witnessed by the furore at the last Test in Bengaluru where he admitted looking to the dressing room for guidance on DRS appeals, something Kohli might have, but didn’t quite, call cheating.

Maybe the reluctant embrace is just a function of Smith’s own circuitous rise. Even now there is still a lurking sense that all this might just be an experiment that got out of hand, the ongoing hot streak of cricket’s most successful five-year night-watchman. Smith’s breakthrough came as leading wicket taker in the 2008 Big Bash and as a bowling star of the 2010 World T20.

As he nosed up into the clouds alongside the Test Match greats this week a wonderful partnership with Glenn Maxwell in Ranchi was perhaps a glimpse of a working future fort his mishmash of interests; evidence that cricket’s debilitating fusion of codes and methods can still produce something orderly and tight and undeniably beautiful.

India fight back following Steve Smith masterclass for Australia Read more

Still, though he seems undervalued. That odd sui generis technique hardly helps. Smith continues to glower out at the world from behind a crabbed and coiled stance. Even in the middle of a test Match he still looks like he’s batting in someone else’s ill-fitting borrowed kit, and doing very well all things considered in between fidgeting with his pads and waggling his helmet and holding the Velcro together on that pair of crusty gloves he pulled out the bottom of the team bag.

Let’s face it Smith doesn’t just look like an lbw candidate, but like an lbw shoo-in, elected life President of the global lbw association in succession to Shane Watson. And yet this is another chimera: such is the brilliance of his footwork Smith has been out lbw seven times in 97 Test innings. For all the splayed feet, the helicopter whirl of the wrists, at the heart of Smith’s batting is a moment of purity, the beautiful clarity with which his bat meets the ball, right under his eyes, head punishingly still.

Perhaps it’s time to be more impressed by all this. Cricket needs its giants. For England, Smith represents a major point of resistance in the coming year. Australia will arrive as the most obvious threat to dreams of a home Champions Trophy win. After which it’s the Ashes.

Smith should already be looming at the edge of the eyeline, the opponent best qualified to ennoble what is a vital year for Joe Root, the ECB, Sky TV, BT Sport and everyone else concerned with promoting English cricket’s latest new-era new era.

Come inside Shakin’ Steven. It’s time to roll out the garlands in earnest for the best batsman of his era, and a cricketer who has now decisively sidled up on greatness.