Statistical brilliance and context

It’s an old Fleet Street adage that any headline ending with a question mark is best answered with a ‘no’. It’s called Betteridge’s Law, after the journalist who made it famous, though it’s old enough now that no one’s sure who coined it. It’s not an absolute rule but a handy little tool, and one you may need the more you read about Steve Smith. Smith’s form in the first four Ashes Tests, with two hundreds, a double, and another fifty, has pushed him up to second in the ICC’s all-time batting rankings, beyond Brian Lara and Denis Compton, past Garry Sobers and Viv Richards, ahead of Jack Hobbs and Len Hutton. The only man in front of him now is Don Bradman.

The rankings are designed to measure the height of player’s peak rather than how long he sustained it. The algorithm says Bradman reached his at the end of India’s tour of Australia in 1948, when he made 185, 13, 132, 127*, 201, and 57* in successive innings. That pushed his rating up to 961. No one else in history has ever made it above 950. But Smith has just reached 947. And the comparison has become irresistible. Steve Smith, The New Don Bradman? asked Sport24; is Steve Smith the best since Donald Bradman, wondered the BBC; and ABC ran with: Is Watching Steve Smith Like Watching Don Bradman in his Prime?

Smith has been brilliant for four years now, apparently since he made a spontaneous decision to add a back-and-across trigger movement to his batting during the Ashes back in 2013. His average since is 75, in 46 Tests, and he’s been top of the rankings the past two years. English fans can be forgiven for thinking the trigger story is just a ruse Australians put around to disguise the deal Smith did with the devil, just like the one Robert Johnson did down at the crossroads by the Dockery plantation one night in the 1920s. A Faustian pact to make him the best in the world.

Because, like so much of the Ashes in winter, all of this still feels like a fever dream, something you imagined while you were half asleep on the sofa with the radio on. It’s Marley’s ghost. The work of an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. Steve Smith, sometime leg-spinner, old overseas pro at Sevenoaks Vine, a man with a home-schooled batting technique who made his Test debut playing at No8 in one innings and No9 in the other, has grown up to become the best batsman of his time, the next best, they say, to Bradman.

Take a look at the scorecard of Smith’s first Test, at Lord’s in 2010 during that odd little series against Pakistan at the beginning of their exile. There were three great batsmen in that Australian team. Ricky Ponting, Michael Clarke, Mike Hussey. Now Smith has become better than any of them. You could hear the scepticism among the old English pros just a couple of years ago. “I didn’t think he was a great player and I still don’t think he’s got a great technique,” said Graeme Swann in 2015. Back then Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson both spoke about how vulnerable Smith would be batting at No3.

Now Ponting himself says that Smith could yet become the “best batsman in history”. He told ABC radio that Smith is “well and truly on track to do that”. Which is where Betteridge’s Law comes in. As good as Smith gets, he can never be better than Bradman. Because Bradman is barely human. Seventy years after his last Test, 17 years after his death, he has become a mythological figure. The idea that he was a player like any other in that he had his own flaws and failings is more remote than ever.

Arguments across eras are catnip for cricket fans. And you can go round and round saying that Bradman, unlike Smith, only had to play in two sets of conditions, English and Australian, and against four teams, England, West Indies, South Africa and India. And that Smith, unlike Bradman, has the advantage of playing on covered pitches, with modern kit and strength and conditioning techniques. But beyond those insoluble back-and-forths, there’s a bigger truth.

Bradman’s standing is, always will be, unsurpassed. Not because of his statistical brilliance, but because of the context of his career. Bradman played in an era when Test cricket had cultural primacy that it has long since lost. As Thomas Keneally wrote about his Sydney schooldays, if “the only history we were taught was European. Poetry cut out after Tennyson. If we spoke of literary figures, we spoke of Englishmen. Cricket was the great way out of Australian cultural ignominy for, while no Australian had written Paradise Lost, we knew Don Bradman had made 100 before lunch at Lord’s.”

Keneally’s quote is part of the lore, the Bradmania, along with all the other songs and stories. When the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser visited Nelson Mandela at Pollsmoor Prison in 1986, the first thing Mandela asked him was “can you tell me, is Donald Bradman still alive?” When Mandela visited Australia in 2000 he explained “in the 30s and 40s, at least in our country, we regarded Sir Donald as one of the divinities, so great was he and such an impact he made”. Bradman, like Babe Ruth, George Best, Muhammad Ali, was bigger than his game. You may as well measure Smith against Nelson’s column.

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