Steve Smith’s run-scoring apparently depends on whether he does or does not know the whereabouts of his own hands. Given Smith didn’t make it out of the foothills in India but then made a hundred in the World Test Championship final, we can only presume he happened across them again at some point while he was in Sussex.

First up, the hands thing, which we have previously revealed as being the real motivation for Smith’s elaborate pre-delivery fidgeting routine. He’s keeping tabs on them; making sure they don’t go astray.

Because according to Smith himself, he is prone to losing his hands and this can be for several months at a time. If that happens, all he can do is hunt for them.

“It’s taken me about three-and-a-half or four months to do it,” he revealed after finding them last time. “I had a big smile on my face after training the other day. I walked past Andrew McDonald and said, ‘I’ve found them again’.”

Judging by how frequently he’s metamorphosed into a batter in this most recent Test appearance, Smith has again located his hands.

Earlier in the year, we mildly ridiculed the idea that Smith playing in division two of the County Championship would be great preparation for Test cricket on the grounds that’s actually supposed to be one of that competition’s greatest failings. In our defence, when we said that, we didn’t realise that Smith had left his hands there.

Want us to email King Cricket articles to you? We can? If you want? Yeah? Cool. You can organise that here.

Mountains crop up a lot in metaphors. They’re forever being scaled, climbed or conquered. Steve Smith has come up with his own way to reach the summit of the mountain that is a Test tour of India though. “If we are able to topple that mountain, that’d be huge,” he said.

It’s an innovative approach certainly, but you’d have to say that mountains don’t immediately seem to lend themselves to being toppled. The word ‘topple’ conjures images of something top-heavy being tipped over. Mountains are constructed rather differently. Mountains are decidedly bottom-heavy.

If Steve Smith is going to topple the Test tour of India mountain, he’s got an awful lot of excavation ahead of him. Then again, sometimes people say they’ll move mountains to achieve something and this is far less than that. Smith’s plan would involve moving only a proportion of just one mountain.

Over the hill

If Pat Cummins’ team do experience success by following Smith’s strategy, they could bring home team captain Rohit Sharma tumbling down to the valley floor.

Following on from Virat Kohli’s unignorable stint in charge, Rohit’s leadership has been bizarrely easy to overlook. He’s missed three of the five Tests since he became captain as well as the three Tests leading up to the handover. Cricinfo’s Karthik Krishnaswamy points out that he’s sat out India’s last half dozen T20 internationals as well.

Rohit is clearly being saved for the biggest engagements – series such as this – but the injuries and rests have nevertheless been proliferating. Just how much authority can you maintain when you don’t actually ever seem to play cricket?

For a player of such high profile, it’s not even like he has a huge Test record to keep him buoyant. At the age of 35 (a year older than Kohli), he’s only made eight Test hundreds – two fewer than Paul Collingwood and less than a sixth of Sachin Tendulkar’s career tally.

Are we forgetting all that Rohit has achieved in other formats here? Yes, we are. Of course we are. And that’s precisely why he could do with adding a few more Test feats to his CV.

> Please can we talk about the time Rohit Sharma ate 25 fried eggs in one go?

The flat

Former Australia wicketkeeper Ian Healy this week added to the long and rich history of Australians having a very specific concept of ‘fairness’ when it comes to Test pitches by predicting a win for the tourists on the kind of surface that he would deem acceptable.

Fair’s fair, Ian. As Ravi Shastri later responded, in trademark Ravi Shastri fashion: “You are speaking to an Indian here, who’s just been on two trips to Australia. I want the ball to turn from Day 1. From Day 1.”

The truth is the pitch will be the same for both teams and the one with R Ashwin will probably win.

You want to talk unfairness? Is one team having an Ashwin fair? Surely the whole point of playing is to identify and celebrate exactly these kinds of imbalances.

The first Test starts on Thursday at 4am UK time.

The easy way to follow India v Australia with us is by getting the King Cricket email.

“Cricket Australia basically said to us, ‘Okay, what can we kinda do to make your time in hotels for the next month better? So the boys just took it to the next level” – Pat Cummins

The latest series of The Test outlines all the various toys and gizmos the Aussie cricketers were dicking around with when they toured Pakistan last year.

David Warner asked for a golf simulator.

(David Warner plays golf right-handed, apparently.)

Marnus Labuschagne asked for a coffee machine (presumably because Adam Zampa wasn’t around).

Cam Green (1m98) wanted a basketball net.

Mitch Marsh asked for some sort of Call of Duty setup.

And Steve Smith?

According to Pat Cummins, Steve Smith said, “We need oat milk!”

This is the page where you can ask us to email King Cricket articles to you.

Mop-up of the day is a thing we do when we can’t really be bothered writing more than a sentence or two about a bunch of different things.

Sometimes we end up writing extra sentences though because it looks weird if the opening sentence, in bold, is immediately followed by a really long subheading.

Steve Smith to win the Ashes for Australia by preparing for it with a handful of games in division two of the County Championship next season

Some people are quite angry about this, but since when has playing in division two of the County Championship been such great preparation for Test cricket? We thought that was supposed to be its biggest failing?

Steve Smith has agreed to play three games for Sussex next summer, leading into the Ashes. Words like ‘treachery’ are being bandied about in some quarters. Our take is that what’s best for England is not necessarily what’s best for the Ashes in a broader sense. In these days of stunted series, we think it’s great to have this kind of prologue to the central story of the series.

The Ridiculous Border-Gavaskar Podcast

Ridiculous Border, ridiculous Gavaskar, ridiculous Border-Gavaskar.

Our erstwhile podcasting colleague Dan Liebke has gone rogue (with our permission) and started up an Australia-India cousin to The Ridiculous Ashes. We are not involved. Cricket writer Bharat Sundaresan is doing the India nominations.

As a person whose life is shaped by laziness, we are delighted that the Ridiculous Border-Gavaskar Podcast has come into existence without our having to actually do anything. As someone whose life is equally shaped by guilt, we also feel slightly guilty about it.

You can find it here. We are halfway through the first episode and enjoying it greatly, in large part due to our absence.

Fancy a bit of first person for a change? Follow us on Twitter or Mastodon.

International cricket’s longest-serving stand-in Test captain, Tim Paine (oh come on, he is), has been talking about whether Steve Smith could one day replace him.

Paine told Cricinfo that when he first came into the Australia Test team, Smith was, “growing into that role and getting better and better. Then obviously South Africa events happened and he’s not doing it anymore. But yeah I would support him getting that job again.”

That’s an incredible synopsis of Smith’s captaincy tenure, isn’t it? He got the job, he was growing into the role, he was getting better and better, and then events – specifically a bout of Australian cheating that was fully approved by Smith, followed by him telling weird lies about that cheating – just ‘happened’.

Despite this, Paine’s comments on the matter are actually of less interest to us than those of Smith’s ‘mentor’, Maurice Duffy – a ‘mindset coach’ who has up until now escaped our attention.

Duffy’s approach is built around his conveniently alphabetical ABCDE methodology. This stands for awareness, belief, courage, delivery and emotion. No doubt his teachings can work wonders for the kind of person who doesn’t instantly vomit their own pancreas out when exposed to phrases like ‘develop a winning mindset’ or ‘drive your performance’ but we’d have to say that on balance, it’s not for us.

“It would be a tragedy right now if he didn’t get the opportunity to be captain again,” Duffy told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2019 – shortly before launching into a list of largely impenetrable reasons why this was the case.

“He owns himself much more now,” explained Duffy. “He has an inner calmness. He owns his own feelings a lot better now. He’s much more in control of himself. I think he’s got a better outlook on life right now and I think he appreciates hugely what has been given to him.”

Self-ownership is not, to our knowledge, considered a good thing in this day and age. A ‘self own’ is in fact defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as, “a statement or an act in which you unintentionally embarrass yourself or harm yourself in some way.”

If Duffy is correct that Smith “owns himself much more now” then that is a very enticing prospect indeed and yes, Australia should definitely make him captain again immediately.

Steve Smith’s pad-tapping, box-adjusting pre-delivery fidget routine is really quite something. And now, finally, we know why he does it.

“I think it’s left pad, right pad, box, one tap in the middle, two behind my foot, look up, two behind my foot, look up, one… good to go.”

That’s what Smith says himself – but he’s kind of simplifying when he says that.

The “box” bit is actually a triple that seems to break down as, “left of box, right of box, hoick up box.”

It’s all very elaborate and quite a lot to cram in before every single ball. So why does he do it? Clearly he’s feeling around for something. But what?

“The past few days, I have found something,” Smith revealed earlier this week. “I have found my hands – which I am extremely excited about.”

So that’s it. Smith, it seems, is prone to losing track of the whereabouts of two of his key batting appendages.

On this occasion it had been quite a protracted search for them.

“It’s taken me about three-and-a-half or four months to do it. I had a big smile on my face after training the other day. I walked past [assistant coach] Andrew McDonald and said, ‘I’ve found them again’.”

We would recommend that Smith store his hands in “a safe place” from now, if it weren’t for the fact that we routinely lose every single thing we ever deem worthy of such careful storage.

Bert sent us this rather wonderful footage of Steve Smith safely countering a Jofra Archer short ball at Old Trafford.

It was shot by Bert’s Australian mate, “so technically the copyright is now owned by the Queen.”

Bert said he had a word with the Queen and it’s fine for us to publish it.

England v Australia, fifth Test, day two

Not permanently tired, you understand. Not sick of it. Just temporarily not at his very best. A bit tired of batting movements. Ever so slightly worn down by constant decision-making.

Yesterday Steve Smith missed a straight one. Maybe this is just the kind of thing that happens once every billion straight ones; a theoretical possibility that we finally got to see. Or maybe he was very, very, slightly more tired than he had been for the straight one before and things just didn’t quite pan out how they normally do.

Tim Paine attracted criticism for choosing to bowl in this Test match. If nothing else, in back-to-back Test matches, did he not want to give his bowlers more of a rest?

Maybe he wanted to give his batsman a rest.

Smith says he has the flu.

England v Australia, second Test, day four

A friend of a friend doesn’t believe in tiredness. Just flat-out doesn’t believe in it. He reckons that as long as you eat enough, you should have energy. This one time he had to call a halt to an extremely long bike ride because his heart had gone funny.

Jofra Archer appears to be of a similar mind. Before the second Test, Justin Langer had wondered how fast the fast bowler would be once he was into his third or fourth spell. Now we have the answer: even faster.

After 22 overs at 90mph, Archer decided that he was going to start ambling in and bowling at Shoaib Akhtar pace from his 23rd over onwards.

As a batting genius, Steve Smith dealt with this about as well as anyone could have done – which is to say he got hit in the arm (which is probably broken)…

… and then he got hit on the neck, which briefly caused everyone with half a memory genuine and grave concern that he might actually die.

(That’s not rhetoric. We wholly mean that.)

As a passage of play, it probably tipped over the threshold that separates ‘hugely exciting’ from ‘slightly frightening and a little bit sickening’.

Turns out Smith was okay. Or at least okay enough to return to the crease and bat like a man who’s suffering acute pain in two body parts – pain that originated while he was previously doing exactly what he’s now trying to do again.

He probably shouldn’t have come back out really.

It makes absolute perfect sense that being peppered and pummelled like a cheap steak would put someone off their game a bit in the short term. It’s also possible to make a case that the experience could affect a man in the longer-term.

Batting bravery is largely a form of delusion, but to be unaffected by what happened to Smith would be on another level.

Given his current rate of acceleration, it also doesn’t pay to think too hard about how quickly Archer will be bowling once he’s got three Tests’ worth of fatigue in him.

Whose delusion will be the stronger?

2019 Cricket World Cup semi-final, Australia v England

This is how it definitely started: Chris Woakes bowled a short slower ball. Steve Smith missed the pull and bodied it down the leg-side. He tried to run a leg bye.

This how it definitely continued: Jos Buttler scuttled round to the ball, shedding a glove as he went, scooped it up and threw.

This is how it definitely finished: The ball passed between Steve Smith’s legs, hit the stumps and he was run out.

Now here’s what we don’t know and what we absolutely need to know: Did Jos Buttler call the nutmeg? Did he follow schoolboy sporting protocol and shout “Megs!”

Because if he didn’t, we’d be kind of disgusted and maybe don’t even want England to win the World Cup any more. That’s how serious this is.