Steven Smith will turn out at Brisbane on Thursday still wearing the thin black anti-glare tape under his eyes, convinced it spares him enough light to make a difference with the pink ball.
“The strips… block out 65% of the glare,” Smith revealed after a quick message exchange with Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the technique’s best-known cricketing advocate. “I’ve seen photos and you’re wearing them the wrong way,” came Chanderpaul’s reply, prompting Smith to flip them round at training earlier this week. “I agree with him. I think it certainly stops the glare. Yeah, I’ll be wearing them.”
Eye-black strips are a staple in American gridiron and baseball, absorbing light that would otherwise bounce off the cheekbone and into the lower part of a batter’s vision. They are still a novelty in cricket, yet Smith, no great lover of the pink Kookaburra, was happy enough with the trial under lights to keep them on for the second Test against England.
The numbers underline his caution. Smith averages 58.31 in conventional daytime Tests but only 37.04 in the day-night format. One century in eleven attempts suggests the extra variables – artificial lighting, twilight, the luminous seam – remain awkward.
“It’s hard to bat all the time,” he said, trying to describe the switch from dusk into full darkness. “The ball reacts obviously differently to a red one. It can change quickly. It can start moving randomly. You’ve got to try and play what’s in front of you… whether it be more aggressive, whether it be going to your shell and trying to get through that period. Everyone’s different.”
Conditions, too, look set to diverge from the norm. When the West Indies pinched an eight-run victory at the Gabba last summer, Mitchell Starc pointed out that the ground’s hard surface took the shine off the pink ball faster than Adelaide Oval, whose extra grass tends to keep it firmer for longer. Smith echoed that view. “Here it’s obviously renowned to be quite a hard, fast wicket… at times [the ball] can get a little bit soft, and you can see guys batting comfortably at stages,” he explained. “That’s one thing we have to weigh up going into this game.”
Team balance will be finalised at the toss, yet Smith did hint at a flexible batting order – even floating the idea of sending out two nightwatchers (lower-order players deployed to shield specialists late in the day) should conditions demand. Still, he is not entirely sold on Pat Cummins’ and Travis Head’s suggestion that batting positions are largely overrated. After all, Smith asked to open during four Tests last year, including the previous pink-ball match at the Gabba, where he carried his bat for an unbeaten 91 in a failed chase.
Nothing in this build-up has sounded especially dramatic, and that suits Smith fine. A small strip of tape and a minor tweak to routine feel more his style than grand declarations. Whether they shift his pink-ball record in the right direction is the obvious next question, one the Gabba lights will answer soon enough.
