Talismanic Australia batter Steve Smith got his mojo back and scored a fine half-century against the Netherlands to cut short his string of low scores. In the ODI World Cup match on Wednesday, Smith looked in his zone with his usual antics while batting and controlled shots to put pressure on the bowlers.
Smith had a bit of an underwhelming start to this edition of the World Cup, which might potentially be his last. He entered the match with low scores of 46, 9, 0 and 7 but made sure he didn’t repeat the same mistakes committed by him in the previous matches.
The premier batter batted in the nets on Tuesday afternoon for about an hour where he faced the side-arm throwdowns and the spinners. He looked in decent touch and tried to play with an aggressive approach in the nets. After completing his session, Smith had a chat with head coach Andrew McDonald and talked about his batting stance. It looked like Smith was discussing some adjustments as McDonald also advised him some through shadow batting.
The 34-year-old left the nets with a smile on his face as he also waved to the media persons who were present there to watch Australia’s net session.
It worked well for Smith on the match day as he scored his first half-century of this edition of the tournament.
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After the match, while replying to News18 CricketNext’s query, Smith revealed that he made some minor changes to his technique which worked well for him.
“A couple of things. Yeah, I move back to the leg stump a little bit. I got my hands a little bit higher than what they’ve been for the last week for some reason they’ve dropped down a bit. I just felt it in the nets yesterday and everything is back into place again,” Smith said.
The premier batter further asserted that he started the tournament well against India but after that things got a bit downhill but now by tweaking his stance a bit he is feeling good and focussing to continue the good form.
“I felt like I was batting well, a couple of weeks back against India, I thought I was actually getting back through the ball, nicely on a pretty tough surface, and then playing well. And then for a week kind of lost it for a bit, got a couple of nice balls I suppose the one swung back in and got me out and Rabada, which was a little questionable but outside of that I felt like I’ve been batting really well. Just I just needed to get the feel again and batting yesterday in the nets straight away, I had a smile on my face at the back end, I felt good and took that into today and felt nice, I thought I was getting in good positions today and hopefully, that continues,” he added.
READ: ICC ODI World Cup 2023: The Netherlands Fizzle Out as Australia Show Their Mighty Side at Kotla
Smith looked fluent during his 71-run knock off 68 balls. The early departure of Mitchell Marsh put Smith in the middle during the powerplay. He rebuilt the innings alongside Warner with a 132-run stand for the second wicket.
He breached the gaps with ease to add worries for the Dutch who looked out of plans against the Aussies. In the 10th over of innings, he smashed Logan van Beek for a hat-trick of boundaries – the first two on the fine leg, while the third came in the same direction at the square leg region.
The talismanic batter reached his half-century in 19.2 overs. However, he failed to convert it into a triple-digit score and was dismissed by Aryan Dutt on 71 courtesy of a one-handed stunner from Roelof van der Merwe.
Australia went on to win the match by 309 runs – which is the biggest victory in World Cup history via run margin. They posted a mammoth score of 399/8 courtesy of centuries from Glenn Maxwell and David Warner, and fifties from Smith and Marnus Labuschagne.
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