How do you get Smith out when he’s a freak?
and haven’t sustained enough pressure to force Smith to make a mistake.
The England bowlers will tell you he’s not the same against the moving ball but that’s true of every Test batsman.
Maybe sideways movement evens things up a bit, like we saw at Adelaide, but when it’s flat it’s almost too easy for Smith.
And he just loves batting. He has limitless patience and concentration and never gets bored at the crease. He has a love and passion for scoring runs.
I’d like to tell you I’d have a plan if I was still bowling and would be confident of getting him out but all you can really do is go back to basics.
That means attacking the top of off-stump — as you would do to mere mortal batsmen — and we’ve seen Smith chop on twice in this series with false strokes.
It certainly needed batsman error to help the bowlers in the fourth Test because that MCG pitch was disappointing. There was just nothing in it for the fast bowlers and we had to wait for batsmen to get themselves out.
So the 5-0 whitewash has gone but England aren’t a bad team and I did think their senior players would turn up sooner or later.
Stuart Broad was under pressure but he bowled a fuller length, had a bit more pace and was a bit more attacking.
And Alastair Cook is just a quality player. I always thought a big innings wasn’t far away for him and you have to give credit to England with the way they had the better of the draw until those last two sessions.
Some have said their improvement has only come when the series has gone but you still have to do the business. Broad and Cook stepped up in that game. I certainly would have liked another whitewash — but I like to be adaptable like the players so my prediction now is 4-0!
Sydney will have a better pitch than Melbourne. It’s not a drop-in for starters and I think it will do a bit early on the first day. I hope they leave a bit of grass on it to help the quicks to start with and it might turn as the game goes on.
This is a very significant game for me because it will be the tenth year the McGrath Foundation has been involved with the Sydney Test.
The SCG is awash with pink on the third day and it’s been renamed Jane McGrath Day now in honour of my late wife.
There will be lots of things happening and at some point I’ll take five to ten minutes just to take in the enormity of it all.
It’s a great legacy for my two older children James and Holly to see what their mum has created and our main objectives are to raise awareness of breast cancer in younger women and funds to place breast care nurses in communities across Australia.
At the moment we have 119 nurses employed and they’ve supported more than 60,000 families going through cancer so hitting those numbers just blows me away.
We’re about 78 nurses shy of covering the whole country now and if we can raise 1.3million Australian dollars from this final Test that will add another ten nurses full-time for a 12-month period.
It’s achievable because of the way we’ve been growing and I am very proud.