Steve Smith comes good

I knew this would happen. Darren Lehmann had said at the press conference following the Test at Chester-le-Street that a few of the Australian players would be playing for their careers at The Oval. He didn't name names, but you knew the players whom he was talking about: Usman Khawaja, Shane Watson, Steve Smith. There was pressure on each of these batsmen to prove their worth, prove they deserved their place in the team. Khawaja was dropped before he got his chance. Shane Watson made 176. Yesterday, Steve Smith made 138*.

I knew this would happen. I knew that, faced with the prospect of, yet again, being exiled from the Australian team, Steve Smith would pull his head in and bring out his best game. Steve Smith is a very talented cricketer who shows great promise and has the capacity to go on to do great things for Australia. It was clear from when he made 92 in India, in his first innings back from a two-year exile, that it was not a matter of if, but when he would make his maiden Test century. And now it's come, and in the Ashes to boot. Now let's have more of it, please, Mr Smith.

In some ways it is better that he got his maiden hundred here than at Old Trafford. At Old Trafford, you got the sense that Smith was being babied to his hundred by Michael Clarke, who was letting Smith take it slowly and easily when Australia ought to have been trying to score quickly at that point in their innings. Here, there was no Clarke to hold Smith's hand as he toddled over the line. After Watson went, Smith became the senior partner out in the middle, and maturely and with composure, off his own bat, made his way to a hundred, and beyond.