Smith joins elite ‘five-in-five club’

Australia’s superstar skipper Steve Smith had joined another exclusive group of batsmen following his brilliant hundred in the first Test against India in Pune.

Smith made 109 in the second innings to help set his team up for a crushing 333-run victory over the hosts, handing Australia a shock one-nil lead in the four-match series.

It was his 18th Test hundred, of which just two have been scored in the second innings, while it was also his fifth century in consecutive matches against India.

The 27-year-old is just the fifth player in Test history to score five straight hundreds against the same opposition, joining an elite list of names: Sir Donald Bradman, Shoaib Mohammad, Neil Harvey and Jacques Kallis.

Smith hit a hundred in each match of the four-Test series against India in the home summer of 2014-15, captaining Australia for the first time in the absence of an injured Michael Clarke and stamping himself as one of the next great batsmen in the sport.

His average against India now stands at 88.83 from seven matches, with five hundreds and three fifties.

In this category, as in others, Bradman of course remains above the pack; the benchmark of batting greats made six straight centuries against England between 1937 and 1938 – a run that was only ended with an ankle injury that ruled him out of batting at The Oval in August of ‘38.

The onset of World War Two meant the next time he faced his Ashes rivals was at home in the summer of 1946-47, and while the political landscape had shifted, the cricket scene remained very much the same – Bradman hit 187 and 234 in the opening two Tests to make it eight hundreds in his previous 10 innings against the Old Enemy.

Fifteen years later it was another Australian who joined Bradman in rarefied air, with Harvey plundering the South Africans for four straight hundreds in the summer of 1949-50, and then adding a fifth on home soil in December 1952 to keep the streak going.

The imperious left-hander was ‘only’ able to add 60 in his next Test against the Proteas, before making up for that with scores of 190, 84, 116 and 205 across the following three matches in a phenomenal sequence of scoring.

Bradman and Harvey stood alone in the ‘five-in-five club’ until Pakistan’s Shoaib Mohammad made it five straight against the Kiwis in two series between February 1989 and October 1990.

The first two came in New Zealand when the determined right-hander made 163 and 112, before putting the Black Caps to the sword once again some 20 months later, with 203no, 105 and 142 in the three-Test series.

South African run-machine Kallis made the most of the decline of the West Indies’ empire when he scored tons for fun against the Caribbean side between December 2003 and March 2005.

In four Tests at home, he made 158, 177, 130no and 130no and while he made a duck in the first innings of his next match against the Windies in Georgetown 14 months later, he kept the scoring spree going with 109 second time around.

Smith, in superb form with the bat and evidently relishing the challenge of facing India’s much-vaunted spin duo of Ravi Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja on their home tracks, now has a chance to go it alone with Bradman in the ‘six-in-six club’ when the two sides again square off in Bengaluru from March 4.

Source: cricket.com.au