Why Steve Smith's IPL Record Is So Ordinary

Steve Smith has scored around 10,700 Test runs at an average near 56, with 37 centuries, and by any measure that does not involve Donald Bradman he is among the four or five best batters Australia has produced. His Indian Premier League record is 2,485 runs from 103 matches at an average of 34.51 and a strike rate of 128.09, with one hundred.

Those two records look like they belong to different players, and there is a familiar explanation on hand — that Test batters cannot adapt, or that Smith did not take the format seriously. Neither holds up. The real explanation is more interesting and it is specific to how Smith bats: the mechanism that makes him the best Test batter of his generation is the same mechanism that caps him at 128 in a twenty-over match.

What the method is

Smith's technique is built on movement before the ball is bowled and adjustment after it. He shuffles across his stumps, gets his head outside the line, and plays late — very late, later than almost anyone — which is why he scores so heavily through the leg side off deliveries aimed at his off stump and why he is close to impossible to bowl a plan to over five days. He does not premeditate. He reacts.

That is the ideal method for the longest format, because in a Test the bowler must eventually bowl to a field, and a batter who can wait and then place is grinding down the same six men over four hours. It is a poor method for a format where the field is fixed by regulation and the batter must hit the ball into the gaps he already knows are there, at a rate of eight an over, from the first delivery.

A T20 batter needs premeditation. He needs to have decided before the ball is released that he will hit through midwicket, because the shot must be a full swing rather than a placement. Smith's whole game is the refusal to decide early. Asking him to premeditate is asking him to switch off the thing that makes him Steve Smith.

The record read in that light

The IPL figures then make sense rather than reading as an anomaly. An average of 34.51 is decent — better than Glenn Maxwell's, better than Mayank Agarwal's, and the sort of figure a side is happy with from a number three. A strike rate of 128 across nine seasons is the problem, because by the middle of the 2020s a top-order strike rate of 128 costs a side roughly twenty runs across an innings compared with the alternatives.

He also hit only one hundred in 103 matches, which for a batter with 37 in Tests tells you exactly where the constraint sits. Smith could bat for a long time in the IPL and frequently did. He could not bat quickly enough while doing it.

The fielding is the part of his franchise game that transferred completely. He took 54 catches in 103 matches, a rate above half a catch per game, and was involved in ten run-outs; the most catches list records the rate as among the better returns for an outfielder with a career of that length. Smith in the ring has always been as good as anyone the competition has had, and fielding is the one discipline where reacting late rather than deciding early is an unambiguous advantage.

Pune 2017, and the final lost by one run

The most consequential thing Smith did in Indian franchise cricket was captain. In 2017 he replaced MS Dhoni as captain of Rising Pune Supergiant — a change that was, at the time, close to unthinkable in Indian cricket — and took the side to the final. He also had his best IPL season with the bat, 472 runs.

The final, against Mumbai Indians at Hyderabad on 21 May 2017, was decided by one run. Pune needed eleven from the last over with wickets in hand and did not get them. A franchise in its second and final season, under a captain who had taken the job from the most successful leader in the competition's history, came within a single run of a title and then ceased to exist when the original Pune and Chennai franchises returned from suspension.

That is the high point of his IPL career and it is a genuine one. Whatever the strike rate says, a captain who reaches a final in his only full season in charge has done the job.

Rajasthan, and a captaincy that did not work

Smith captained Rajasthan Royals twice. In 2019 he took over mid-season from Ajinkya Rahane after a poor start, and in 2020 he led the side for the full campaign in the United Arab Emirates. Rajasthan finished bottom.

He was released before the 2021 season, with the captaincy going to Sanju Samson, and his IPL career effectively ended there apart from a later brief stint. A batter of his stature being released at thirty-one is a plain commercial judgement: the franchise looked at a top-order slot going at 128 and decided the money was better spent elsewhere. Given the direction the format was moving, they were right.

The suspension, and what it did not do

The 2018 ball-tampering suspension removed Smith from the 2018 IPL season entirely, along with the Rajasthan captaincy he had just been appointed to, and it is the obvious candidate for what derailed his franchise career. The evidence does not really support that reading either.

His returns before and after the ban are broadly similar, and he came back to captain Rajasthan within a year. What the suspension genuinely interrupted was his Test career, and the response there is the most emphatic thing in his record: 774 runs in the 2019 Ashes, in his first Test series back. The history of Australian cricket has few better answers to a year out of the game.

By the 2025-26 Ashes he was captaining Australia in four of the five Tests with Pat Cummins injured, in a series Australia won 4-1, and passing Allan Border's Ashes run aggregate along the way. Whatever the ban cost him, it was not the Test career.

The one-day record, which sits in between

If the argument is that Smith's method is format-specific, the fifty-over record is the test case, and it broadly supports it. He retired from one-day internationals in March 2025, after a Champions Trophy semi-final exit, closing a fourteen-year career in the format. His ODI numbers are good without being of the same order as his Test ones.

Fifty overs is the format where his approach has enough room to work. There are ten overs at the start when the field is up and the ball is new, a long middle period where a batter can bat conventionally and rotate strike, and only a short window at the end where premeditated hitting is compulsory. Smith could occupy the middle of a one-day innings productively in a way he could not occupy the middle of a twenty-over one, because in fifty-over cricket the middle overs are for building and in T20 they are for attacking.

Read across the three formats, his averages descend in the order the demands on premeditation ascend. That is not a coincidence and it is not a character flaw. It is a straightforward consequence of a technique optimised for one set of conditions being asked to work in another.

Why this matters beyond one player

Smith's split is the strongest available evidence against a proposition that has dominated cricket talk for fifteen years: that batting is one skill and the formats are variations on it. If that were true, the best Test batter of a generation would be at least a very good T20 batter, and he is not. He is a competent one.

The reverse case is equally instructive. Plenty of batters with a T20 strike rate of 150 cannot average 40 in Tests, and the reason is the mirror image of Smith's: premeditation is fatal against a moving ball over five days. What the last decade has actually established is that the two formats reward opposite cognitive habits, and that the players who manage both — Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, a handful of others — are doing something rarer than we credit.

Smith's response to the problem was, characteristically, not to compromise. He kept his method, accepted a modest franchise return, and spent his prime becoming the most difficult man in the world to dismiss in a Test match. Nine seasons of an IPL strike rate in the 120s is the price of that, and he paid it without much apparent complaint. Career figures are on the Steve Smith profile.