“I didn’t sleep too well,” unfortunately, said Aussie maestro Steve Smith to commentators Deep Das Gupta and Sourav Ganguly in a chat with the broadcasters prior to the start of play on Day Two Of the World Test Championship final against India at the Oval on Thursday.
A nervous sleeper at the best of times, especially when a Test is on, being not out on 95, would have made him edgier.
He needn’t have been as he was batting at a venue where he can probably walk on water.
It was here at the Oval in the 2013 Ashes that he discarded all pretentions of being Shane Warne’s leg-spin replacement for Australia and tasted the joy of what getting to three figures means for the first time as he embarked on the journey towards becoming a bonafide legend.
Amid a dismal Ashes 3-0 drubbing, Smith, seamer Ryan Harris and all-rounder Shane Watson were the only Aussies to give the team any joy.
On Thursday, he had the opportunity to raise his arms and kiss that badge on his helmet for the 31st time. He is the second quickest to get there (170 innings). Only the great Sachin Tendulkar (165 innings) has got there faster. It was his third hundred at The Oval and his seventh in England.
Against India, it was his ninth ton as he equalled his other big rival in the Fab 5 of modern greats, Joe Root. Virat Kohli, Kane Williamson and Babar Azam complete that set of five. In India vs Australia contests, only Tendulkar (11 tons) has more.
Smith is also third on the list of most Test tons by Australians behind Ricky Ponting (41) and Steve Waugh (32).
Through the course of his 121, Smith relied on his tried and tested technique of moving across his stumps, showing the bowler his middle and leg sticks and any delivery pitched even on off-stump or a couple of inches outside it, was flicked through mid-wicket or mid-on. When he got the edge, he made sure his soft hands were his allies.
When he was beaten outside off, he let the bowler know with a thumb up, a vigorous nod and a range of facial expressions that could put an emoji manufacturing software to shame. He even did some commentary while batting, letting the bowler know exactly what had been bowled.
Some of it was absolute rubbish. But Smith was too decent to call it that. But he assessed in that chat, “They probably bowled short in the middle session and didn’t hit the top of the stumps as much as they probably would have liked to. I still think there’s enough there in the wicket if you bowl in the right areas.”
He also credited Travis Head for playing positively as that meant the focus was on him and not Smith which allowed him to do what he does best. Be in his bubble and grind the bowlers down.
“I thought they were focusing a lot on Trav, the way he was coming out and scoring so quickly,” he stated.
Very few bowlers have challenged Smith’s method. R Ashwin did cause him some grief with a middle and leg line in Australia two years ago, while keeping a leg-slip, but out at the Oval, he could only watch from outside the pavilion. Neil Wagner, that tireless workhorse from New Zealand, is probably the only other bowler that can claim to have troubled Smith with that line.
A lot of bowlers have been shown the stumps and they’ve licked their lips at the prospect of hitting his pads, but very few have managed to do it successfully.

Known to sleep with his bats close to him and shadow practice in the hotel room, Smith would have dreamed of a getting to three figures on Day Two. Two leg-stump half volleys from Mohammed Siraj off his first two balls to move from 95 to 103, made those dreams come true.

MIAMI: Donald Trump said Thursday that he was indicted for mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, a remarkable development that makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw.
The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if he’s convicted.
But it also has enormous political implications, potentially upending a Republican presidential primary that Trump had been dominating and testing anew the willingness of GOP voters and party leaders to stick with a now twice-indicted candidate who could face still more charges. And it sets the stage for a sensational trial centered on claims that a man once entrusted to safeguard the nation’s most closely guarded secrets willfully, and illegally, hoarded sensitive national security information.The Justice Department did not immediately confirm the indictment publicly. But two people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly said the indictment included seven criminal counts. One of those people said Trump’s lawyers were contacted by prosecutors shortly before he announced on his Truth Social platform that he had been indicted.
Within 20 minutes of his announcement, Trump began fundraising off it for his 2024 presidential campaign. He declared his innocence in a video and repeated his familiar refrain that the investigation is a “witch hunt.” He said he planned to be in court Tuesday afternoon in Miami, where a grand jury had been meeting to hear evidence as recently as this week.
The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he faces, legal experts — as well as Trump’s own aides — had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trump’s attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.
Appearing Thursday night on CNN, Trump attorney James Trusty said the indictment includes charges of willful retention of national defense information — a crime under the Espionage Act, which polices the handling of government secrets — obstruction, false statements and conspiracy.
The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years — as president and private citizen — but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.
The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
The indictment arises from a monthslong investigation into whether Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property, Mar-a-Lago, and whether he took steps to obstruct the government’s efforts to recover the records.
Prosecutors have said that Trump took roughly 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including some 100 that were seized by the FBI last August in a search of the home that underscored the gravity of the Justice Department’s investigation. Trump has repeatedly insisted that he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House, and has also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.
Court records unsealed last year showed federal investigators believed they had probable cause that multiple crimes had been committed, including the retention of national defense information, destruction of government records and obstruction.
Since then, the Justice Department has amassed additional evidence and secured grand jury testimony from people close to Trump, including his own lawyers. The statutes governing the handling of classified records and obstruction are felonies that could carry years in prison in the event of a conviction.
It remains unclear how much it will damage Trump’s standing given that his first indictment generated millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and didn’t weaken him in the polls. But no matter what, the indictment — and legal fight that follows — will throw Trump back into the spotlight, sucking attention away from the other candidates who are trying to build momentum in the race.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump opponent in the primary, condemned the indictment on Twitter, saying it represented “the weaponization of federal law enforcement.”
The former president has long sought to use his legal troubles to his political advantage, complaining on social media and at public events that the cases are being driven by Democratic prosecutors out to hurt his 2024 election campaign. He is likely to rely on that playbook again, reviving his longstanding claims that the Justice Department — which, during his presidency, investigated whether his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia — is somehow weaponized against him.
Trump’s legal troubles extend beyond the New York indictment and classified documents case.
Smith is separately investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And the district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton County is investigating Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.
Signs had mounted for weeks that an indictment was near, including a Monday meeting between Trump’s lawyers and Justice Department officials. His lawyers had also recently been notified that he was the target of the investigation, the clearest sign yet that an indictment was looming.
Though the bulk of the investigative work had been handled in Washington, with a grand jury meeting there for months, it recently emerged that prosecutors were presenting evidence before a separate panel in Florida, where many of the alleged acts of obstruction scrutinized by prosecutors took place.
The Justice Department has said Trump repeatedly resisted efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to get the documents back. After months of back-and-forth, Trump representatives returned 15 boxes of records in January 2022, including about 184 documents that officials said had classified markings on them.
FBI and Justice Department investigators issued a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents that remained in Trump’s possession. But after a Trump lawyer provided three dozen records and asserted that a diligent search of the property had been done, officials came to suspect even more documents remained.
The investigation had simmered quietly for months until last August, when FBI agents served a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and removed 33 boxes containing classified records, including top-secret documents stashed in a storage room and desk drawer and commingled with personal belongings. Some records were so sensitive that investigators needed upgraded security clearances to review them, the Justice Department has said.
The investigation into Trump had appeared complicated — politically, if not legally — by the discovery of documents with classified markings in the Delaware home and former Washington office of President Joe Biden, as well as in the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence. The Justice Department recently informed Pence that he would not face charges, while a second special counsel continues to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.
But compared with Trump, there are key differences in the facts and legal issues surrounding Biden’s and Pence’s handling of documents, including that representatives for both men say the documents were voluntarily turned over to investigators as soon as they were found. In contrast, investigators quickly zeroed on whether Trump, who for four years as president expressed disdain for the FBI and Justice Department, had sought to obstruct the inquiry by refusing to turn over all the requested documents.