England wave white flag on Smith strategy

It was near enough to the centre point of the 2017-18 Magellan Ashes Series that England formally flagged they had run out of ideas to subdue Australia's captain and resident batting glutton, Steve Smith.

The declaration of omnipotence was made by Smith's rival skipper Joe Root via the field placings he deployed early in the middle session of the middle day of the five-Test campaign's middle match, as England toiled with a ball barely 10 overs old against a force rarely seen in the five-day game.

Of all the players across more than 140 years who have played at the elite level more than 20 times, only one – the statistical aberration that was Sir Donald Bradman – has scored runs with the remorseless consistency that Smith takes to the wicket.

His current Test average of 62.89 is hardly Bradman's 99.94, but it's better than anyone else who's played the game for any meaningful period.

In their desperation to quell Bradman, England famously identified what they saw as the sole weak point in his technique (a skittishness against bowling aimed at his upper body) and devised a strategy that was then unleashed against every hapless Australia batter in the summer of 1932-33.

The method that Root and his men devised for Smith, 85 years after the Fast Leg Theory (aka Bodyline) was invoked and then quickly outlawed, was similarly designed to contain but was rolled out with neither menace nor consequence.

Like Douglas Jardine before him, Root stacked six fielders on the leg side and opened a vast hole on the opposite side of the wicket that stretched from gully to the dispirited bowler (under the contemporary scenario, Nottingham's Stuart Broad) while most of his troops were scattered on the western flank.

If the short fine leg fielder could have been generously judged to be a catching option, then he was one of three (along with a solitary slip and the man at gully) loosely defined as 'attacking positions'.

The rest of them could be collectively evaluated as either 'restrictive' (the deep cover and the mid-on) or 'speculative' (fine leg, deep square and deep mid-wicket) who waited in hope for the game's dominant Test batter to mis-hit or over-reach.

Both of those outcomes were about as likely as Smith declaring his team's first innings closed while still in deficit to England, and when the ploy produced nothing other than free runs through the unpopulated off-side more direct action was taken.

England's premier protagonist James Anderson was stationed in the position – perhaps best described as 'short forward hindrance' – shoulder-to-shoulder with the non-striker, and where he had famously clashed with Smith during the second Test in Adelaide.

That being the one and only occasion in this campaign, which is rapidly becoming Smith's in the same way that Mitchell Johnson owned the whitewash of 2013-14, when England appeared to have pierced the bubble of steely single-focus in which the Australia captain has been cocooned since day one.

But Johnson himself knows uncomfortably well what a thankless job it can be wheeling away at Smith when he's batting, not least because of the captain's infuriating tendency to walk across his stumps at the very moment the ball is about to be released.

During a commentary stint with British broadcaster BT Sports today, Johnson revealed that he used to unleash verbally as well as physically at Smith during Australia nets session prior to his retirement, to try and find a chink in his teammate's seemingly impervious, if idiosyncratic technique.

At the end of a day that Smith had played hardly a false stroke and England's only appeal against him was an lbw shout off what turned to be a no-ball (and perhaps a few for mercy under their collective breath), assistant coach Paul Farbrace reflected on the challenge the world's best Test batter poses.

"The tough thing with him is making sure you don't get drawn into bowling where he wants you to bowl at him," Farbrace said as England pondered a day that began with them holding a 200-run lead and ended 146 runs behind with a solitary wicket to show for their efforts.

"You try and drag him across his stumps, but the way he's playing at the moment it seems to be that he gets into some awkward positions.

"The thing that he does do well is he gets his head back into the ball and he keeps the bat face open.

"And he hits the ball from what seems like strange positions but he seems to hit the middle of the bat on a consistent basis.

"When somebody moves across the stumps you can easily think 'Oh, we can attack the stumps a little bit more or attack his pads a bit more' but that's exactly what he wants.

"So we've tried to be disciplined and hit a good length and get the ball through somewhere around fifth stump line.

"But he does get himself into positions where he can score both sides of the wicket, and the one thing he does do – which is what all the best players do – is they score off your good balls and then they put you under pressure to bowl bad balls.

"And then he doesn't miss – he puts those bad balls away and that's the sign of a player in really good form."

Farbrace also conceded that while England had come into this series with carefully formulated plans for all of the Australia batters – most of which had proved effective until the game got away from them today – the ones hatched for Smith simply haven't brought success.

In the opening Test at the Gabba they tried to starve the Australia captain of scoring opportunities on a slow pitch, but he simply dug in and recorded the most drawn-out century of his Test career while later admitting that he was happy to endure that ploy if England persisted.

"That's cool. I'm happy with that, I love batting so I'm happy to stay out there for as long as I can," Smith said in the wake of that first Test win.

"I don't like being back in the sheds, I prefer being out in the middle and just doing my thing so if it takes me 300 balls to get a hundred then it'll take me 300 balls."

On the eve of this current Test in Perth, Smith forebodingly recalled the WACA match against New Zealand two years ago that ended in a runs-soaked draw and he noted form that experience if a batter got set on that sort of surface, "it was almost impossible to get out".

So quickly did he settle in today having resumed on 92, in the morning's second over he aimed an audacious back-foot cover drive at Stuart Broad which the match referee, former West Indies great Sir Richie Richardson, might have recognised as a local derivation of his one-time signature stroke.

And while there was minimal conversation exchanged during their so-far unbeaten 301-run fifth-wicket stand, Mitchell Marsh watched his skipper from the non-striker's end with admiration tinged by an uneasy sense of recent recall.

"I think he's certainly got an aura," Marsh said tonight in the wake of his maiden Test century, but also remembering a JLT Sheffield Shield match at Hurstville Oval last month where Smith top scored in each innings with 76 and 127.

"I've felt what it's like because I captained against him for (Western Australia against) New South Wales a couple of months ago and it's not very nice.

"You come up with all these plans and none of them seem to work. He's a special player."

2017-18 International Fixtures

Magellan Ashes Series

Australia Test squad: Steve Smith (c), David Warner (vc), Cameron Bancroft, Usman Khawaja, Peter Handscomb, Shaun Marsh, Mitchell Marsh, Tim Paine (wk), Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins, Nathan Lyon, Josh Hazlewood, Jackson Bird.

England Test squad: Joe Root (c), James Anderson (vc), Moeen Ali, Jonny Bairstow, Jake Ball, Gary Ballance, Stuart Broad, Alastair Cook, Mason Crane, Tom Curran, Ben Foakes, Dawid Malan, Craig Overton, Ben Stokes, Mark Stoneman, James Vince, Chris Woakes.

First Test Australia won by 10 wickets. Scorecard

Second Test Australia won by 120 runs (Day-Night). Scorecard

Third Test WACA Ground, December 14-18. Tickets

Fourth Test MCG, December 26-30. Tickets

Fifth Test SCG, January 4-8 (Pink Test). Tickets

Gillette ODI Series v England

First ODI MCG, January 14. Tickets

Second ODI Gabba, January 19. Tickets

Third ODI SCG, January 21. Tickets

Fourth ODI Adelaide Oval, January 26. Tickets

Fifth ODI Perth Stadium, January 28. Tickets

Prime Minister's XI

PM's XI v England Manuka Oval, February 2. Tickets

Gillette T20 trans-Tasman Tri-Series

First T20I Australia v NZ, SCG, February 3. Tickets

Second T20I – Australia v England, Blundstone Arena, February 7. Tickets

Third T20I – Australia v England, MCG, February 10. Tickets

Fourth T20I – NZ v England, Wellington, February 14

Fifth T20I – NZ v Australia, Eden Park, February 16

Sixth T20I – NZ v England, Seddon Park, February 18

Final – TBC, Eden Park, February 21