Ashes 2019: 'Steve Smith is not immortal - England must remember that'
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Watch day three's best moments as first Test evenly poised
How do you solve a problem like Steve Smith?
The finest minds in cricket have been trying to find the answer to this particular question for years, and the finest minds are still looking rather red-faced and embarrassed.
Genius doesn't always come in neat packages. You could never coach anyone else to bat as Smith does, and if you struggle to see the beauty behind his ugly unorthodoxy then you might wonder if he can really be a genius at all.
But he is. His unbeaten 46 at Edgbaston on Saturday means across his past 10 innings against England he is averaging 145. Before his self-inflicted absence from Test cricket he was averaging 70 in his past three years of Test cricket.
These are extraordinary numbers, and Smith is an extraordinary talent.
The secret of his success is his eyes, and the time they give him to see the ball and adjust accordingly. The truly great players have this advantage over the rest of the international elite, gifted though those others are: they have the ability to slow down a ball travelling at 90mph, to move before others can, to make the world adjust to their rhythm rather than the other way round.
Curiously, for all the time I spent in the same Leicestershire team as David Gower, only once did I stand at the non-striker's end with David at the business end.
We were playing Hampshire, Malcolm Marshall gliding in with that beautiful, easy, intense speed of his, bending the ball in late and lethally, popping balls up off a length, frightening the daylight out of us all, giving us nightmares, weak knees and panic attacks.
Gower was almost totally unfazed. It was as if he were facing a medium-fast seamer rather than one of the greatest slippery quicks of all time. It was like a strange cricketing superpower, seeing where a delivery was going before it had left the bowler's hand, stepping into position to play it with an ease that made no sense to those of us who were hopping and praying under exactly the same onslaught.
That's what Smith does. And with that ability comes another - the skill and wrists to place a ball precisely where he wants it no matter where it might initially be heading.
It's like billiards played at 90mph, all angles and caroms and being three shots ahead of the poor, perspiring field. It is horrible for the bowler and it produces agonies for the opposition captain, for how do you set a field to a man who knows how to bypass every field you set?
Steve Smith has scored 35 of his 46 second-innings runs on the leg side
Of course, Smith looks strange at the crease. His movement across his stumps is almost unprecedented at this level. Combined with the twitching, and the grabbing at his pads, he can look like a cat on a hot tin roof.
He isn't at all. At the precise moment the ball arrives at him, everything is exactly where any batting coach would want it to be. Everything is perfect. His head and his eyes and the ball are all in a perfect straight line.
As a bowler, you look at his exposed leg stump and see an obvious solution. Bowl full at that area and he will miss one. Except he never misses one. His eyes are so good that he just flicks or nudges it away.
You think about going round the wicket. Bowl full and fast at that same area. Stick in the finest of fine legs, a leg slip, hope he misses one or angles one into the waiting hands.
But if you did that he wouldn't make the big step across. He would adjust with all that time he has and put the ball into the gaps that you have had to leave to put those men in the funky spots.
It is why I am not a huge fan of the way England tried to get him out on Saturday, which Australia ended on 124-3 - a lead of 34 - after three days of the first Test.
The leg slip makes as much sense as anything else. The short and straight mid-on? That just gives him a single into the vacant spaces on the leg side any time he wants one, and Smith is both a rhythm player and a man with the patience of a man of the cloth.
A single is just fine for him. He will accumulate and accumulate and kill you with a hundred little jabs and cuts.
You could bowl it wide not only of off stump but wide of the second set of stumps he creates with his step across - try to bore him out. "Chase those. Blink before we do."
He won't blink. He will outlast you. You have to get him out. He is happy to stay there as long as it takes.
'Whoops!' Archer stops play at Edgbaston
We have seen these sorts of relentless displays in Ashes cricket before. You think of Steve Waugh in the 1989 series, seemingly impossible for England to dismiss. You think of Alastair Cook and 766 runs in 2010-11.
There will be comparisons too with the greatest of them all - Don Bradman. The numbers push you that way. The gulf between him and the best of his team-mates suggests the same.
Stylistically they are continents apart. Bradman had the most gorgeous cover drive, a follow-through that could make you swoon. Anything short he would pull with speed and whip-crack pace. He was as still at the crease as Smith is twitchy.
But Smith may have a Bradmanesque effect on this series. If you have one batsman who scores this heavily, who is this hard to shift, it changes matches. Australia were rampant through Waugh in '89. England won their only overseas Ashes series in 32 years in large part through Cook's runs.
How to solve the problem? Believe, against all the odds. Smith can still nick a ball. He is mortal.
Focus on the first 20 balls you bowl to him, give him no sighters, challenge him with every one. Aim to hit the top of his right pad, or at least where the top of his right pad ends up.
Don't let him settle. Try going round the wicket, even for an over or two. Bowl the sort of length that draws a shot and can draw an edge. Talk to him. Make him laugh. Shake him from that spell of unbroken concentration, however you have to do it.
He is not immortal. He is just batting rather close to it.
Jonathan Agnew was speaking to BBC Sport chief sports writer Tom Fordyce.