Smith was spitting chips after a tough Durban net. Only one man could shake him from his funk

Just before Australia’s tour of South Africa began in Durban earlier this month, Steve Smith was in a mood at Kingsmead Stadium, cursing for every ball that found the edge of his bat.

The nets in Durban were scratchy, to say the least, and the superstar No. 4 looked far from pleased.

At one stage he stormed stony-faced past a watching crowd including Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg without a word, fiddled with his bats, then went back in for more.

But as he was on his way back to the Australian locker room, he glanced up and spotted a friendly face among the watching pack, which seemed to shake him from his funk.

Former Australian Test opener Phil Jaques is in South Africa providing expert analysis for the ABC and has been doing his due diligence in the nets and at press conferences over the past fortnight.

The Baggy Green aside, he also shares something in common with Smith, with the pair among the dozen odd players who progressed from the Sutherland District Cricket Club to represent Australia at the highest level in Test cricket.

And Smith, who raised queries about his future preceding the South Africa series, was up for a chat with his old teammate.

As Jaques recalled a few years ago, he opened the batting alongside the teenage prodigy in his District debut and watched him fall narrowly short of a ton. It was a pointer to the future. The kid with the blond locks had something special about him.

“The thing that impressed me most was how quickly he could take on information. He could hear it and go out and implement it immediately,” Jaques said on the ABC back in 2024.

The 47-year-old, who made three Test hundreds in 11 matches at an average of 47.47, has now moved into private coaching but remains heavily involved at Sutherland as well.

In a casual chat over a beer and braai at a BBQ put on by the delightful hosts in Durban after Australia’s 214-run win, this writer quizzed Jaques as to whether he was in the business of searching for the next Steve Smith given their Sutherland links.

“Maybe. That would be nice,” he said, before noting legends only come along so often.

The pursuit of excellence

A couple of days earlier in an extended interview with foxsports.com.au, Jaques outlined his love of coaching, how the private coaching system works and what he thinks Cricket Australia could do better from a development perspective.

The left-hander runs the Phil Jaques Pro Cricket Academy and while it is a business, there is also another factor to the pursuit as well.

He loves his cricket and derives great enjoyment from passing to the next generation the experiences he gleaned in a topsy-turvy career which had its share of difficulty as well as remarkable experiences for Australia.

“It’s a different thing altogether to playing. I love coaching. I love giving back to the game and helping develop the next generation of players,” he said.

“I’ve always tried to help younger players within the side whenever I’ve played as well, and mentor and help them learn some of the lessons I’ve learned, and to be able to do that for a living now after playing cricket, it’s rewarding.

“I mean, I loved playing cricket. The things you see and the experiences you have in life as a cricketer, there’s so many ups and downs, and it builds the resilience levels within you, and it challenges you on a daily basis.”

Jaques, who is also the head coach at Sutherland, said the ecosystem in cricket will often see promising players have a private coach working in tandem with the club system in order to progress their development.

Those associated with club cricket around the country say it is a rarity to have a player reach the higher echelons in the sport who has not had a private coach or worked through an academy like those run by Jaques.

“With Sutherland, my old great club, in reality you’re not giving them a one-on-one focus through those club sessions,” he said.

“So to have someone that’s working a bit more intensely with players across the board is really important to ensure that development. And a lot of players are within that great environment and a lot of junior players have those private coaches.

“There’s a lot of different academies around Sydney and different parts of Sydney, and a lot of good people working in the space. They’re all getting little bits and pieces from some good people around, which I think bridges the gap between that intensive coaching that they maybe miss at a club cricket or junior rep level, where you know often it’s parents and non-cricket people that are quite often running sides.

“It does play a vital role in the development of players to then lead into state pathway programs.”

Has the Aussie Next Gen got what it takes?

At a time where the hunt is on to find the next generation of Australian champions, Jaques said there is talent in the teenagers he is seeing come through the ranks in his region and he suspects the same is true nationwide.

“There’s still lots of talent around Australia, especially, and I tend to coach kids mostly from the area where I live, but there are players that are coming from different parts of Sydney,” he said.

“I coach everything from first grade and second XI players right down to 10-year-olds and it is a real mix, a real broad quality of kids. But they’ve all got one thing in mind - they want to be the best they can be and they want to improve their cricket.

“And any kid that wants to improve their cricket, I’d want to coach if they’ve got some talent and ability, and they show that little bit of promise, because I feel like I can help them get to that next stage of their cricket career.”

Jaques, who debuted in the Boxing Day Test against South Africa at the MCG 21 years ago, is confident the opportunities on offer to young cricketers to enhance their skills are greater than when he was a junior.

“I had a few different coaches along the way and a couple of private coaches throughout my journey, but it wasn’t as extensive as what it is now,” he said.

“The opportunities to train within both an individual environment, plus an academy environment where you may mix it with other kids of like-ability throughout the course of a winter, that basically gets them ready to hit the season running.”

But it is not just the year round pursuit that cricket has become that is a step forward for younger cricketers to develop skills to handle a multi-format sport.

Another important step is the exposure this talent is receiving outside of Australia, with trips abroad no longer solely the domain of private schools.

The former New South Wales and Queensland coach shepherded a small squad to India midway through this year and described the time the group spent away as invaluable to their development.

It follows the trend at the highest level, with Cricket Australia sending a highly-talented development squad there in early August and then several fringe Test contenders to the country for Australia A games in September.

The consensus is that the more exposure to spinning decks a young player gets, the more it helps to round them.

Part of the reason Jaques wanted to take his academy kids was to enhance their ability to sharpen important skills like the sweep shot, or for bowlers the exposure to the importance of flight and speed, on subcontinental wickets.

“It is a fantastic opportunity for the kids, but also the parents to see parts of the world that they wouldn’t normally go to see, to be able to train in different environments and different on different pitches, get access to some other coaches and some different ideas as well, who are very familiar to those conditions,” he said.

“We were lucky enough to have a first-class coach for almost all of the days that we were over there on these tours and then we picked up another skill coach along the way to help the spinners for the last couple of days.

“To be able to have access to those elite coaches to work alongside myself and my other coaches that I have, it really builds a good skill set for that player to learn how to play in spinning conditions and different conditions that they might face in world cricket.

“Australia is totally different to playing spin in the subcontinent. That’s a different skill set. There’s probably not as great a need to learn how to sweep or play the sweep shot in Australian conditions.

“You can definitely use your feet and get forward and get back and get down the wicket a bit more in Australia, as opposed to the stoppy, spinning conditions of the subcontinent.”

Toughening up the talent

Focusing on technique is one element. Developing grit and strengthening the mind was another, for no tour of India at any level is easy, Jaques said.

“To be able to develop a different skill set, to be able to add a few different shots to the game, to be able to deal with how to how to play in humid conditions and heat, how to play when sick or coming out of sickness, were some of the big learnings that the group certainly learned,” he said.

“Every player in the tour group bar one, I think, got sick, and most of the parents, including the coach, got sick as well. It’s part of life over there. You’ve got to be able to deal with those little things that come up.

“They find out a lot about themselves on those trips. We were training twice a day in hot conditions with a lunch break in between at the ground. The amount of water we would go through in a day’s training in those sorts of conditions was quite high, so we had to talk about nutrition, to talk about hydration, to talk about recovery.

“Those little things about being a professional - if they don’t do those things, then they don’t get the most out of their tour. If they’re not hydrated going into a game and they have to come off the field after 30 runs and they’re cramping, that’s an opportunity missed to be able to get the most out of their cricket. Learning all those little things along the way is all part of it.”

An excellent experience

What Jaques would like to see in the development of elite Australian cricketers is the return of a formal Centre of Excellence similar to the one he attended in the infancy of his senior career when showing promise with the Blues.

While CA hosts development camps for promising players in Brisbane, among a host of initiatives to develop younger talents, the Sydneysider believes it is a missing part of the puzzle.

He was part of an intake that included future Australian Test players Mitchell Johnson, Adam Voges, Shane Watson and Nathan Hauritz.

“If you’re talking about developing players, I think the biggest thing from this era to when I played, I guess, is there’s no cricket academy now,” he said.

“The cricket academy actually gave players a different layer in their development because they had to live away from home. It was in Adelaide when I was there, and then they moved it to Brisbane.

“Living away from home for six months challenged you, dealing and connecting with a group of players away from home for a long period of time, which is the same as what the Australian cricket team is doing now (in South Africa).

“They also used to play in second XI competitions as a team, so you got that competitive edge playing against men. For guys coming out of under 19s, that is a big challenge, but a good challenge.

“It had a proven track record for breeding Australian players and that’s probably the one thing that’s missing out of our system at the moment and I’d love to see it go back to that.”

Touring the world again as a professional broadcaster

Coaching aside, Jaques is enjoying travelling to parts of the globe where he did not get to play during his stint in the Australian team.

He made centuries against Sri Lanka and West Indies in his 11 Test career and says he still loves visiting iconic venues around the world, including St George’s Park, the host of the second Test.

But one venue he is looking forward to getting back to is Bridgetown, where he scored a century in his final innings for Australia in 2008 before being cut down by injury.

“I never played international cricket at Lord’s, but being able to play county cricket there was a pretty special place to go. In Australia, the MCG, SCG, it is very hard to beat those, even Adelaide Oval. They’ve all got their iconic feel to them,” he said.

“Playing away from home, I really only toured the West Indies where I made a hundred in Barbados, but I haven’t had a chance to go back and spend any time there. That was a special memory, to go on that tour. I had a couple of one-day tours overseas, but not other Test tours.

“But every ground is iconic, isn’t it? You can sense the history of places when you turn up and come and watch and to be able to come and do that now on a broadcast, that is pretty special as well.”