The trigonometric venn diagram: Why Josh Tongue gets Steve Smith out (almost) every time

Josh Tongue is 28 years old, playing only his ninth Test. Injury troubles mean he has only played 64 first-class matches in nine years. He has never taken more than six wickets in an innings, and more than nine in a match. Essentially, it's safe to say Tongue is not an all-time great.

But he does have the wood over Smith.

The pair have faced off in seven innings across formats, and Tongue has dismissed him six times, the latest coming on Wednesday in Sydney. In first-class cricket, this is five dismissals in six innings, and Smith averages 16.6 against the Notts quick.

What is it that makes Josh Tongue so successful against Steve Smith?

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For the first point of order – what stands out? Watching him, it’s the action that catches the eye. It is a bit awkward and jerky, a far cry from the romanticised idea of fast bowlers as lithe, quick and smooth.

The angle of Tongue’s release is what has often been talked about, and part of what pushed England’s team management to back him as a Test bowler. Bowling from beyond the perpendicular, batters see the ball always angling in towards them. To accentuate that, Tongue also tends to deliver from wide of the bowling crease (when he comes over the wicket).

Data from CricViz shows that Tongue has a “wide” release from over the wicket for 99.1 per cent of his deliveries to right-handers. In Test cricket since 2021, the corresponding figure for Jasprit Bumrah, another bowler with a beyond-the-perpendicular release, is 89.6 per cent. New Zealand’s Will O’Rourke is at 93.6.

Select right-arm quicks coming over the wicket to RHB - since Jan 1, 2021

This, of course, is the most distinctive feature of Tongue’s bowling. Another, more subtle aspect is his ability to seam the ball.

When bowlers look to move the ball off the pitch, they are rarely in control of which direction it moves; that is the nature of the beast. All a bowler can do is try to land it on the seam, and let the natural variation take over. All things being equal, one would expect a roughly 50-50 split between the ball moving left or right after pitching (among deliveries that do move).

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As such, he does not get the ball to move off the seam significantly more than the others on this list. All eight bowlers on this list get some form of movement off the surface 70-80 per cent of the time.

Where Tongue stands out is how often this movement is in a particular direction. Nearly two-thirds of his deliveries that move off the seam go away from the right-hander. Bumrah at 68.1 is the only one here that is higher. James Anderson and Matt Henry, two of the best exponents of the wobble-ball in recent years, have more intuitive and even splits of 50 and 52 per cent respectively.

Select right-arm quicks coming over the wicket to RHB - since Jan 1, 2021

It is not quite evident why this happens, perhaps a quirk of Tongue’s release, but straightaway one can see how he is a difficult proposition. A batter facing up to him sees the ball coming from wide of the crease, always angling in sharply before it pitches and (predominantly) moves away.

The third factor that aids Tongue’s bowling is his height, but this is not really unique. Around 84 per cent of Tongue’s deliveries come from a height of over 2 metres, but that pales in comparison to taller quicks like Cummins, Rabada and O’Rourke, who virtually always deliver from that height.

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What does all this have to do with Steve Smith?

We have the three aspects of Tongue’s bowling that fit together – a high release, a wide release and an uncanny knack for moving the ball away from the right-hander off the seam.

Measure this up against Steve Smith’s record in Test cricket; split as overall and since January 1, 2021, to ensure there have not been significant changes in the overall trends.

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Compared to his career as a whole, Smith’s averages have been down across the board in the last five years, only natural given the general trend of Test cricket in this time. This also matches with his overall average – 56.3 across his career, but 48.1 since 2021.

The following diagrams show Smith’s record against seam bowlers considering different combinations of the attributes outlined above; wide-angle deliveries, high release points and seam movement leaving the right-hander.

The middle section of the Venn diagram illustrates just how difficult it can be even for a batter of Smith’s quality to adjust. When bowlers can combine the ability to angle the ball in, nip it away off the deck and deliver from a height that hits the pitch hard as well as makes use of any inconsistent bounce, batting is extremely difficult.

One other thing is evident – with Smith, as with any other batter, averages drop when seam movement is involved. At the pace of most quick bowlers, around 130 kmph and above, any movement off wicket is near-impossible to adjust to.

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Seam movement is the only attribute of the three that appears to trouble Smith on its own. Tall bowlers alone do not suffice, and neither do bowlers that bowl from wide of the crease. That specific combination is also not enough.

In fact, one may notice that since 2021, Smith’s average is lower when seam movement alone is in play, against shorter bowlers who deliver from closer to the stumps. It’s not a big difference, but there is an explanation there. 57 per cent of these deliveries from bowlers shorter and closer to the stumps “seam big”, i.e., they move away by more than 0.75 degrees. The corresponding figure from taller bowlers wider of the crease is 48 per cent. Logically, more seam movement is more difficult to survive against.

Compare Smith’s returns against the bowlers mentioned earlier. He averages 30-plus against each of them except Tongue and Matt Henry, for whom the sample size is even smaller. Further, Henry’s two dismissals of Smith were off deliveries that seamed significantly, as mentioned previously.

While all of these bowlers are undoubtedly world-class, Tongue is the only one that regularly hits the intersection of a wide release, high release and seam movement away. Cummins and Rabada, for example, do not bowl from as wide of the crease, and O’Rourke tends to get movement into the batter rather than away, meaning the outside edge is rarely in play. Bumrah does not have the height.

While all these bowlers have other attributes that bring them success (Bumrah for example has an effective outswinger which Tongue does not), they do not quite put together the ingredients to make this – admittedly incredibly specific – cocktail that appears so effective against Smith. (For the record, Mark Wood also averages 16 in Test cricket against Smith, but largely because he has bounced him out twice.)

Since Tongue also lacks the elite-level control of these bowlers, he isn’t as successful across the board as yet. That said, he certainly bowls enough good deliveries to trouble most batters, in between the looser ones – a Test strike rate of 41 balls per wicket is evidence enough of that. After all, if a bowler can have Steve Smith in trouble, it's a safe bet they should be good against other batters as well.

Essentially, this particular quirk of a matchup is largely down to the alignment between the bowler’s strengths and the batter’s weaknesses fitting together almost like a jigsaw puzzle. It certainly gives England a handy weapon though; perhaps it’s time to christen Tongue the anti-Smudge.

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