Mitchell Johnson: If even the great Steve Smith finds opening tough work, how about we get a specialist in

I don’t know whether Steve Smith underestimated the difficulty of opening the batting in Test cricket.

Because he hadn’t been at his best for a while at No.4, I think Smith was just trying to find something that would work for him and he thought it was something to work towards.

Smith made his debut as a leg-spin bowler batting at No.8. So he’s a guy who needs new challenges.

We all know he’s a great player. But the worry I always had about him opening was that he’s trying to find form. And to try to find it in a new role at the top of the order at the back end of his career is a lot harder.

Smith would be frustrated with only one half century, his 91 not out when carrying his bat against the West Indies at the Gabba in January, from his first six knocks as a Test opener.

There’s got to be a lot of pressure on him in this position after the team backed him in. We saw Usman Khawaja in the first innings against New Zealand face 118 balls to get just 33. It takes a lot of patience and there’s a skill involved in that.

The way that Smith got out in the first over of the second innings, that was not an opener’s shot. It was a ball that he should be leaving. People might say “that’s unlucky”, but he played with a bat that was on an angle, a shot we normally see from him at No.4 and when a bit of shine is off the ball.

But against a hard new ball, he will know he needs to make better decisions. And that’s the thing about being an opener. It’s a different game.

Selectors will leave the batting line-up the same for the second Test but moving forward they must start treating opening the batting as a specialist role.

If one of Australia’s greatest ever Test batsmen in Smith doesn’t succeed as an opener, it should only strengthen Cameron Bancroft’s claims to get a go against India next summer.

Because selectors would then have to admit that it is a specialist role and pick the best opener in the Sheffield Shield.

In the meantime, both Smith and Marnus Labuschagne need to start next summer with some shield cricket and make some runs.

If Smith ends up having to move again, then the logical spot for him might be Labuschagne’s at No.3 should Cam Green keep performing at No.4.

Regardless, you would think Labuschagne is under some pressure with his lack of consistency in Test cricket and with a big gap between the next Test series against India, opportunities are there.

The Kiwis would have been pretty happy after the first day when it looked like they were going to roll the Aussies for under 300 but that final-wicket partnership between Green and Josh Hazlewood was a killer.

Just think how different the match situation might have been without it.

VIVA LAS VEGAS

The NRL’s big Las Vegas experiment takes place on Sunday, but if I was a gambling man I wouldn’t be betting on rugby league making any long-term headway in the United States.

The NRL hasn’t even been able to make rugby league work in Perth yet. I’d have thought gaining a genuine national footprint by introducing an NRL team to Perth, and perhaps Adelaide, would be a better use of their money. Grow your game in your own country first.

As a one-off spectacle, the double header involving the Rabbitohs, Sea Eagles, Broncos and Roosters promises to be pretty cool experience.

It will be entertaining. Ticket sales look good and the deal for the matches to be shown on Fox Sports 1 across the US in prime time should help give the sport a shop window.

Rugby league looks more like American football than Aussie rules, minus obviously the padding and helmets, so it’s something that the average US sports fan might be able to relate to. It’s also much shorter than an NFL game, fitting within a two-hour TV window.

But if the idea is that they’re trying to grow the sport of rugby league long-term in the US, then it’s probably going to be pretty difficult.

And the reason I say that is cricket’s ongoing struggles to do the same, as the sport tries to promote the Twenty20 format to Americans.

The cricket will get good crowds at most of the games in the US at June’s T20 World Cup they will co-host with the West Indies, because there’s a lot of expats from the sub-continent and Caribbean. But how many born and bred locals are going to show up?

Interestingly, the AFL seems to have abandoned all attempts to play matches overseas since the onset of COVID, despite VFL clubs travelling to the US as early as the 1960s. The AFL’s most recent focus was China, which never seemed to really get going.

While there might be some positives to come out of the NRL’s venture as a curiosity, to earn an ongoing slice of the lucrative American sports market you would have to do a lot of hard yards starting from the grass roots.