Steve Smith scripts history, breaks Root's Test record in South Africa Test

BREAKING: Steve Smith breaks Joe Root's Test record, reaching the landmark on Day 3 against South Africa after catching David Bedingham off Pat Cummins' bowling.

Steve Smith just took Joe Root's Test record off him, with one catch.

Day three in South Africa, Pat Cummins gets David Bedingham to edge one, and Smith snaffles it. That's the moment, right here, ball held aloft like he knows exactly what he's just done. Because he does. That catch moves him past Root, and in Test cricket those fielding numbers are a lifetime's work, not a hot streak.

And look at the celebration. Arms up, grinning, a thirty-something who still treats every chance at slip like a birthday present. Root, for his part, is still playing, still catching, so this particular tug of war is nowhere near finished.

The detail I love is who bowled it. Cummins and Smith have been doing this double act for a decade, and the record falls off his captain's bowling. Poetry, with slip fielders.

This is Kateryna Kovalenko, reporting for HIT.