Australia batter Steve Smith has been wearing black strips of tape under his eyes as he prepares for the second Ashes Test against England in Brisbane.<\/p>\n
The day-night match will feature floodlights and the players will use a pink ball.<\/p>\n
The patches have been used in the past by former West Indies batter Shivnarine Chanderpaul to reduce the glare caused by the sun and improve contrast.<\/p>\n
Australia’s stand-in captain was photographed wearing the patches while batting in a nets session, with the anticipation of batting under the lights at the Gabba.<\/p>\n
The method is known as ‘eye black’ and is commonly used in American sports, including American football, baseball and lacrosse.<\/p>\n
Babe Ruth, one of baseball’s greatest players, used it in the 1930s and seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady famously wore paint under his eyes too.<\/p>\n
“There must be sort of science or theory around it,” explained Australia team-mate Marnus Labuschagne when asked about Smith’s patches.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t read into it. I think it’s something to do with glare, especially on the wicket. The glare up from the wicket. Maybe it helped pick the ball up better.<\/p>\n
“I look at it either way, if there is a science behind it or whether it is a placebo. If it doesn’t but it feels like it works, both ways, it works.<\/p>\n
“I would love nothing more than to see him stroll out to the wicket with the Shivnarines and go out there and smack them around everywhere.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia batter Steve Smith has been wearing black strips of tape under his eyes as he prepares for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-163317","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}