Weekly Talent Spotlight #12: Will Smeed

Nearly smoking a maiden T20 ton in his first overseas league on debut, what talent does the 20 year old from Somerset hold?

DISCLAIMER: THIS WEEKLY TALENT SPOTLIGHT EDITION IS FOR THE WEEK OF 22ND JANUARY-29TH JANUARY.

The grass at King’s College, Taunton is greener on neither side of the fence. It is posh, neatly manicured lawns emblazoned with auburn autumn leaves remind the layperson that grass can only be so green. As the official blog asserts, King’s is a big piece of rural hidden in the middle of town, full of wonderful spaces to breathe.

Cricket is king at King’s. The school has a cricket programme which it calls the Elite Player Programme (the EPP), designed for young players pushing to gain contracts. Jos Buttler, Tom Banton and Alex Barrow are some of the beneficiaries of the programme. If you pasture the grass at King’s once, it is said that cricket will in due time caress your cheek and call you a magnificent beast. If cricket had its version of the Fullbright Distinguished Awards, King’s would fight for the top spot with other elite private schools.

William Smeed too went to King’s College, Taunton. It’s not a surprise then that he oozed through Somerset’s age-group system like fine water gurgling out of filter paper. Records exist since as early as 2009, when he was an eight-year-old, denoting his appearances for Somerset Under-10s. In 2017, he batted 19 overs alongside Marcus Trescothick for a partnership of 92 runs in Somerset’s seconds as both players scored hundreds. Trescothick would later say, “Will has got a big future ahead of him in the game and we have all said that he has got a very good chance of going all the way.” A second eleven debut versus Middlesex would soon follow and so too a maiden hundred against a Sussex attack comprising of George Garton and Abi Sakande.

A lengthy layoff due to a series of injuries followed: a broken thumb, a stress fracture in the foot and a shoulder operation burned in the oven. But that didn’t stop Smeed from getting jacked during the year-long layoff. “I used to be quite small but I still managed to clear the ropes, and then I filled out a bit and got stronger,” he hollowed out to ESPNcricinfo. In his homecoming match for Somerset U17 against Gloucestershire, he smashed a voluminous 243 from 260 balls. The comeback trail does not stop: An unbeaten 185 off 127 balls sprung out of his bat, the first 50 runs coming from 27 balls, as Somerset thulped Warwickshire with eight overs to spare.

Maturity is a word that people routinely associate with Smeed. For Nick Friend, writing for The Cricketer, Smeed is “wiser than his years”. Some say that this is reflected in part in his work off the field: Smeed is an active campaigner for Sporting Minds UK’s “The Huddle”, a charity that seeks to provide mental assistance for English athletes. A case can be made for the claim that this maturity translates readily to his cricket. Not only does Smeed take up the seemingly blasphemous choice of the IPL over the World Cup and the Ashes, he also wins over fans of the shorter format with his fresh and dewy approach to T20.

“You don’t get many horrible balls, which you get when you’re playing against people around our age. That’s the main takeaway so far – an appreciation of bowlers’ capacity to nail their skills more consistently, especially in T20 where execution is king. So, that’s what I’ve been working on a lot this winter: how do I hit bowlers off their length? If they’re settled in and it’s working for them, they’re not going to move.” High pace hitters at the under-19 level are uncommon (because high pace bowlers at the under-19 level are uncommon). Then there’s Smeed, whose pursuit to enhance his stroke-making against good balls at high pace is jaw-dropping.

A hazy set of pandemic years follow as Smeed makes hay when the sun unwinds: Smeed is launched into the Blast and he impresses with a 49-ball 82 in only his second professional match. 12 T20s and 283 runs later he becomes the youngest player to win a Hundred contract as he takes the field for Birmingham Phoenix alongside Liam Livingston, Moeen Ali and Finn Allen. The BBC’s cricket pages soon read, “Will Smeed stars as Phoenix end Rockets 100% record.”

A T10 stint and a PSL contract with Quetta Gladiators later, Smeed has to try harder not to simper at the deluge of comments thronging his early Instagram pics.

Technical Analysis

An enfeeblement against spin at this level is well-documented. According to CricViz, Smeed’s PSL strike-rate of 169 against pace over 68 balls dims to 44 against spinners over a sample of 34 balls.

And teams are beginning to understand this. While all six overs of the PowerPlay of his first game of the tournament were bowled by quick bowlers, the spin of Imad Wasim and Khushdil Shah has run riot since.

From a statistical point of view, it was predictable. Before coming into the PSL, Smeed averaged 28 against spinners with a strike-rate of 125. While neither metric categorically suggests a weakness against spin, these runs came on unresponsive pitches against part-time tweakers. At a higher level, it was likely that he was going to struggle.

It's against away-spin that he struggles especially. Before the PSL, he averaged 24 against in-spin while thwacking it at 168. Against away-spin it was 30 and 114.

Smeed against pace (Up) v Smeed against spin (Down)

The promising part? It’s quite possible that he can sort this out. Smeed’s modus operandi against spin consists of a forward press accompanied by a crouch, both qualities that put him in good stead against away-spin. Not only does the forward press take his front foot towards the direction of spin of the ball, his extreme side-on stance means that he’s ideally suited to giving the ball airtime. A side-on position before the initiation of your downswing is linked with being able to maximize your X-Factor Stretch – the difference between your hip-shoulder separations at the point of initiation of downswing and the point of contact – a quantity positively correlated with range achieved. How about familiarity, batting’s favourite child? Somerset produces the country’s most spinning pitches.

This is also why he is unsparing of anything on his body. Heaving the ball to the leg side gives you the best chance of maximising your hip-shoulder separation at the point of contact – which, assuming that the hip-shoulder separation at initiation remains the same, directly translates to range.

A second consideration while discussing Smeed’s ceiling as a T20 journeyman lies in his physical attributes. As T20 gravitates towards taller players, batters of Smeed’s ilk are becoming rarer. The lack of levers and the relative difficulty in getting to the pitch of the ball is a deterministic reason for his trials by spin, while empirical data confirms that shorter players are less efficient at exploiting the straight boundary. As franchises begin to scout to maximise home advantage, the utility of players like Smeed could come in a very restrictive, claustrophobic sense: on grounds where the square boundaries are longer and on pitches that do not favour spin.

In other words, visualise him playing more for Birmingham Phoenix and Perth Scorchers – and a lot of T10 cricket.

Why is Will Smeed on Weekly Talent Spotlight?

Will Smeed on Friday the 28th of January scored 97 runs off 62 balls in a player-of-the-match effort for Quetta against Peshawar Zalmi, surpassing Kevin Pietersen for the highest score by an Englishman in the PSL and Haider Ali for the highest score by a player younger than 21. Though he doesn’t gush with the verve of lofted shots on the legside or chutzpah to step out and hit spin, the upside he brings to the table in a very narrow task is enormous: From 55 short balls in his professional career, he has scored 113 runs.

The combination of the two facts regarding the rarity of such a hitter at the Under-21 levels and the possibility he presents of not being a high negative matchup against spin (one who is threatened on both the strike-rate and average sides) marks him out as one to keep an eye out for. Whether he goes on to entertain Australian crowds at Perth with his array of hook shots over deep midwicket, or masters his spin game and makes the crowds of Mumbai chant his name, we might be about to watch unfold the career of one of cricket’s first out-and-out franchise specialists.