The Hundred didn’t ‘produce’ Will Smeed – the traditional, county-led system did
by Mike Atherton
Not long after the conclusion of the inaugural staging of the Hundred, the comms department of the ECB arranged a press conference via Zoom to reflect on its successful launch. The tournament’s managing director was on hand with the figures and when asked about the competition’s other benefits he talked of women’s cricket, naturally, which had been the biggest success, as well as the opportunity afforded for young men’s cricketers. Like “Will . . .”. Eventually, after an awkward pause, Smeed’s surname came to him.
Smeed, the 20-year-old Somerset batsman, was the breakout men’s star of last year’s competition, despite not having been picked up in the initial draft, and he made its first century on Wednesday evening for the Birmingham Phoenix side he represents. He has already been picked for the England Lions this summer, despite having yet to make his first-class debut or indeed without having played a List A game for his county.
Muscle-packed and dynamic, he is a six-hitter who has enjoyed some eye-catching success in the short-form cricket he has played — the T20 Blast, Pakistan Super League and now the Hundred.
Occasionally, you hear notes that jar: that Smeed, somehow, has been “produced” by the new competition, or that he was an unknown beforehand and has suddenly emerged from thin air, fully formed. Yet, there is an important distinction to be drawn: the Hundred, like the PSL and the Blast, has given him a platform, but he is a product of the game’s traditional systems, through county age-group matches, a county academy and ECB-funded pathways.
One of the advantages of having a son who plays (my lad, Josh, is at Middlesex) is that you get to see a whole cohort of young players at first hand, and it has been a source of joy to watch many of the boys that he grew up playing against going on to make their way in the professional game. I first saw Smeed, for example, at the Bunbury Festival — the tournament for the best under-15 regional players — in the summer of 2017.
I looked up that match yesterday — South West Under-15 v London and East Under-15 — in July of that year. From it, I counted at least a dozen players who have gone on to represent their counties in the professional game. Among that number, for example, was Tom Prest, who has captained England’s Young Lions and who made 181 for Hampshire in the Royal London Cup last week. He looks a player of real promise.
Smeed was already on English cricket’s radar by then, having being nurtured by Somerset, who have an enviable reputation for making the most of the talent around their county and beyond their immediate boundaries. Two years before the Bunbury Festival, for example, he was playing for Somerset Under-14 against Cornwall at Hayle, a match that included Lewis Goldsworthy, Sam Young and Kasey Aldridge, all of whom went on to represent Somerset’s first team.
After the Bunbury Festival, I kept tabs on Smeed’s progress. Later that year, he was playing in the ECB’s flagship under-17 regional competition at Loughborough, known as the Super 4s, the point from which those in charge of the ECB’s senior development programme really start to take notice. Smeed was playing well in advance of his age group by then, a measure of his promise, and he played in the Super 4s for three consecutive years. His runscoring didn’t stand out, but you could see the destructive potential there.
The point of all this is not to lay out some kind of potted career history or dismiss the platform that the Hundred has given Smeed, rather to remind those who may have tuned in on Wednesday evening that there has been an awful lot of help and investment along the way to get a young player to that point. Parents, teachers, friends, coaches, groundsmen and volunteers, giving time and energy and using precious resources, to develop young players and give them a chance to become the best they can be and achieve their dreams.
All over the country, these systems are in place: from formal county age groups and academies to the less formal networks that I outlined in a piece with Leicestershire’s head of development, Jigar Naik, earlier in the season. Funded and mature — and no doubt in need of improvement in areas such as cost and accessibility — these systems have produced good young players for English cricket for decades.
As the debates intensify around franchise cricket and private investment in the game, and how it all knits together with more traditional structures, it would be wise to remember that one cannot exist without the other. All over the cricketing world, franchises are reaping the benefits of the investment of others. In this instance, Birmingham Phoenix are enjoying the fruits of Somerset’s labour.
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