NICK FRIEND - INTERVIEW: Who knows if it will work for Smeed focusing so early on white-ball cricket only? Not even he can say for certain, but you sense he'll be comfortable whatever the result, knowing that this means staying true to himself
If Will Smeed was bowling to Will Smeed, he knows where he would bowl.
"I think once I'm in," he says, "I'd go wide blockhole because I don't scoop, which is why I want to work on those shots and hit funky areas, which makes it a lot harder to set a field.
"And then it becomes a case of the bowler having to decide on a plan before executing it, whereas at the moment the plan is pretty obvious and it's purely down to execution.
“My main thing at the moment is to make it harder to set a field for me."
What was a small sample size is now a burgeoning career – spread across five tournaments – entering its third year, where everyone who's anyone has seen enough of the 21-year-old opener to know what he's looking to do to you. You'd only need look at Smeed and his tree-trunk forearms as a bowler to realise his areas of strength and your areas of danger: he has hit 81 sixes in 54 T20 innings since debuting in the T20 Blast for Somerset as a teenager during the pandemic summer.
Plenty has happened since: 240 runs in six Pakistan Super League matches, the first player to a century in The Hundred, fast-tracked into the England Lions fold for his List A debut. As he touches down in Pakistan for a second season at Qutta Gladiators, he does so as a marked man.
"I wouldn't say I feel under more pressure," he insists, "but maybe I expect a bit more of myself and actually believe that I can do it because I've done it before."
In November, Smeed announced that he was stepping away from first-class cricket to commit to becoming the best white-ball player he can be.
"Everyone I know or who knows me wasn't surprised at all," he says. "It wasn't something I'd rushed into; it was a few years in the making. There isn't an obvious moment, but it was just something I mulled over for quite a long time."
Smeed has just finished a stint in the ILT20 with MI Emirates (Karim Sahib/AFP via Getty Images)
And no one who knows Smeed would have been surprised by the ownership he took of that decision, fronting up in a newspaper interview and happily expanding on his reasons, unafraid of upsetting those perturbed by a youngster's heresy in contravening old norms and choosing his own path. As far back as 2019, he told Somerset's website that he'd rather play in the IPL than the Ashes.
Who knows if it will work? Not even he can say for certain, but you sense he'll be comfortable whatever the result, knowing that he has taken a plunge that means staying true to himself.
It's a bold call from a player who is exactly that: he was still a teenager – and an unknown to most observers – when he bludgeoned 36 runs from his first 13 balls in The Hundred. There was no hesitancy then in the presence of fame and reputations, and there is none now.
Instead, his decision is bound by a clarity of what he's looking to achieve and how he believes this gives him the best chance of doing so, with a finite lifespan available to him as a professional cricketer.
"If it goes well, it goes well; if it doesn't, then that's why I'm doing a degree and making sure I have some backup options. It means I can enjoy my cricket. If I keep working hard, fingers crossed it goes my way"
"I just want to give everything to trying to become the best white-ball player I can, and it just made sense to not feel that I have to – in all my free time – work on defending and leaving the ball, because I'm not sure how much benefit that has. Obviously, there are technical fundamentals which cross over a lot, but I think I can still do that and not have to do that in excess."
Smeed has been away all winter so far, first in the Abu Dhabi T10, then in the ILT20, from where he is speaking out of his latest hotel room. Now comes Pakistan, before home time and the chance to see family and friends. So, he hasn't yet had a training block to suck his teeth into since committing to this new regime.
But, when the time does come to work with Greg Kennis, his batting coach at Somerset, that is an important nuance to get across. He won't stop netting against red balls, contrary to popular misconception. There are ample stories of players doing that, disowning the non-negotiables of batting, losing the base from which everything else follows and living the pitfalls.
Smeed is set for a second spell in the PSL with Quetta Gladiators (Arif Ali/AFP via Getty Images)
Carlos Brathwaite told The Cricketer last year how he could chart his decline back to the aftermath of the famous World T20 final, where he instantly became such a draw for franchises that he ran out of time to tick over. Once upon a time, he was a Test cricketer, averaging 45.25 over three matches. It was only when he took a self-imposed break at the end of 2018 to fix his game that he hit the nets and rebuilt those foundations.
"Yes, my role is to come in at the 15th over and hit 30 off 10," said Brathwaite, "but you need a platform to be able to do that on a consistent basis, and I don't think – without playing first-class cricket – that I had that platform, and I just had this steady decline in my batting.
"I think that is a good case study for young players who have come up in this T20 era."
Alex Blake, the Kent white-ball-only batter, said similar of his motives for playing in the county's second-team red-ball fixtures in 2022. In essence, if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. He made two double hundreds in five innings, freed by knowing he was only using these games to help his white-ball game.
"Batting up the order, you're facing a new ball and it will move," says Smeed. "I'd like to be facing a red ball in training because it moves more and will challenge me technically and show up any issues that are there, and then also I'll have some time now to work on some white-ball-specific skills – trying to hit the ball further or scooping, working on those specifics."
He has thought about this. As he says, it's not been a snap judgement or a grab for riches on the back of his meteoric rise. Rather, he averaged 15.57 through seven innings in the Second XI Championship in 2022, having averaged 14 the year before, with a single half century. More than a third of his 154 runs in six games came in one innings. In simple terms, he might be clinging onto his professional contract in a previous era, where this other code of the game didn't exist.
When you pit those struggles against his opposite returns for Somerset, Birmingham Phoenix and Quetta Gladiators – he even bombed 90 off 56 balls against Lungi Ngidi, Anrich Nortje and Marco Jansen in a 50-over warmup against South Africa last summer – it's difficult to argue with his logic.
Smeed became the first player to make a century in The Hundred last year (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
His first appearance after The Hundred final in 2021, played out in front of a full house at Lord's, was against Northamptonshire's second string at West Lodge Park in Desborough. "It is tough," he smiles. "I call it the great leveller." You can understand if that paradox nudged him towards this place – not because he's spoilt, but because turning up at a ground built on the back of a farm rammed home how different these formats are and where he sits on the foodchain of each.
The starkness of that outlying is why he doesn't necessarily think that his decision – however ground-breaking – will make him a case study or cause a generation of young batters to follow his lead.
"I felt in a pretty unique position," he says, "where I played quite a lot of T20 games but wasn't anywhere near making my first-class debut. It was a lot more straightforward decision than if I was playing the County Championship every week. If you do well at Somerset, they give you the chance, so I knew I was a couple of games away. That's just how it is. But I just didn't earn or deserve that chance.
"If I'd kept working, could it have clicked at some point? Maybe. I don't know that. I've not shut the door on it fully; I might miss it and go back to it, but just these next couple of years I just want to give everything to the white-ball stuff."
That doesn't mean globetrotting for the sake of globetrotting, though. Theoretically, you could visit the United States, Australia, South Africa, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates and Pakistan as a white-ball player before the start of the IPL, the end of which overlaps with the start of the Blast.
But he is consciously not in it for that, respectful of how privileged he has been to visit places like Pakistan but also aware – as with the importance of retaining a defence against the swinging ball – of the perils of burnout and living out of a suitcase, particularly when spending so much time on the road would negate his mission statement of self-improvement.
"If you don't have that block at home, it can become very easy to rock up to these comps, have a bat in the nets and try to smack a few, so you're never really working on your game.
"The point I'm at right now, it's not about trying to fill up the calendar; it's about trying to get the balance right: time at home, time playing cricket, time practising. I think I'm very wary of the people who have gone the other way and tried to play everything, where it's had a pretty negative effect on their game."
Smeed's first professional List A appearance came for England Lions agains South Africa (Ryan Hiscott/Getty Images)
Despite the efforts of BazBall, first-class cricket and its short-form varieties in general have never been so divergent. So, when you strip everything back, Smeed's is the logical route: it's a more extreme example, but 100m sprinters don't often double up as 400m runners, even if there is plenty of crossover.
It feels compulsory to ask how appealing he finds England's new approach to Test cricket. "I think the way they are playing is a bit closer to white-ball cricket," he says, "but for me at the moment I want to focus purely on this stuff."
He only made 55 runs in four matches for MI Emirates, the ILT20 offshoot of the Mumbai Indians franchise, but a month in the UAE meant a month in a dressing room with Kieron Pollard, Dwayne Bravo and Imran Tahir. Rashid Khan joined in time for the playoffs. The quartet have 1,918 T20 appearances between them. Smeed is an embryo by comparison.
He isn't one to sit down and throw 20 questions at Pollard, his captain, but he milked them dry for their knowledge either in the middle or if they were sharing a net.
His biggest takeaway from those chats?
"Speaking to a lot of the guys out here, everyone bats very differently but the best players all have a very similar mindset. So, that has been interesting to talk to them. That's something I've really taken from the West Indies boys out here: watching them, you think they're trying to smack every ball, but they're not at all. There is a lot of method to what appears to be madness at times."
He also leaves with a confidence that he is a better player than in November. "You have a lot of time to train, so it's not like you're the same player at the end of the comp as when you arrived. That's another thing for me: I'm going to these comps at the moment with the mindset of trying to improve. Obviously, I want to perform as I get the chance, but I want to make the most of the coaches available and the senior players and the bowlers. I'm facing good bowlers the whole time and batting in different conditions. It all builds up to be very good for your game."
Smeed has never played a first-class game for Somerset but has experienced a meteoric rise in white-ball cricket, stemming from his introduction to the Blast in 2020 (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
And if it doesn't translate into runs? Then life goes on.
Because what you learn more than anything from a conversation with Smeed is that he is a young man with a healthy perspective on what cricket is: a job to be enjoyed, a game to be played at – not a life sentence. Even when he first spoke to The Cricketer in 2020, when his professional career was five games old, he was talking about life after cricket and the need to maximise the spare time that comes with being an elite sportsperson.
Three years on, he is in the second year of an online degree in maths and economics, with exams in June and a convenient period after the end of the PSL to revise. At every turn, Smeed has plotted this path to make sense for his life. He sees his eventual graduation as a chance to apply for work experience and undertake a Masters.
"I'm very fortunate to be able to play sport for a living," he says. "It’s something a lot of youngsters dream of doing. I'm fortunate to have that chance, and I'm just trying to enjoy it.
"If it goes well, it goes well; if it doesn't, then that's why I'm doing a degree and making sure I have some backup options. It means I can enjoy the cricket. If I keep working hard, fingers crossed it goes my way.
"For me, making sure I have the most rounded CV I can and setting myself up for life after cricket takes the pressure off the cricket. Most people play at their best when they're enjoying it."
And that final sentence is what this is all about.