NICK FRIEND: For The Hundred, he is an ideal poster-boy as a youngster forging a global reputation through the competition. That's not to take away from Somerset or the Blast, but a storyline like this is invaluable
The Hundred's first hundred could have belonged to anyone.
It could have been Jos Buttler, Jason Roy or any of the white-ball guns who have taken English white-ball cricket to such outrageous heights over the last seven years.
It could have been Andre Russell, Quinton de Kock or any of the white-ball guns who have lined up to be part of a competition still in its early days.
But it went the way of Will Smeed, king of the next generation in this country: a leftfield star of the tournament in its first year when picked up as a late replacement, a much more predictable dangerman this time around.
"I felt a bit scratchy for most of my innings," he said, smiling wearily as he talked to Shaun Pollock afterwards. Modesty, as all those who have encountered him can testify, is a central trait of his character. Between innings, he chugged from a bottle of water and accepted the handshakes of Henry Brookes and Liam Livingstone, two teammates who watched on in awe.
Smeed sat in the dugout seemingly nonplussed: for an increasingly undisputed talent, this is nothing particularly new. The hundredth run, yes, but not the big scores in front of the big crowds, up against the big players.
Only last month, he smashed 98 for Somerset against Surrey in the T20 Blast. Exactly a month earlier, he whacked 94 unbeaten in the same competition.
During a winter fortnight spent as a partial replacement at the Pakistan Super League, where he arrived as a relative unknown, he took Peshawar Zalmi for 97 and 99 in two separate outings. In only his second appearance as a professional, he hit 82 in a derby over Gloucestershire. All in the space of 48 innings.
Smeed smashed the first century of The Hundred (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
Before then, inside a single week in 2019, there were scores of 243 and 185 at representative age-group level, and a year earlier he was included on an England Young Lions tour while barely 17.
The breakthrough has come in the shortest formats, but they are not where his aspirations end: he spent much of the winter working on his red-ball skills at Somerset, who deserve so much credit for his development: it was they who chucked him into the Blast as an 18-year-old when James Hildreth's hamstring flared up. Before his assault on Gloucestershire's bowling attack, Jason Kerr – his head coach – simply told him to bat like it was another game for Bridgwater, his home club. It worked, and he doesn't appear to have veered from that stance since.
He only made his List A debut in July, a quirk of circumstances and a changing calendar that puts him at the forefront of the sport's mutating direction. Based on his current trajectory, it feels extremely possible that he could play ODI cricket with just a single day's experience – a duck against the touring South Africans, though he'd belted 90 against the same opposition two days earlier in a warmup without official status.
By the time England tour Pakistan ahead of the T20 World Cup later this year – for which he is surely climbing the pecking order – Smeed will be on the cusp of turning 21. A contemporary of Tom Banton at school – Banton was three years above his Somerset teammate – it's worth not forgetting his age, not only because it gives further context to this extraordinary start but also because, as Banton has experienced himself, it won't always be as plain sailing as this.
For The Hundred, he is an ideal poster-boy, a male equivalent to Alice Capsey as a youngster forging a global reputation through the competition. That's not to take away from Somerset or the Blast, but a storyline like this – as for Brendon McCullum's 158 on the first night of the Indian Premier League – is invaluable. Smeed neither entered nor watched the inaugural draft in 2019, when he was still a year from his county bow, but holds a significant record.
Eoin Morgan spoke about Capsey ahead of this year's edition, reflecting on the speed of her rise: "I think it's extraordinary. In other tournaments, I think we've seen it before – it's going to continue to happen, not only the jump that the tournament brings to springboard you to international level, but also creating household names from a domestic tournament."
Henry Brookes took five wickets for Phoenix in the second innings (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
He might as well have been speaking about Smeed, whose hitting – with his still base and tree-trunk arms – typified the approach put in place for Birmingham Phoenix by Dan Weston, their analyst, who has long championed the value of boundaries above all else in short-format cricket.
"If I hit a four or a six, my first thought is hitting another boundary – it's not trying to get off strike," he told The Cricketer last summer after the campaign. "To be honest, as a bowler in T20 cricket, if someone hits you for six and then gets a single, you're probably pretty happy."
By his own admission, Smeed felt like an imposter in his first year on the circuit. "The way I got thrown into it last year, it all came from nowhere. Should I really be playing in this? Do I deserve it?
"The way this year has been, it has made me feel a lot more confident that I should actually be there. I think once you have that confidence, you start telling yourself that if you think you should be there, then you should be performing. I'm just trying to score as many runs as I can now."
He will consider this an overdue declaration of arrival: that he made reference to his past near-misses in the immediate post-century interview says all you need to know of the clarity in his mindset.
Kevin Pietersen debated on commentary how Smeed would look to reach three figures, with two balls of the innings remaining and one run required. "Slog," he yelped. And the temptation almost certainly entered the 20-year-old's mind, only for him to bunt into the off-side where a misfield offered a second run. No one can ever take the moment away, as Pollock reminded him.
The Hundred has been awaiting its statement innings, and who better for it to come from.
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