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3 minute read

Jamie Smith earned himself a mention in our previous article about which England Test players might get the boot for the next Test. We had him down as someone who’d need to play very badly in early season to lose his place, so a match-saving 132 for Surrey presumably keeps him in the team.

Things didn’t look too great for Smith in Surrey’s first innings when he was dismissed for 9 and his team-mate and England predecessor Ben Foakes then made 128.

Even if Ben Foakes is “the best wicketkeeper in the world” he’s only worth so much to England

If your county thinks another guy is a better wicketkeeper than you, there’s extra pressure to score more runs than him.

Perhaps that’s why Smith was batting at three in this match: simply to look like a more serious batter. Another interpretation is that he might be hedging his bets a bit with top order England places at even greater risk. Or maybe it’s just a Surrey thing – they have a lot of players to accommodate, after all.

It worked out for him in the second innings anyway and Dan Lawrence – another cricketer who once got suckered into batting up the order – also made a hundred.

How harshly should we judge Dan Lawrence for his fairly terrible performance as a Test opener?

Surrey’s opponents, Warwickshire, made 544, so it clearly wasn’t the most challenging pitch. Those kinds of details will be washed away by the weak shower head of time however. Come England’s next selection meeting, all that will matter is that they were probably going to stick with Smith anyway, and look, he made a hundred.

An interesting footnote to all of this is that the bare stats of Foakes’ and Smith’s innings suggest both men made efforts to alter perceptions. The former rattled along at four an over and even deigned to wallop a six at one point, whereas Smith scored at three an over and didn’t clear the ropes once, thus obliging reporters to say that he batted ‘watchfully’.

For what it’s worth, we would guess that there was zero conscious effort to play differently from either man; that those outcomes were in fact merely products of circumstance and natural variation. Ours is a world of MAKING STATEMENTS though so let’s all just pretend it was that instead.