Will Smeed

Will Smeed announced himself as the latest young batter off Somerset's production line when he hit 82 off 49 balls in only his second professional game, as an 18-year-old against Gloucestershire in the 2020 Vitality Blast. Smeed had been marked as one to watch throughout his days in the county's academy, not least when he and Marcus Trescothick scored hundreds in the same 2nd XI innings when he was only 16.

A product of King's College Taunton, where he was three years below Tom Banton in the same boarding house, Smeed impressed enough in the 2021 Blast season to earn himself a deal as an injury replacement for Birmingham Phoenix in the inaugural Hundred. He was a breakout star in that tournament, hitting 36 off 13 balls on debut and finishing with a strike rate of 172.91 as the Phoenix topped the group stage and reached the final.

He hit the Hundred's first-ever century in 2022, against defending champions Southern Brave at Edgbaston, and showed his potential in one-day cricket, too. On his England Lions debut - in a match that did not have List A status - he thrashed 90 off 56 balls against the touring South Africans, as the Lions chased down 320 with 12.5 overs to spare.

In November 2022, Smeed made a ground-breaking decision: he signed a white-ball-only contract with Somerset, effectively quitting first-class cricket before he had played a game of it. He had endured a lean run in the Second XI earlier that year, averaging 15.57. "The easy option would have been to carry on playing red-ball cricket and try to fit everything in and reach a certain level across all formats, but I want to try to be the best that I can be," he explained. "To achieve this, I feel that I need to focus on excelling in one format."

ESPNcricinfo staff