England prospect Will Smeed has signed a new white-ball-only deal with Somerset in what could be a ground-breaking move for the sport.
Smeed has never played a professional first-class match, but first hit the headlines back in 2018 as a 16-year-old when he scored a hundred alongside England legend Marcus Trescothick in a Somerset Second XI game.
Since then, Smeed has excelled in the shorter formats, starring for Somerset in the T20 Blast, scoring the first-ever century in The Hundred for Birmingham Phoenix and earning overseas franchise gigs in the Pakistan Super League, Abu Dhabi T10 and the new ILT20.
He also featured for the England Lions in two tour matches against South Africa earlier this summer, with the second game his only List A appearance to date. And despite insisting in August that he still had "aspirations in all three formats", Smeed has now decided to focus solely on white-ball cricket.
Explaining his decision, Smeed said: "I feel that my game is better suited to white-ball cricket. After a huge amount of thorough and considered discussions, I feel that I need to solely focus my attention on the limited overs formats in order to become the very best cricketer I can be.
"I can assure people that this not a decision that I've taken lightly, and I've spoken to a lot of people about it. I want to be the best player that I can be, and to do that I believe that this needs to be my focus.
"I know how much our Members love red-ball cricket, but unfortunately I haven't been performing how I would like to in the longer form of the game. 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."
Smeed added that he may one day decide he wants to play first-class cricket, but believes going down the white-ball-only road is the right move for now. "I feel that I need to focus on excelling in one format," he said.
"I'm certainly not saying that I'll never play red-ball cricket again. I just feel that this is the right decision for me and Somerset at the current time."
