MATCH STORY
Follow UsThe last time Jamie Smith batted in Test cricket, he missed his hundred by five runs. It was an unfortunate dismissal. Shamar Joseph’s good length kept low. Smith, quite rightly, went for the pull shot only to see the ball scoot under his bat swing to hit the stumps.
Cometh the first Test against Sri Lanka, Smith finished that unfulfilled job, scoring 111 in England’s first innings in Manchester. He is now the youngest England wicketkeeper to amass a Test hundred, surpassing Les Ames’ 94-year-old record.
Smith walked in to bat on Day 2 with England’s score reading 125/4. They had just lost Joe Root and the conditions were tricky under the overcast Manchester sky. Asitha Fernando, three wickets at that point, had caused enough swing and seam movement off the good length to leave any new batter circumspect.
However, Smith started on a strong note, scoring 19 off his first 30 balls while only playing 3.3% of false strokes. When he came down the track to loft the left-arm spinner Prabath Jayasuriya down the ground for the first six of the innings, the commentators praised the Surrey-born for assessing the lack of turn in the pitch.
Smith batted at a strike rate in excess of 50 for most part of his innings, taking the aggressive option whenever there was an opportunity. Thus, he has already distinguished himself from his predecessor — Ben Foakes — who had a strike rate of 47 under England’s Bazball era.
The pull and the cover drive come naturally to Smith. In the three Tests against West Indies, his debut series, 92 of his 204 runs (nearly 45.1%) came off these two shots. En route this ton, 44 of his 111 came through these two shots.
Continuing another trend that Smith has established in his brief career, he stretched England’s total with the lower-order. During his 95 against West Indies in Birmingham, Smith forged a 106-run stand with Chris Woakes to build a 94-run lead for England, from a position where they were 51 runs in arrears with three wickets in hand.
At Lord’s, where Smith scored 70 on debut, he had a 52-run partnership with Woakes again for the seventh wicket. He replicated that stand against Sri Lanka, adding another 52 runs to take England into the lead. In only his fourth Test, the right-hander has been a part of seven 50-plus stands in 14 partnerships. It is quite an impressive ratio for a lower-order batter.
With his 111 off 148 balls, Smith now averages 63.6, the third highest for any England batter after their first five innings. He has emerged as their partnership builder lower down the order, while keeping an efficient balance between aggression and control.
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