- New England Test wicketkeeper Jamie Smith is set to be called up for this year’s T20
- Smith is expected to be one of three players not yet included in the England squad.
- Jamie Overton and Jacob Bethell are also scheduled to play against Australia
Jamie Smith is one of three players not yet selected for a role when England begin their rebuilding Twenty20 campaign against Australia later this summer.
New England Test wicketkeeper Smith, 24, will be joined by his Surrey team-mate Jamie Overton and 20-year-old Warwickshire native Jacob Bethell in the three-match series against the Australians from September 11-15.
Rob Key, the ECB’s director of men’s cricket, has yet to conduct a full investigation into the mid-season World Cup, in which England reached the semi-finals but defeated only one Test-bound team.
The future of white-ball coach Matthew Mott – who is halfway through a four-year contract – is among the issues he must decide on, while it remains uncertain whether Jos Buttler will remain as captain.
Either way, there will be changes in personnel, with new blood seen as essential to revitalise an ageing group.
Jamie Smith, 24, will make his T20i debut for England against Australia in September
Jamie Overton is also expected to be named in England’s squad for the three-match T20 series
Smith’s ferocity speaks for itself. He is averaging 3.4 sixes per innings in this season’s Vitality Blast and is one of two players in the competition’s top 150 run-scorers with a strike rate of over 200 – Australian tail-ender Nathan McAndrew, ranked 100th, the other.
Last week he took his groundbreaking skills to Test cricket, where he hit two huge knocks in his debut innings of 70 and was watched by a multi-format player from Key.
England’s batting sometimes lacked dynamism in the Caribbean. Overton could have made a difference, had a back injury not ruled out the hard-hitting all-rounder.
Barbados-born Bethell is seen as the answer to the imbalance between lefties and righties in the middle order. Ben Duckett was the only left-handed batsman in the 15-man squad that was knocked out by India in the round of 16 in Guyana. However, he lacks the power game that is increasingly necessary in cricket’s shortest format.
Bethell showed he can do that in spades last month when he beat Northamptonshire with a 15-ball 50, the second in the history of the competition after Marcus Trescothick (13-ball delivery) for Somerset against Hampshire in 2010.
The emergence of another spin bowler and all-rounder in Bethell – his slow left-armer has an economy rate of 7.36 for the Bears, who top the table this season – could end another long-running international career this summer, after that of Jimmy Anderson.
Jacob Bethell (pictured) is another player set to make his international debut
England deployed vice-captain Moeen Ali in the top five throughout the World Cup to break the uniformity with the right-hander, but his struggle for international T20 runs continued: his highest score in his most recent 19 innings is 26.
Now 37 and in the final months of his one-year contract with the centre-back, Moeen could be on the way to a franchise future as England look to assemble a new squad ahead of the next World Cup, which will be held in Sri Lanka in February 2026.
Question marks also remain surrounding Jonny Bairstow and Liam Livingstone, despite the fact that both have two-year contracts with the ECB.