The history of sports betting is littered with tales of punters getting rich on precocious talent. One chap memorably snaffled £125,000 on a bet that a 13-year-old go-kart whizz called Lewis Hamilton would some day rule Formula 1.
The family of goalkeeper Chris Kirkland backed him to play for England at a similar age and made a fortune (just, since he did so only once). There’s even a famous story of Oxfam landing a £100,000 windfall after Roger Federer won Wimbledon for the seventh time. The gambler who’d bet on him to do so in 2003 had died too soon to cash it and left the slip to the charity in his will.
Such, though, was the certainty with which all the right voices had been talking for years about Jamie Smith as a future England Test cricketer that when he made his debut in July only the very earliest believers could have done more than double their stake.
The great Australian captain Ian Chappell was among those, as anyone who has heard Mark Butcher commentate on Smith this summer will know. Butcher recalls receiving a phone call from Chappell four or five years ago, talking up the talent of a young Surrey batter with a big future in the game.
Butcher assumed he meant Ollie Pope, county cricket’s established golden boy who was then just starting to make an impact in the senior England team. In fact, he was talking about Smith, who had spent the winter playing for Eastern Suburbs on the Sydney Grade scene.
Smith’s performances this summer confirmed that he is the real deal. England have been blessed in recent years with young players who have taken quickly to the Test game, none more so than Harry Brook, but also the likes of Shoaib Bashir, Rehan Ahmed, Tom Hartley and Smith’s Surrey teammate Gus Atkinson.
Not even Brook looked quite so instantly at ease. Of course, the Yorkshireman was freakishly prolific in his breakout winter two years ago, playing the aggressive game that had got him there and reeling off the hundreds with a brashness that said: ‘Test cricket, is this all you’ve got?’
Smith, by contrast, played every scenario like a veteran, as if he had seen and done it all before. In his first six Tests, he made 487 runs — fewer only than Joe Root among England’s batters — at an average just shy of 50, including a maiden international ton.
So, England knows and Australia is on notice, thanks to Chappell and a brief glimpse of Smith’s talent in the recent ODI series, with the Ashes now not much more than a year away.
The coming months, though, are significant for Smith, not least because the 24-year-old is due to become a father in December. That happy life event means he may miss part or all of the tour to New Zealand later this year. In the latter scenario, this month’s three-match series in Pakistan would become his sole overseas exposure before the First Test in Perth next November.
Not even Harry Brook looked quite so instantly at ease as Smith
Pakistan and Australia are worlds apart, in terms of both conditions and the flavour of the accompanying circus, but the challenges of touring remain the same. Smith admitted after his debut series against West Indies this summer to feeling mentally and emotionally drained and three Tests in the heat of Multan and Rawalpindi will throw some physical exhaustion into that mix, too, for a player who has been on the go almost non-stop since April.
There will be fresh focus on Smith’s ’keeping, more than adequate this summer but now to be examined in a place he has never played, or been. Runs on the subcontinent will bear more clout than those against modest attacks on home soil: the great batters are all, in the end, set apart by their records overseas.
Earmarked for that sort of status long before he had worn England white, there is nothing yet in Smith’s brief Test career to suggest the forecasters will be proven wrong.
