Inside Jamie Smith’s dire Ashes: Why ‘low-key’ wicketkeeper has misplaced his spark, what the consultants are saying, England’s long-term plan for him and the opposite glovemen within the reckoning

The news that Jamie Smith had been left out of England’s new year white-ball plans completed a difficult few weeks for a player who is struggling to keep his head above water barely 18 months after making waves in 2024.

It’s one thing to spend an Ashes tour earning unfavourable comparisons with your opposite number: while Australia’s wicketkeeper Alex Carey has been one of the players of the series, Smith has averaged less than 20 with the bat, and dropped a high-profile catch – Travis Head at Brisbane.

But Smith, still only 25, has attracted scrutiny not simply because of what he has done, but because of how he has done it: advocates describe his demeanour as ‘low-key’, critics as ‘downbeat’. Neither side would argue he is England’s life and soul.

After their defeat at the Gabba, Matt Prior – who spent his 79 Tests behind the stumps trying to be the ‘drummer of the band’ – told Daily Mail Sport that Smith’s role was ‘to set the tone’.

He added: ‘You’ve got to catch everything, score hundreds, and create the intensity. You’ve got to take that off the captain: he’s got enough to think about.

‘I know Jamie’s young, and maybe people say that’s unfair. I will go back to you: you’re an England cricketer, it doesn’t matter how old you are. If you’re good enough to be playing cricket for England, you’re old enough, right? And you’re in Australia playing in the Ashes. It’s a non-negotiable.’

Critics describe England wicketkeeper Jamie Smith as ‘downbeat’ whereas he should be ‘the leader of the band’ behind the stumps 

Smith dropped Aussie dangerman Travis Head off the bowling of Jofra Archer in the second Test 

Some of the criticism stems from the fact that Smith set the bar so high, so early. He blazed 70 on Test debut against West Indies at Lord’s, including a monstrous six into St John’s Wood Road. Then came 95 at Edgbaston, followed by a classy hundred against Sri Lanka at Old Trafford, and a 43-ball half-century at The Oval. His pull shot suddenly seemed like one of the most destructive strokes in the game.

England’s view was that, unlike many of his team-mates, he didn’t need the ‘10ft-tall’ treatment from Brendon McCullum. Smith, the management felt, had an inbuilt confidence which was no less real for being quiet and self-contained. No one needed to make him feel bigger and better than he already was.

And when he made a century before lunch on the third morning of the second Test against India at Edgbaston in July, walking in on a hat-trick at 84 for five and driving his first ball from Mohammed Siraj through mid-off for four, he seemed to confirm the diagnosis. That Test brought him scores of 184 not out and 88, and eight sixes.

Already promoted to open in the white-ball formats, he was depicted as England’s answer to Adam Gilchrist. The comparison didn’t seem outlandish. In some ways, it still doesn’t. Even after a lone half-century in his eight innings in Australia, Smith averages nearly 42 in Test cricket. Among long-term England wicketkeepers, only Les Ames, who batted on flat pitches in the 1930s, averages more.

But there is no doubt Smith has faded, his inner calm increasingly reinterpreted as diffidence. He finished the India series with a quartet of single-figure dismissals, including a loose waft on the last morning at The Oval, when his job was to shepherd England over the line.

Plainly exhausted, he should then have been excused the white-ball trip to New Zealand, but England’s concern about missing out on automatic qualification for the 2027 World Cup in southern Africa meant he had to go.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Australia, where England have no specialist wicketkeeping coach with them, has not gone well. If he was unfortunate at Perth, stranded with the tail in the first innings, then victim of a questionable decision in the second, he was all at sea against the pink ball at Brisbane having never faced it before, then worked over by Pat Cummins in the first innings at Adelaide – apparently confirming pre-series concerns that he lacked a sustainable gameplan against the short ball.    

Even his one significant score of the series, a fighting 60 in the second innings of that third Test, attracted brickbats for the manner of his dismissal, caught at mid-on trying to hit a fifth consecutive four. ‘Dopey, dopey, dopey,’ said Ricky Ponting in the commentary box, seeing in Smith’s dismissal a symptom of England’s wider malaise. ‘There’s another one of those moments – another one of those times where they didn’t need to do that.’  

Smith gets in a tangle at Adelaide. He has averaged less than 20 with the bat during the Ashes 

Smith had never faced a pink ball before the second Ashes Test at the Gabba

Scott Boland cleans Smith up in Melbourne. The England will have a break after the last Test to gather his thoughts

With Smith temporarily out of the white-ball reckoning, and England’s next Test after the Ashes not until June, he will have time after Sydney to recharge his batteries and gather his thoughts.

But that won’t silence those who believe his Surrey team-mate – and the club’s first-choice wicketkeeper – Ben Foakes was ditched too early by the Bazball regime. Meanwhile, Jordan Cox of Essex, who but for a late injury would have kept wicket in New Zealand a year ago when Smith was on paternity leave, has not given up hope of a Test debut.

Smith is in a different category from another Surrey colleague, Ollie Pope, who England now privately admit they stuck with for too long. And if it’s conceivable Smith was among the candidates when an infuriated Ben Stokes embarked on his ‘no country for weak men’ soliloquy after Brisbane, there is no doubt England see him as their long-term wicketkeeper.

Whatever happens at the SCG, where the fifth Test starts on Saturday night, Smith is part of the band. England may just have to accept he’s never going to be the drummer.