Pretoria Capitals have signed England’s white-ball specialist batter Will Smeed for Season 3 of SA20. So far, Smeed has played 98 T20s, scored 2484 runs, at an average of 26.70, and a strike-rate of 152.57, including a century and 16 fifties.

The Somerset-born youngster Smeed, who has committed to play only limited-overs cricket, became the first batter to score a century in The Hundred competition in 2022 – through an unbeaten 101 off 50 balls for Birmingham Phoenix against the Southern Brave.

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Smeed has also played in the Caribbean Premier League (CPL), Pakistan Super League (PSL), Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), ILT20 and Abu Dhabi T10. Incidentally, he has only featured in one List A game thus far for the England Lions against the touring South Africans (which includes his new teammate Anrich Nortje), in 2022.

The franchise had earlier roped in current Afghanistan head coach and former England batter Jonathan Trott as their new head coach ahead of SA20 Season 3 and replaces Graham Ford in the role.

Trott comes into the role ahead of Season 3 of SA20 on the back of delivering spectacular results with a much-improved Afghanistan in two consecutive World Cups. In the 2024 Men’s T20 World Cup, Afghanistan beat teams like New Zealand, Bangladesh and Australia to enter the semifinals for the first time, before losing to South Africa in Trinidad, making this their best-ever performance in the global trophy of the shortest format.

Under Ford, the Capitals finished runners-up in season one of SA20 but had a difficult time and finished in fifth place in the second season of the tournament. This is the second major shake-up in the Capitals’ franchise world after Ricky Ponting parted ways with Delhi Capitals (DC) in the Indian Premier League (IPL).