Beach cricket, Brian Lara and Barbados shaped England’s new prodigy Jacob Bethell

Nestled in the corner of a cricket pitch at Harrison College, one of Barbados’s most illustrious schools, lies a black scoreboard. This remains one of Jacob Bethell’s legacies at his alma mater.

One day while Jacob was at the school, his father Graham asked the coach whether he wanted to get a scoreboard. The next day, Graham put up the scoreboard himself.

Harrison is widely recognised as the most academic of the island’s 21 state secondary schools, and has educated five out of Barbados’s eight prime ministers since independence. Bethell started at Harrison College in 2015, aged 11, after getting almost full marks in his common entrance examination.

As old photos at Harrison show, Bethell was very small for his age-group, a deficit that was compounded by playing against older boys. Even aged 14, Bethell would train with the school under-19s. From Tuesdays to Thursdays, training would be held for several hours after school, until the sun went down.

“He was tiny,” recalls Corey Edwards, Bethell’s coach at Harrison College. “But he understood: ‘If I stand up, I can get balls in my area, as opposed to trying to hit the ball in the air all the time. He understood, hit the ball on the ground.’”

Rather than the swaggering player seen on England’s white-ball tour of the Caribbean earlier this month, the young Bethell was a classicist. Unable to power the ball past opponents, instead Bethell had to outthink them – working the ball through gaps and playing late, with his pull and cut particularly essential given his height.

Aged 12, Bethell often batted against 16-year-old boys. “They really couldn’t figure out what to do with him,” recalls William Gordon, an old team-mate for school and club alike who is two years older. “Anything too short was over his head. And anything full, he was just always ready for it.

“That’s been the story of his life. In Barbados, he was always one of the younger kids in his teams.”

Jacob Bethell at 12 years old opening the batting in his first match for Barbados U15s v Trinidad in Grenada

Gordon still cherishes the lone time that he dismissed Bethell – clean bowled by a tape ball in a lunchtime game of cricket on the tennis courts at school, with a netball pole for a stump. “I bowled a seam-up delivery to Jacob, and I finally heard the ping behind him. Once I heard that ping, I knew I got it right.”

Bethell has now come to regard his slow physical development as beneficial. “It taught me how to manipulate the ball when I was young,” he observed earlier this month. “When I got a bit of power I had that foundation. Rather than going the other way round and being big to start with and then everyone gets to the same size and you have no more advantage.”

At Harrison, Bethell particularly benefitted from Edwards’s approach to fitness. The coach mandated that all players had to run 10 laps of the ground in 15 minutes; they also had to do a circuit of 30 sit-ups and then 30 push-ups in a minute. “If they like me or hate me,” Edwards says with a chuckle, “they saw what had to be done from a very early age.” Edwards, to Bethell, “was the first person that drove me in the way of fitness. You weren’t able to play for the team if you couldn’t pass his fitness test”.

‘His appetite for practice was insatiable’

For years, Damian Edghill was used to being woken up by the sound of his nephew hitting cricket balls. Edghill lived next door in Rendezvous Ridge, in Christ Church parish.

“His appetite for practice was insatiable,” Edghill recalls. “He would wake up at five o’clock and get his mother to bowl at him before school, in the dark.”

Then, Jacob’s dad would take over, often putting a ball up on a string in the backyard. “He would hit two to three hundred balls on a morning before school at primary school, starting from six years old. That went on for years. I knew that he had the application to match the ability and the passion.

“He just gravitated towards cricket and practised a lot in our backyard and in the neighbourhood. Then a lot of it was beach cricket, just going down to the beach house or any beach in Barbados and messing around.

“Jacob was a very easy-going kid. Stuff doesn’t bother him. I’ve never seen him get agitated on the cricket field.”

Rather than enduring the stultifying coaching approach used with some children, the young Bethell was encouraged to problem-solve himself. “That’s always been the emphasis here in Barbados – not to over-coach,” Edghill reflects. “It’s not too rigid. He has maintained that style, that flair. I don’t think he has been changed too much, thank goodness.” Bethell’s characteristically high backlift reflects his unshackled method.

Every Saturday morning during the season, Dexter Toppin, a coach with Barbados who also worked at Wanderers Cricket Club, would arrive at the club to start training around 8am. Only two people would be there before him: Jacob and his father Graham – “Uncle Graham”, to the boys that he coached at the club – who would be practising in the batting cage. “That’s why Jacob’s at this level now,” Toppin recalls.

At Wanderers and elsewhere, Bethell was renowned for embracing any challenge. While batting was always his greatest strength, the young Bethell often opened the bowling with his left-arm medium pace. Then, he would don the wicketkeeping gloves before often returning to bowl left-arm spin.

The Bethells have been centrepieces of Wanderers, one of the island’s most storied clubs, for generations; both sides of his family have been based in Barbados for centuries. Arthur Bethell, Jacob’s grandfather, played 16 first-class games for Barbados. He captained the side and averaged 26 with the bat. Arthur’s son, Graham, was a distinguished Barbados youth player, and later captained a young Michael Vaughan at Sheffield Collegiate, but never played first-class cricket.

In Barbados cricket circles, there is a common theory about the Bethell family. Toppin is among those who believe that Jacob’s father was actually a better player than his grandfather.

“In them times, white people played easily,” Toppin says of Barbados in the 1960s, when Arthur played. “The cricket was more dominated by certain white people in certain clubs.”

By the time that Graham was trying to break into the professional game, in the late 1980s, the racial politics in Barbados were very different. No longer was being white an advantage to breaking into the island’s first-class side. Some suggest that by this point it might even have been a hindrance.

“From all reports, Graham got a raw deal,” Edwards explains. “He wasn’t treated well with cricket, that’s my understanding. So then he obviously learnt from that.”

Aged 11, Jacob enrolled in the Franklyn Stephenson Academy, run by the great former Barbados all-rounder. “Franklyn just provided the best learning and development environment that one could imagine,” Edghill recalls. “The facilities were excellent. The environment was very healthy, and the boys learnt a lot.” When Bethell was 11, he worked with Brian Lara – another left-hander with a pronounced backlift – at the Academy. Lara declared that Bethell was better than he was at the same age.

In 2015, just before Bethell turned 12, the Academy played a game against Loretto, a touring Scottish school. Bethell was not supposed to play, but brought his whites along in case a team-mate failed to show up. Playing against boys as old as 18, Bethell scored a half-century and took five wickets.

The performance changed his life. John Blain, the former Scotland cricketer who was Loretto’s master in charge of cricket, approached Bethell after the game to ask whether he would be interested in moving to Britain. Blain subsequently passed on Bethell’s details to Michael Powell, the former Warwickshire captain who had worked for Loretto, and moved to Rugby School. When Powell assembled references as Rugby offered Bethell a sports scholarship, one name was conspicuous: Sir Garfield Sobers, an old family friend and sometime golf partner of Bethell’s. Aged 13, in 2017, Bethell began life as a boarder at Rugby. He followed the path of the English cricketing grandee Pelham Warner 130 years earlier, who also switched from Harrison to Rugby.

Ideal blend of Bajan and English influence

Growing up, Bethell had dreamed of wearing the West Indies maroon. Now, his life rapidly took a different path. At Rugby, Bethell finally grew – he is now 5ft 10in – and bulked up, combining finesse with new-found power.

After excelling in the 2018 Bunbury Festival, Bethell was considered one of English cricket’s most captivating talents. The impression was confirmed by brutal hitting for England in the Under-19s World Cup in the Caribbean in early 2022. He made his Warwickshire debut aged 17.

Jacob Bethell won the prize for best player at the Bunbury Festival in 2018

While Bethell represented Barbados Under-15s as recently as 2018, there was never much chance of him returning to play for his home island and West Indies. “I will always be a West Indian supporter,” Edghill reflects. “But as an uncle, I’m delighted by how things have worked out.

“We’re very passionate about West Indies cricket. But when a situation comes up like this, you have a young kid who has potential – it’s just a question of allowing them to fulfil their ability and to take the best opportunities.”

No matter which team he plays for, Bethell’s cricket has been shaped by his upbringing. It could even be argued that he benefits from an optimal blend of Bajan and English cricketing influence.

As a boy in Barbados, Bethell relished the year-round playing opportunities, whether on the beach or on grounds, which aided his motor development and developed his capacity to problem-solve. The culture of informal play, and the physical skills honed by the island’s outdoor lifestyle, remains evident in Bethell’s natural – not rigid or overreached – batting style and effervescent fielding.

“He used to dive around on the beach and jump in the sea and take running catches,” Bethell’s uncle recalls. “I told him the other day, ‘You’re taking some incredible catches’. He said, ‘I learnt all that on the beach’.”

Barbados often struggles to ensure that teenage talent has a smooth transition into the professional game. From the age of 13 or so, players are stunted by a relative dearth of cricket, while the lack of infrastructure becomes a hindrance, too. Bethell moved away from Barbados, he previously told Telegraph Sport, because “I realised that opportunities are better over in England”.

At Harrison College, Edwards makes a sad admission: Bethell, he says, would not be as good had he stayed in Barbados. “To be honest, no, because we don’t have the system.”

Earlier this month, 150 family and friends packed into the Greenidge and Haynes Stand to watch Bethell’s homecoming in a T20 international in Barbados. A commanding, unbeaten 58 in England’s victory added to the towering impression that he has made in his first months in white-ball international cricket. On Monday, he was signed by Royal Challengers Bangalore for the Indian Premier League.

Hours later, Bethell learnt that he would be making his Test debut at number three, a position that he has never occupied in the red-ball game. While Bethell’s domestic pedigree in first-class cricket is modest, with a batting average of 25.4, Edwards has no doubt that his old pupil’s qualities will translate to the longer format, too.

In 2022, after Bethell had enjoyed a fine Under-19s World Cup, Edwards saw his old pupil in Barbados. “I told Jacob, ‘My man, I hope I get a signed shirt when you help England win the Ashes’. I believe that Jacob Bethell can help England win the Ashes.”