Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

128 Chapter Twenty Two Team mates and friends When assessing the merits of someone, the best insights come from speaking to their contemporaries. While allowing for looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles, the consensus of team mates and opponents was that Edwin was a very good and extremely unlucky cricketer. Take the comments of Mike Page, an acknowledged fine player of spin bowling, who played alongside Edwin between 1964 and 1971 and for Derbyshire until 1975. I played with Edwin and also with Venkat in his time at the club. Venkat was a lovely guy, who came with a big reputation, having taken over 150 wickets in Test cricket as part of their classic quartet alongside Prasanna, Chandrasekhar and Bedi. I roomed with him regularly when we went to away games and got to know him really well. To be honest, on English wickets, I would take Edwin first, every time. You could get down the wicket to Venkat, use your feet and work it around. He was used to flighting it more and had a lovely loop – but it was much harder to get after Edwin. He would do you in the flight, could turn it different amounts and had this fantastic arm ball, that you always had to watch for. What about as coach? He was shrewd, very quick at seeing flaws that creep into your game and helping you to adjust. He was especially good with young players and he helped the younger ones to build the techniques that later stood them in good stead in the county game. Now 87, Barbados-born Laurie Johnson played cricket alongside Edwin for much of his first-class career and scored over 14,000 runs in entertaining style. He is well placed to comment on his former team mate Edwin was a fine bowler – you don’t play cricket at that level for two decades without being very good at your job. I think he could have been even better, but for much of his career he bowled to his captain’s instructions to keep it tight. Most of the time he had to keep an end secure while the seamers worked away at the other and someone had a breather. If I cast my mind back, I don’t recall many days when he wasn’t on the spot and doing exactly as he was asked. He was respected by all of us who played with him and by the teams that we played.