Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

130 Team mates and friends was growing up, and his name, along with the names of many other Derbyshire cricketers, past and present, features in one of my detective novels. When I was working on my first book, I had to figure out what names to give to my fictional characters. The names needed to suit the storyline and be credible, and preferably a little unusual, but as a lawyer, I was conscious of the need to avoid libel. It seemed to me that an entertaining solution was to take surnames from players in my favourite football and cricket teams, people who could not possibly be confused with the characters in my murder mysteries. My first book used several names from Derbyshire teams over the years, and this became a recurrent in-joke. It’s a light-hearted way of expressing my lifelong enthusiasm for Derbyshire cricket and my genuine admiration for the people who play for the club. David Steele was a Northamptonshire stalwart for many years, before becoming a national hero for the way that he stood up to the Australian pace barrage in 1975, then the West Indies in 1976. He later played for Derbyshire between 1979 and 1981, captaining the side in his first season. He remembers Edwin well. He was a terrific bowler, one who always needed treating with the utmost respect. He rarely bowled a loose delivery and he had this terrific loop that made picking the length problematic. Then there was his arm ball, which caught out many unsuspecting batsmen, perhaps unaware that a spinner could swing a ball that much! I fielded short leg in an era when we were expected to be right on top of the batsmen. Brian Close used to field on the edge of the cut strip and worked on the basis that if the ball hit him, someone would catch the rebound! Doing that, you had to have a lot of confidence in the bowler that you weren’t going to be in the firing line, especially at backward short leg, which was my specialist position. I would have happily fielded there any time for Edwin, because he had complete control of a cricket ball. He was a lovely man too, with a ready laugh and a smile never far from his face. In short, he was a very fine cricketer. Peter Eyre was a good county all-rounder whose career was sadly blighted by injury and ill-health. With better luck he could have gone much further in the game but remembers his time in the first-class game with fondness, speaking highly of Edwin. There couldn’t be a nicer man anywhere than Edwin Smith. I don’t think he had an enemy in the world and he was always happy to help me whenever I asked for it. Was he quite up to the standard of some of his contemporaries? Maybe not, but that was largely because he played on far less favourable wickets and there wasn’t that much in it. He learned to bowl on tracks