Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

21 Carnage at Chesterfield It was a right turner! For some reason Bert Rhodes didn’t do well on it, so they gave me a go and it started to grip and turn straight away for me. I bowled Don Kenyon when they were 53 for one and then batsmen kept coming in and going out quickly - it was hard to take it all in. They were all out for 78 ... I remember Cliff Gladwin coming up to me, perhaps after I had my fifth or sixth wicket and saying ‘Cometh the hour, Edwin, cometh the man’. He’d used that before, when playing for England during a tight finish in South Africa, but I was overjoyed that all this was happening to me at 17, in my second game in first-class cricket. I finished with eight for 21 in ten overs ... Apart from the top three, the highest score for Worcestershire was eight. Kenyon was bowled, but the rest fell in what was to become a regular mode of dismissal – caught in the predatory leg trap, or taken at slip as the ball drifted away. Edwin had bowled out a very good batting side. It is easy to under-estimate the achievement. For all that conditions were in his favour, the knowledge of that can overawe some bowlers, causing them to get excited and try to do too much with the ball. The old Yorkshire spin bowler, Wilfred Rhodes, once said that ‘if batter thinks it’s spinnin’, it’s spinnin’’. It was a fair point, as was his assertion that a bowler had only to turn a ball to miss the middle of the bat to have a batsman in trouble. As he led his team off that evening, Edwin reflected on a job well done, though they knew that the chances of a win were remote: 206 to win on the final day was unlikely and Derbyshire didn’t get close. They were all out for 66 in under 30 overs; Perks and Howorth took five wickets each. A chastened side made the short journey to Nottingham and their next match at Trent Bridge that evening and, as so often, did the unexpected. They dropped Edwin. It seems a strange decision even at this distance. What was said to the player to explain it? Nothing really. Derek Morgan had missed the match at Chesterfield through injury, but it was the sort of thing that was done at that time to stop you getting carried away and full of yourself. Rain ruined the game at Nottingham anyway and seam bowlers took most of the wickets that fell. I went off to play for the second eleven against Lincolnshire and got none for a hundred – so maybe they knew more than I gave them credit for at the time! He got home to Grassmoor on the bus that evening to find a reporter at the end of the street, wanting his thoughts on the day’s play. It was his first encounter with the press and more than anything illustrates the change in both the game and the media. Yet he played only one more game that summer, bowling just six overs in a rain-ruined draw at Derby against Surrey, a side that was to dominate the county cricket scene for most of the decade. At least he had the consolation of returning to his village to