Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

53 West Indian summer player. One day, after lunch, I told the players that I was going to move the motorised roller from its location in one of the nets so they could practice. Keith jumped up, grabbed the keys and volunteered to do it for me. He started up the engine, then put it into what he thought was reverse gear. It wasn’t. He drove forward and straight through the back of the net, taking down all of them – and they took some time to erect properly. I went into my hut and came out with a length of rope, which I gave to him. ‘Take this round the back of the pavilion and see if you can make a better job of hanging yourself,’ I told him. Edwin bowled steadily throughout the season despite the fielding restrictions. The only times he was hit was against Worcestershire, where he freely admits that brothers Peter and Dick Richardson had his measure. Taking a long stride down the wicket, the left-handers would slog-sweep against the spin, aware that Edwin couldn’t reinforce the field to counteract it. There was a five-wicket haul against champions Surrey, but Edwin was often used to contain during a summer in which Derek Morgan almost became a third wicket centurion. After several years of promise, Morgan emerged as one of the best all-rounders in the game, his seam bowling backing up the opening pair and stepping into the breach when Gladwin missed a few matches through injury. Edwin sustained a pulled thigh muscle against Leicestershire at Chesterfield, causing him to be carried off and miss three matches. He had previously been relatively injury-free. I was usually fine, but I did have problems with my spinning finger. Jim Laker had the same problem and we used a similar method to sort it. I developed a callus on my middle finger, but the inside of my index finger used to split. There was an old woman in our village, Mrs Hart, who had lost the tip of one of her fingers and when she heard about the problems I had, she told me to use Friar’s Balsam. I used to put it on my finger each night and it would harden the skin, so you could bowl without too much pain the next day. There were two viewing highlights for Edwin during that summer, both of them at Chesterfield. One was watching an extraordinary century by the West Indian all-rounder, Collie Smith. He was an astonishing player. Cliff bowled him for a duck in the first innings, but in the second he hit 133 in three hours. It was really hot and he had us chasing the ball all afternoon. He hit Cliff back over his head onto the pavilion roof and there weren’t many people did