Ed Smith's early declaration is game's loss
Times, November 27th 2008
Mike Atherton, Chief Cricket Correspondent
The glorification of the inaugural Champions League, which was due to begin next week in India before yesterday’s atrocities, would have appealed to Ed Smith’s sense of the absurd. No less a figure than A. R. Rahman, the “Mozart of Madras”, had been enlisted to pen a ditty for the tournament. And the trophy? Cartier, of course, because Mr Cartier fortuitously noticed that cricket and Cartier are seven-letter words that begin with the letter “c”, a happy coincidence that reflected, he felt, a synergy between the two of style and elegance. I kid you not.
Perhaps it is just as well that Smith will not be there. Nevertheless, those who celebrate cricket’s diversity, its ability to draw in all types, regardless of shape, size, background or colour, will regret that the Middlesex team would have departed today without the man who helped to dig the first shaft of their off-season Twenty20 goldmine. Without Smith, the Middlesex dressing-room, and by extension the professional game, will be that little bit more uniform, that little less diverse.
Smith was an unusual cricketer, combining life as a professional sportsman with life as a writer — of books, essays, journalism and literary criticism. Early book reviews were penned under the name of Edward T. Smith, while he played cricket as plain old Ed, as if somehow never the twain could meet. In truth they struggled to, or at least cricket struggled to come to terms with the two faces of Smith, because he left Kent under a cloud four years ago and now, after a spat with Middlesex, has retired from the sport at just 31.
Smith is too good a batsman to be lost to professional cricket at such a tender age. It is clearly a source of intense irritation to him that the focus is always on the other bits of his life. “When it came to cricket, I was never a dilettante,” he says. His record proves it: he averaged more than 40, scored 34 first-class hundreds and in excess of 12,000 first-class runs. With experience and youth on his side, he ought to be entering his prime years; another crack at international cricket should not be beyond him.
On the morning of his retirement, we met in a café local to his West London home and it was clear that, while he has much to look forward to, he will miss the game. “I’ll miss the dressing-room, its fun-loving, democratic nature; I’ll miss the battles on the field, the elemental part of the game that fulfils a childish need in us all, I’ll miss the stimulation of captaincy enormously and I’ll miss the variety that comes with being involved in an intensely physical activity,” he said.
Much to offer, then, yet things have not worked out. Bad luck played its part — Smith broke an ankle halfway through last season — but broken bones mend and with Ed Joyce off to Sussex, Middlesex could do with Smith’s runs. But Middlesex’s new broom decided that Smith’s face does not fit. It poses the question: is intelligence of the nerdy, academic kind rather than the practical kind — Smith has a double first in history from Cambridge — a hindrance in modern professional sport?
Smith does not think so. “It can be an advantage, if not to the player himself then definitely to the group,” he said. “You need all types in a team and the bright ones can stand back from things and see the whole picture. They can influence a change of direction more than someone who is always part of the pack.” Do they make the best captains, though? Mike Brearley is more the exception than the rule.
The tendency for those perceived to be intelligent (always a relative thing in a sporting dressing-room) is to dumb down, to blend into their surroundings. To his credit, Smith has never done that, no doubt part of the reason that he has been viewed suspiciously. And he remains unrepentant: “The danger with professionalism is that people can think only the most obvious type fits. I don’t agree with that standpoint at all. I wanted the Middlesex dressing-room to be the most diverse place possible. One, because it’s more fun that way, but also I reckon that’s the best way to win cricket games.
“It’s not practical to have a one-type-fits-all policy. I have always been drawn to people who have not been easily pigeonholed. Brearley was the classic example. He was courteous but not establishment; coolly intelligent yet capable of almighty and illogical tantrums.”
Arsène Wenger is another whom Smith admires and writing about the Arsenal manager recently, Smith could have been thinking of himself. “You sense that Wenger would have made a great contribution as a thinker in whatever job he had taken,” Smith wrote. “That he chose the cut-throat, laddish world of football says a lot about him — and about how sport has evolved.”
Clearly, though, cricket has not yet evolved enough. The sport’s loss will be the literary world’s gain, but in these quarters at least there is a certain sadness that he wanted cricket more than cricket wanted him. http://content-www.cricinfo.com/ci/content/story/288475.html