The diary of a somebody
Hugh Massingberd
ON AND OFF THE FIELD by Ed Smith Viking, £16.99, pp. 259, ISBN 0670914819 Those of us who spend our summers watching county cricket often feel a beleaguered bunch amid calls for needless reform and jeers that we are sad social misfits huddled in our anoraks. Therefore it gave fans of the much maligned county game particular pleasure last year to see Ed Smith of Kent being selected to play for England not through some streamlined 'academy' system but purely on account of his scoring a stack of runs in the County Championship. In one prolific patch he made 135, 0, 149, 113, 203 and 108 in successive firstclass innings.
Now, as a splendid bonus, we have Smith's own account of his roller-coaster season, for, by happy chance, he had been commissioned to keep a diary of 2003 for publication. And unlike so many ghostwritten. cliché-ridden 'sports' (whatever happened to 'games'?) books, On and Off the Field is well worth reading. The author, E.T. Smith (Tonbridge and Peterhouse), hardly fits the popular perception of your average county 'pro': he took a double first in history at Cambridge, reviews highbrow novels for the Sunday Telegraph and wrote an absorbing comparative study of cricket and baseball, Playing Hard Ball.
Smith skilfully articulates what goes on in a batsman's head. He sees batting as 'a battle between two competing voices, one weak, the other strong'. His strong voice urges him not to slog: 'If you throw it away now, you may as well throw the cricket away, you weak bastard! You should be ashamed of yourself. Show some fight, weather the storm. Be here for a while. It will get easier.' The biff-bang excitement of the televised highlights package or 'sporting montage' is a million miles away from the reality of 'a kind of concentrated blankness ... a calm kind of fun', 'Timing a cricket ball,' he observes, 'when you get it just right, is a sensual experience.'
The highlight of the book is Smith's fascinating description of his three Test matches (will there be more?), which gives a unique insight into an experience most of us can only dream about — 'an extended, relentless application of pressure with the occasional moment of genuine elation'. We are also treated to a series of perceptive sketches of such characters as Alec 'Mr Immaculate' Stewart (Instead of wondering what lies beneath the surface, we might perhaps accept that he takes the surface itself very seriously'), Nasser Hussein (whose eyes 'burn with an anger that often borders on hatred'), the novel-reading Mark Butcher, the gentlemanly Indian Rahul Dravid, the predatory Aussie Andrew 'Symmo' Symonds and Smith's county captain, David Fulton, who bravely battles on after being hit in the eye.
Sometimes, though, I found myself muttering about Smith's reluctance to spill the beans about, say, attitudes to the Zimbabwe tour, why Hussein resigned as captain. why Martin Bicknell wasn't picked for ten years or indeed what the chairman of selectors told Smith about his exclusion from the main winter tours ('What David Graveney said is private and should remain so'). Discretion is not what one expects from a diarist. Call me prurient (as Canon Throbbing complains in Habeas Corpus, 'They always miss out the best bits'). but I would also have liked more details of the author's love life beyond a tantalising description of a female follower. But one fan letter turned out to be from an older gay man', who concluded his paean to the batsman's beauty with, One other thing, Ed — I am willing to pay,'
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