If I wanted to annoy Ed Smith, I would tell him he is a better writer than he ever was a cricketer. All the same, it's a pretty compliment: Smith played three Tests for England and scored 34 first-class hundreds for Kent and Middlesex, with a top score of 213. You have to write fairly decent books to top that," writes Simon Barnes in the Times.

He has written three well-received books. His 'prentice piece, Playing Hard Ball, compared his experiences in cricket and baseball. He then did a season's diary, one with an awful lot of meat, On And Off The Field. His present book is in many ways remarkable, entitled boldly What Sport Tells Us About Life. The diary deals with 2003, the year he played for England. He made 64 in his first innings; in his last, he was given out leg-before to a ball that would have comfortably cleared the stumps. What sport tells us here is that life is a bitch. He never played for England again.

Thus it was that England lost a player who might have been up for the long haul. He was, in some eyes, a Future England Captain who never made it, a Mike Brearley come again, but better off the back foot. He couldn't break back in; what some call consistency of selection, others call a clique. Smith's was a career that missed its trajectory.

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