Five Trophies and a Funeral by Stuart Rayner

Author:Stuart Rayner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

12.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

WILL Smith only lost one County Championship match as Durham captain. He was sacked before the bus got home.

The removal of the skipper with the highest Championship win ratio the county has ever had – and probably ever will – was brutal, dramatic and extremely swift. Smith perhaps tried to evolve Durham’s first great side too quickly, but it was partly dismantled, partly disintegrated without him.

Durham always try to have one eye on the future, which is why Smith became captain aged 26. They began using one-day competitions as many football teams use the cups, to blood youngsters, fielding 25 players in all competitions in 2009. Although their 50-50 record limited them to sixth in Pro40 Division One, victory at Taunton made an important impression on Smith.

‘It was the very last game of the season,’ he recalls, ‘and all the experienced guys who’d played in the Championship sat it out. Somerset could win the league if they beat us and Sussex didn’t beat Worcestershire. We had a really inexperienced team with Luke Evans and Will Gidman opening the bowling. Luke Evans bowled the first over. He bowled about five wides, Marcus Trescothick hit him for a couple of fours and he got him lbw with the last ball. He’d been all over the shop then produced this beautiful inswinger to the left-hander, who fell over it a bit. We said we’d take 1-15 if we got Trescothick. Giddo bowled eight overs 1-18, he bowled unbelievably well, and we kept them to 242 in 40 overs at Taunton.’

It had a big bearing on Smith’s thinking for 2010. ‘I wanted to make sure we had a really good one-day unit,’ he explains. ‘I never wanted it to take over what we were doing in four-day cricket but maybe in not playing certain people in that one-day team, while it would have kept them fresher for four-day cricket – and that’s what we always conveyed to them – it was probably just the wrong thing to do. It was probably the Somerset win with this young, fresh, vibrant team that made me think we should. Experience tells me you can’t have everything. To be successful in all three formats is nigh-on impossible now, almost the nirvana.’

Ian Blackwell, not Michael Di Venuto, opened in the four 40-over games Smith captained in 2010; Dale Benkenstein and Stephen Harmison played once each as the likes of 23-year-old Evans, Gidman (25) and Ben Harmison (24) got opportunities. ‘There are a lot of players who’ve been called “young” since I’ve been at Durham, and I’ve been here four seasons now,’ Di Venuto told The Journal. The trouble was, Di Venuto and his fellow seniors rightly did not want to stand aside. ‘I have prepared to play every day of cricket for Durham,’ he announced at the start of the season but in his final four summers the Australian one-day international made just 12 limited-overs appearances.

‘I don’t think the senior players saw the bigger

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