Tom Smith has found happiness in cricket again

NICK FRIEND: Since losing his wife Laura to cancer two years ago, Smith has spoken openly about bereavement. After signing a new three-year deal with Gloucestershire, he opens up on how lockdown helped him find happiness in cricket once more

Lockdown was a challenge for everybody. But for Tom Smith, a left-arm spinner for Gloucestershire and a single parent to two young daughters, it was much more.

“The sun was shining, perfect weather for spin bowling and we were grafting in the kitchen doing phonics,” he recalls with a gentle chuckle very much in keeping with his mellow, likeable character. “None of it seemed right.”

Smith lost his wife Laura to a rare liver and bile duct cancer on August 23, 2018, a tragedy about which he has spoken openly. Discussing her passing and the complexities of bereavement has helped him in the time since; he has listened to the words of former footballer Rio Ferdinand and television presenter Simon Thomas, both of whom have suffered similar heartache in recent years.

“When Laura died, my first reaction was that I wanted to retire,” he says. “I didn’t want to be judged on being Tom the widower.

“It was all cooked up in my own mind – it wasn’t anything that people were doing or saying. But if I didn’t perform, I didn’t want to let my family down, I didn’t want to let Laura down. I didn’t want bereavement to judge my career.”

Over the following winter, he escaped those thoughts, realising how much he needed to be back out on the field. He had joined Gloucestershire in 2013 – initially on loan, where he has played ever since.

He is talking now – on a cold December morning, having signed a new three-year deal with the county which will take him through to the end of the 2023 season, when he will be 36 years old.

And Smith has rediscovered his happiness which, after all he’s gone through, feels more important than anything else. In November, he was the recipient of the player of the year award at Nevil Road, as voted for by the county’s supporters, while only six players took more wickets in this year’s T20 Blast as Gloucestershire reached Finals Day.

Rosie, his oldest, was named house captain upon her return to school after lockdown. That landmark is significant enough for Smith to mention as he reflects upon the strain on homelife brought about by the pandemic. He had to become carer and educator, good cop and bad cop.

^{Tom Smith celebrates after hitting the winning runs against Somerset}

“For me personally, I think the toughest point was that I didn’t have a job,” he explains. “I was on furlough, so I didn’t have anything else to do. Whereas if I’d have had a laptop-based job or whatever, you’d be doing a little bit of work while the children were doing whatever was set by the school.

“So, I was sat there, trying to do home-schooling and it just felt like the lines were quite blurred between parent and teacher. I think, as a single parent, it’s quite hard on the girls because they’ve got me barking at them to do their work, but then also I’m the only carer in the house.

“I felt for them as much as for me; I just found it very stressful and I found it hard to manage. But we found a way through it.”

Once the school had its online system set up, the burden eased gradually. Smith was able to listen to tasks as they were explained, “so it wasn’t just me having a go at what I thought might be appropriate”.

Beyond the makeshift classroom, government guidelines around daily exercise made life harder still. “It was generally with Clara asleep in the buggy and Rosie having a little pedal around on her bike.” And so, he turned to his garden – “I’ve only got about 10 metres”, running five-kilometre circuits in whatever space he had “to take some control of the uncontrollable”.

That helped to a certain extent. “It was very dark,” he adds, “but I think looking back on it now with my positive hat on, Rosie didn’t slip behind. If anything, she improved. Now, I’d say that was really good – it was positive for us to go through it. Rosie did well and she did upskill in a way. But in that moment, it was extremely hard.”

Without the desolation of lockdown, Smith wonders whether he would be as contented as he is now. There is so much to admire in his attitude towards everything he and his daughters have faced.

“I guess when the children went back to school after lockdown, the fog started to clear,” he says. “We were going back to cricket, we had a date for returning to training, the formats were sorted, and I started to get back into my exercise. I was just really looking forward to playing cricket again.

"Cricket's my time when I'm Tom the cricketer, not Tom the widower"

“Over the last two years since Laura died – probably longer than that - I haven’t really enjoyed cricket. I’ve enjoyed moments of it, but there’s a lot of pressure and you worry about stuff.

“But this summer, I just couldn’t wait for it to come. And when it did come, I cherished every moment. You never knew... a few cases here and there, and the season might be cancelled. Likewise, I might have a case and then I’d be locked in for two weeks. You just thought that every game could be your last, every moment could be your last of the summer. I just absolutely loved it.”

It helped, of course, that Smith and Gloucestershire were successful: having lost their last three T20 Blast quarter-finals, they had become conditioned to falling at that stage. But after beating Northamptonshire comprehensively in October to earn a semi-final berth against Surrey, a 13-year wait for a Finals Day return came to a belated end.

For Smith, the events of this campaign were made extra-special by his own emotions. He has described in the past of how he had lost the ability to experience highs and lows following the loss of Laura. “I just feel pretty flat,” he told the Professional Cricketers’ Trust last year. This time around, however, he felt his team’s success, almost like he had found himself once more.

“We lost a couple of games and it didn’t matter,” he says, his voice breaking into a laugh. “I just really enjoyed being out there.

“To reflect on the season after, to have that emotion of feeling happy and not feeling numb, was really nice. I probably had to go through lockdown to feel that, to appreciate my career and to appreciate everything I do have, although obviously I have lost someone extremely special to me.

“But to get that feeling back, I feel fortunate in a way for lockdown because I wouldn’t have had that otherwise.”

^{Smith took 14 wickets in this year's T20 Blast}

It was never more so the case than at the end of a thrilling win over Somerset – a victory constructed by Ian Cockbain’s 89 but clinched thanks to Smith’s final-ball boundary, with Gloucestershire needing three runs to edge over the line. A swing into the vacant deep midwicket region triggered a joyous roar from the Bristol dugout.

“It wasn’t really about what I’d achieved,” he explains. “It was how happy it made everyone else. I think, for a lot of time, I felt quite insular about bereavement and grief. Cricket was a relief, and you don’t really think about it then – you’re just playing cricket. But that was a moment of just looking at how happy that one shot had made everyone else.

“Everyone was just so happy for that one moment, and we had a couple of drinks together after. It was just a nice feeling to see how happy everyone else was and that fed into me.”

Talking as he has done has aided this process. As well as Ferdinand and Thomas, who a fortnight ago returned to football presenting three years after the passing of his wife Gemma, he points to the work of Sir Andrew Strauss and Glenn McGrath as similar inspirations.

“I do my little bit where I can just to support,” he adds. “I know that when Laura died, I was looking for anyone that I could find – to listen to videos, to understand it, to work out whether the feelings that I was feeling were normal. And it was.

“People are experiencing things similar to this all the time, and you just feel like if you can do your bit, then it helps other people. I think in the dressing room, the players are extremely supportive.

“I’m not someone who would go in the dressing room to discuss everything to do with it – because cricket’s my release. Cricket’s my time when I’m Tom the cricketer, not Tom the widower. I like that. I like my release of leaving the single-parent stuff at home and going to play cricket. Likewise, if people want to discuss it or are going through hardships in their own personal lives, then I’m more than happy to discuss it.”

Gloucestershire – and, more widely, the game’s domestic family – have been pivotal to Smith in his last two years. “The cricket players are as much my support network as people that help me out at home,” he says. “It’s a big family, the cricket community. It’s not anything that I wanted to leave quickly. I’m not ready to finish and leave my support network. They’ve been extremely supportive, everyone around the traps is often very kind and friendly.”

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Ahead of Finals Day, he praised his own dressing room for his teammates’ “emotional intelligence” in and around individual adversity. Ian Harvey, the club’s assistant coach, also lost his wife Amanda in 2018. It was revealed in December 2017 that Cindy Klinger, wife of Michael, the county’s long-serving overseas player until his retirement last year, had been diagnosed with cancer. Gareth Roderick, who left Bristol for Worcestershire at the end of the season, lost his father to suicide in 2017.

Smith’s own cricketing journey has taken him from Sussex to Gloucestershire, via stops at Middlesex and Surrey. This is his third three-year contract in that time – this particular occasion marks a rare, valuable slice of security in an uncertain age. “And it was lovely that they identified me as someone that they wanted to build the future of the club around,” he adds.

There are some coaching responsibilities built into the deal as well, initially working with the club’s young spinners and, as the years progress, perhaps with the second team. For a cricketer at the beginning of their path, there might not be many better to count as mentor.

Not that he intends to wind down his playing days, though. The last County Championship match played ahead of Covid-19 saw Chris Dent’s side return to the top division for the first time since 2005, while the T20 side – now flourishing under the captaincy of Jack Taylor – is in the midst of a crescendo, full of established players and match-winners.

“We are a group that’s now played for a number of years together, and we definitely understand how we win games and the way we play,” Smith says. “We don’t have many inexperienced players anymore.” Of the T20’s side’s regulars, the youngest is James Bracey, now very much on England’s radar. Otherwise, the likes of Ryan Higgins, Benny Howell, Ian Cockbain, Jack Taylor and David Payne are all integral parts of the furniture.

^{Smith has signed a new three-year contract}

And a summer without overseas players has merely handed more experience to those players in crunch moments. Australia’s seamer Andrew Tye, for example, would normally finish an innings, while Klinger’s enduring dominance at the top of the order provided a reliable source of runs. In the absence of both, others profited: Dent hadn’t played a T20 game for four years until averaging 33.7 in 11 games this season.

In amongst all this is Smith, a less glamorous operator and perhaps underrated beyond his pastures, but a 137-game career has taken him to eighth in the all-time list of Blast wicket-takers. In front of him, Jeetan Patel, Azhar Mahmood and Yasir Arafat have all retired, while Gareth Batty, Harry Gurney and Samit Patel are in their later years. Only Danny Briggs, out in front with 172 scalps to his name, looks uncatchable over the horizon.

Of Smith’s overall haul, 99 have come for Gloucestershire, with Howell on top on 116 – one ahead of Payne.

“I guess it’s going to be difficult to get near Briggs because he’s younger than I am,” he laughs. “If I finish in the top five, that would be a good achievement. There has been quite a lot of coverage of it over the last summer, so I’ve been aware of it. But you’re not in control of anything, are you? You can try to perform as well as you can, and if you get a few wickets, then great.

“It’s not really a controllable but I think it is a nice reflection that I’ve played for a while and I’m in that top 10, which is really nice. It’s something to look back on after my career to feel like I achieved that.”

In the meantime, however, it’s the simpler things that matter. “I’m sat with a three-year deal, as supporters’ player of the year, feeling really happy and warm. Rosie’s in school and got house captain. There are so many positive things from lockdown that we would never have seen in May, so I do feel very fortunate.”

And after all Tom Smith has been through, you can’t help but be chuffed that he feels able to say that.

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