Some might say I was born in wrong era, but I wouldn’t change a thing

neil smith Former England and Warwickshire all-rounder

CRICKET was in my blood and from a young age – I can still remember being babysat by Eddie Hemmings.

When you have a Dad like mine (MJK Smith) who has played for and captained England, it is inevitable that you are going to be sport-mad.

He tried to push me towards the books but it was a fruitless attempt – all I ever wanted to do was play sport.

I never thought about cricket as a job or a career, I just wanted to be playing all the time and the way to do that was to get on the staff at a county.

After a year on the groundstaff at Lord’s, the chance came and Warwickshire offered me a deal. It was a great time to join the county just as they were entering a golden period of success.

The 1989 NatWest Trophy final against Middlesex at Lord’s was a great experience for a young lad – hitting the winning runs will forever be one of my highlights and made me feel like I belonged.

And from then everything seemed to go right for the county, over the next five or six years we won everything there was to win.

It was a combination of factors really.We had great players of course like Allan Donald, who was deadly alongside Tim Munton and Gladstone Small.

Throw in someone like Brian Lara, a shrewd captain like Dermot Reeve and the coaching of Bob Woolmer and we were ahead of the game.

I was definitely a

better one-day player than four-day and I managed to get up the batting order to open for Warwickshire in the shorter forms, which I enjoyed a great deal.

During our run of success I was also called up by England which was a fantastic honour for me and something I was very proud of.

But unlike these days where you have Lions tours and players are groomed for the international stage, back in my day you were just dropped in.

I played two ODIs in South Africa in 1996 and before I knew it was on the plane to Pakistan for the World Cup later that year.

I had never been there before, let alone bowled on those pitches. International cricket was a big step up from county cricket, especially in terms of intensity, and I had to learn on the job.

I was also joining an England team that was not really competing, it was disappointing considering the players we had at our disposal.

At Warwickshire we had a team that was greater than the sum of its parts – the England side by contrast had great players in every position but they were behind the times.

Sri Lanka blew everyone away that tournament whereas for England it was a damp squib.

I got another chance in ODI cricket the next summer and will forever regret getting out against India at the Oval when I was promoted up the order in a rain-affected game. I was on 20-odd and feeling good and threw it away when a score was there for the taking. That was it for me with England – some might say I was born in the wrong era with the rise of white-ball cricket and IPL money. I was an aggressive batsman who liked to give the ball a rip. My dad also thinks I would have done well on the uncovered pitches that came before but I have eight or nine winners medals in my drawer and I would not change those for the world.