A hard grafter is back in the Saddle

DEAN Smith was never the most gifted player in the world. Ask fans of Hereford, Leyton Orient or Sheffield Wednesday to describe their former skipper and none will recall a man blessed with lightning pace or a feathery first touch.

Yet nor will they have a bad word to say about a centre-half who made up for those flaws with aggression, effort, unflinching bravery and pride in the shirt.

“I have always been a believer in hard work, honesty and discipline,” said Smith, who started his career with Walsall as a teenager in 1989. “Those are the values I got from my parents, and from Ray Train, my youth team coach at Walsall.

“He’s a man I’ve got a lot of respect for, who hammered home to all of us that it was all about having the right attitude. That stayed with me and it is something I try to pass on to every youth teamer and every first-team player.”

Train’s lessons were well heeded. At 18, Smith was already in the Walsall first team. By the age of 19, he was captaining men a decade his senior.

“I made him captain and he was the youngest skipper Walsall had,” said Kenny Hibbitt, then Walsall manager and now a referees’ assessor for the Premier League. “There was always that steel to him. Even though there were senior players around him he was someone who had that lead- ership. He was a teenager but the senior players had seen him as an apprentice coming through the ranks and he had a bit of presence about him. They responded to him and didn’t have any problems.”

After 130 appearances for the Saddlers, Smith was sold to Hereford for £80,000 and again made captain under Graham Turner. “He was a good lad, a good competitor, a good skipper to have in your club,” said the recently-retired Shrewsbury boss.

Then – after relegation from the Football League with Hereford – came a £42,500 move to Leyton Orient and legendary status.

Playing alongside Simon Clark and Stuart Hicks (“We called them the three amigos, said Orient boss Tommy Taylor. “We should have played 4-4-2, but with three good centre-halfs we had to play them.”) Smith made 309 appearances in six years, scoring 32 goals, including an impressive 10 in his first season.

“He was a great captain and a great player,” added Taylor. “For a couple of years, he was the best centre-back in that division.”

Alas, though he captained Orient to two play-off finals – one against Scunthorpe and one against Blackpool – Smith tasted defeat in both, adding to similar failures with Hereford and Walsall.

He wouldn’t get another chance to win promotion, ending his playing days in 2005 after season-long stays at Sheffield Wednesday and Port Vale.

Yet the success that eluded him as a player would come swiftly as a coach. Having completed his UEFA ALicence, Smith became Martin Ling’s youth coach back at Orient.

Less than a year later he was promoted to assistant and the pair took Orient up from League Two, spending four years together before Ling’s dismissal in 2009.

Two years as Walsall’s head of youth followed before, in 2011, Chris Hutchings was sacked and Smith was asked to save the Sadllers from relegation to League Two.

That he did, clawing back a ninepoint gap to safety and today Smith has Walsall challenging for the playoffs.

“Before Dean came, day-to-day we weren’t sure what we were doing,” said Matt Richards, one of the players Smith inherited who is now at Cheltenham.

“But then things got a lot more organised.We got itineraries instead of coming in and being told: ‘We’re doing this’. We knew what we were doing, it was all prepared and we all benefitted from it.”

And Lee Bradbury, who played with Smith at Sheffield Wednesday, isn’t surprised to see his old teammate turning Walsall’s fortunes around.

“Dean was a very determined and hard-working player,” he said.“And he will have instilled that into his players.

“He is very professional and won’t let anybody slack. That was the type of player he was and I’m sure he will make his players the same.”