"You do have some days when you just can't be arsed..."

“Perspective is everything,” says Ed Smith, at the start of What Sport Tells us About Life, the book he wrote back in 2008, in which he argued that sport should be taken more seriously.

My first perspective on Ed Smith, as a human, rather than the cricketer I watched from 50 yards away, was when he bounded into the press canteen at the Oval during the 2013 Ashes, saw that beef stroganoff was on the menu and bellowed the word “Stroggers!”

The first time I saw Rob Key up close was in 2002, when Kent were playing at The Mote and an entire day’s play was lost to rain. The press box was in the now-derelict upper tier of the pavilion and Key was taking a phone call a few yards away. He put on a high-pitched voice and yelled: “How would you like, to suck my balls, Mr Garrison?” into the receiver.

This, for context, is a line from the film South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Without that context, you might get the impression that Key was violating the terms of an ASBO and that Smith was an off-the-peg public school idiot, but they were, and still are, two exceptionally bright boys. Smith had the Oxbridge education. Key was the streetwise, grammar-school boy.

Neither had the England careers they were tipped for, but both would rise to the very top in the only distantly related field of sports administration and both have had pivotal roles in the national team’s fortunes during the last decade. Smith was the Chief Selector between 2018 and 2021, “A period of unprecedented success for England’s men’s teams,” according to his website.

At the time of writing Key is still, just about, the Managing Director of the England team, a position he’s held since April 2022. Both men authored books before their time in charge (Smith actually wrote his) and these books left significant clues as to how their tenures would play out.

“I’m not a drinker,” said Rob Key in December 2025, reacting to reports England players drank excessively during the Ashes Tour. “Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol for an international cricket team is not something that I’d expect to see at any stage.”

He may well have eased off a bit in the last six years, but in 2020, when he was still a mere pundit, his book Oi, Key! was published. Open it on a random page and the chances are you’ll find a heavy clue about how the Ashes were going to go.

He talks of interrogating Matt Coles, who confesses to having three, then five and then seven pints, plus an unspecified number of shits. He concludes: “It’s hard to police that kind of behaviour.”

Oi, Key! was released in the early weeks of the pandemic and it became a huge hit, having received over 700 positive reviews on Amazon. These aren’t always to be trusted, but they’re no less reliable than the guff provided by dust-jacket quote whores: the puff quotes at the start of Smith’s book Making Decisions border on the sycophantic.

Smith has been writing since 2003 and while his books have generally been well reviewed, they average about a tenth of Key's readership. He recently told an audience at Tonbridge School that he had no craving to be liked, and while his debut, On and Off the Field, won the 2005 Wisden Book of the Year award, it arguably did irreparable damage to both his Kent career and multiple relationships.

His style is bone dry. It’s not uninteresting, but it isn’t anything like as enjoyable as Key’s because he seems so serious and everything he writes feels like an essay being submitted for a tutor. Academia was perhaps his comfort zone. Back in 1998, during a lull in play while commentating on a Sunday League game, Radio Kent’s Neil Bell and John Warnett were discussing the news that Smith had just received a double first in History at Cambridge. “That is very good indeed,” Bell purred.

But some of the anecdotes he uses in Making Decisions feel designed to show how well read he is: “By chance, just before becoming a selector, I was fortunate enough to be sent a new edition of A Guide to the Classics, by the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott.”

This isn’t my idea of good fortune, but as Smith explains, the title was an in-joke. It was really about the Epsom Derby during the interwar period and the book is actually about using past evidence to make informed decisions.

And these passages are interesting. To surmise: failure is always possible, but fearing it will inhibit you. Even if you do everything right, you still might only have a 1 in 3 chance at a World Cup. So you do everything possible to give yourself the best possible chance of winning and absolve yourself if, despite your best efforts, someone else comes out on top. If Key’s England team had followed Smith’s advice, we might not have had headlines like the following.

The red flags start on page one, when he confesses to getting a “backie” off a kid on a scrambler bike to avoid having to complete a punishment run along the River Severn at Worcester.

On page five he drops the bombshell news that Duncan Fletcher thought he had fitness issues, then reveals he put on two stone, “mainly through drink” during a spell in Zimbabwe.

One chapter is called: “A coach is what you get to the ground in,” and in another, called “The Grind,” he admits: “You do have some days when you just can’t be arsed.” But arguably the most revealing passage of the lot is his reaction to Steve Waugh’s diaries.

“He would go out visiting all sorts of places. Me, Harmy and Fred were three people who were never going to make the most of opportunities like that. We couldn’t think of anything worse. We would be quite happy sitting in a cafe sharing a basic thought – ‘England is the greatest country in the world. We’re not going to see all this other stuff.’ In South Africa, players would get up at 2am to go on safari. I would rather chop my leg off than do that. I’ve never been bothered by sight-seeing. What’s the point? It’s all on Google.”

This is a great line if you're trying to make people laugh on the back row of a bus. I'm not sure I'd say it a group of cricketers preparing for a once-in-a-generation chance to win a tour in Australia. The Worcester story reminded me of a passage in one of David Gower’s autobiographies, when as Leicestershire’s skipper, he suggested driving to the gym and was left looking sheepish when his team mates opted to run there instead.

The reverse happened over the winter, when Ben Stokes suggested a 12k run around Noosa during England’s infamous mid-Ashes break. There were hardly any takers, but the effect was the same: both men were undermined.

If I were stranded on a desert island (a desert island with a well-stocked library) I’d read Oi Key! before any of Ed Smith’s efforts. But I’d put Smith in charge of the survival and rescue missions.