England’s oldest Test player Don Smith turned Aravinda de Silva into a match-winning bowler

Coach Don Smith and Sri Lanka captain Duleep Mendis before their departure to the 1987 Cricket World Cup in India and Pakistan

By Sa’adi Thawfeeq

England’s oldest men’s Test player Don Smith who passed away at the age of 97 on Sunday was one-time coach of the Sri Lanka cricket team in its early days as a Test-playing nation.

A little known fact about Smith is that he was responsible for turning Sri Lanka’s champion batsman Aravinda de Silva into an effective off-spinner. 

De Silva whose “phantom off-spinners” (as Smith called it) was never considered seriously as a bowler until Smith persuaded him to “do a Viv Richards”. The former West Indies captain bowled fastish off-breaks and was quite effective in curbing the run rate in the one-day game. Guess what, De Silva turned his arm around in the 1987 World Cup and his first victim was none other than the great man himself Viv Richards caught by Rumesh Ratnayake for 14.

De Silva went on to capture 106 ODI wickets in his illustrious career which included a match-winning spell of 3/42 against Australia that helped Sri Lanka win the Cricket World Cup final at Lahore in 1996.

Even though he had coached Denmark, the Sri Lankan assignment was Smith’s first as coach of a national Test team. He had the knack of being present at the right moment. He told Sri Lanka captain Duleep Mendis and his boys that they could beat India in 1985 and they did it quite handsomely winning the 3-Test series 1-0 to record the country’s first Test and series win.   

Smith’s association with the Sri Lanka team began during the historic tour of England in 1984 when Sri Lanka got the better of the Englishman in the drawn Test. He was also around when Sri Lanka beat Imran Khan’s Pakistanis in a Test match in 1986 and later went onto win the Asia Cup the same year.

Smith was the coach of Sri Lanka when they took part in the 1987 Cricket World Cup in India and Pakistan. The tournament however ended disastrously for Sri Lanka when they lost all six group matches and failed to qualify. With it ended Smith’s tenure with the Lankan team and he later went and settled down in Adelaide where he became a naturalised Australian.

Smith played three Tests for England during West Indies’ tour of 1957, making his debut at Lord’s and enjoyed a distinguished career at Sussex where he scored nearly 17,000 runs and claimed 340 wickets from 1946-1962 as an all-rounder who opened the batting.