How Robin Smith subdued the fastest, meanest bowlers in the world and now taming the inner demons that afflict him | Cricket News

Tears well up in Robin Smith’s eyes. “I am sorry, those words still send a shiver down”. It was the doctor’s words to his son about him: “Your dad probably has got a 10% chance to live”. For three months, until September 11th this year, the former aggressive batsman born in South Africa and played for England, was fighting for his life in a Perth hospital.In 2019, he had penned an autobiography detailing his battle with alcohol, his dark days where he contemplated suicide, but he told the cricketing world that the dark nights of the soul were over. “But the devil has got you the clutches. The moment you relax, think you are over it, it can come back.” It did in 2021, and slowly yet again the downward spiral began. Until that moment in the hospital a few months ago.
We are at a busy outdoorsy part of a coffee shop in the Perth city centre, a couple of days after India’s win, next to a train station exit. People flutter , occasional laughter drifts in the air, and bright morning sunshine lights up the space. Sipping a latte, with two sugar sachets—he wanted three but the raised eyebrows made him cut down one. He comes across as an avuncular gent, shy, polite, compassionate, who spent much time asking about others, be it former India players or about India or the life of the person interviewing him.

But it is Robin aka Judge, his childhood nickname, stuck due to the way his white hair flowed then like a Judge’s wig, that one is interested in. “That essentially was one of the problems, that fractured identity between Robin, the awkward, introvert, shy person that I am, and this Judge, aggressive batsman who loved the adrenalin rush of playing fast bowling. To become Judge after play, I would need to drink a couple to loosen up, you know, get that vibe going in the body. Though luckily through my career, though I was a ‘party’ guy, alcohol didn’t really become an all-consuming affair.”
Back then he was busy assaulting the pacers with his courage, skill, and the fiercest cut one can imagine that rivalled the West Indian legend Gordon Greendige’s in its power. As you would expect, stories flow. He cues up confrontations with Waqar Younis. “For some reason, he hated me, even telling me that ‘I am going to kill you!’. Terrific bowler and it was some series that – 1992 against Pakan, when Wasim Akram and Waqar harassed us at their peak.”
For a while, until Waqar’s frank words to him, Robin says he thought it was all with them. “I would greet him in the morning, and he would mutter back something in Urdu.” A few years later, when Wasim joined my county team, I learned it meant “motherf*****”! Robin laughs at the memory. Not that it was something new. The West Indians wouldn’t say a word, but Australians and Pakanis would.
Robin cues up an incident with Australia’s captain Allan Border. “A wicket had fallen and as he was crossing me to join his team-mates, I asked him, ‘would you mind if I had a drink now”’. He kept walking when he suddenly turned and came back: “No, you f***, you can’t. This is not some f****** picnic. Have it with the rest of us.” Thank you very much Mr Grumpy!”.
More laughter. “Oh there was this one more time. The ball had gone down leg, and as a batsman, just to shrug off the nervousness, you want to go down the pitch and do a bit of gardening etc. So I turn around, see Border there, ask his permission to leave the crease. And he of course storms across to say, “We are not here to run you out, we want to knock you out, you c***!” Robin smiles at that memory before grimacing a touch, “You know he isn’t too well, these days, AB. Hope he gets well soon.” More memories spill out. “Merv Hughes would only say one thing to me when I wished him morning on the field. A grunt that would be followed with “A***wipe!” Friendly blokes, those Australians!”
Dousing speed, demons
Were the West Indians that different? Didn’t he have the most fiercest on-field battles with the likes of Courtney Walsh, who broke his jaw once with a bouncer, and Ian Bishop, who made him retire hurt after blood poured from just below his eye? “They were different alright. Nice guys. Played hard, but that was just business for them. Nothing personal,” he says.
With the Aussies, it was often personal or so it seemed. The Aussies never interacted much with us, none of this great post-game bonhomie drinks together in the dressing room that I would read being romanticised in the papers but hardly saw in my time,” he recounts.

The Caribbean quicks were different. “Courtney (Walsh) actually came over at the tea break to enquire about my wellbeing that day. Of course, the first ball I faced him afterwards was a bouncer. You didn’t expect anything else, either,” he says.
That was in Antigua 1990, when Smith swayed away from two fiery bouncers before the third smacked his jaw. Viv Richards, a friend from county cricket ran over, put his hand over the shoulder and told him that ‘huh maan, it’s swelling up, you need to go back and get it treated’.
“It’s when Lam (Allan Lamb, Smith’s idol and friend), intervened as the non-striker, “Hey, I am England’s captain, thank you very much, we shall make that decision!” Smith gets treatment on the field for the jaw and continues batting. “Next ball, another bouncer at my face, and luckily this time, I had swayed to the other side.” The visuals are there on YouTube, worth repeated looks. Or the time Bishop, “One of the fastest men I faced as you couldn’t pick his bouncers. There was no change in action. With a Waqar or Shoaib Akhtar or a few, you can know from the way they dropped their shoulder that a missile was incoming. Not with Bishop. He could bowl an outswinger and with what seemed exactly the same action, he could bounce at your face. Pity about his back injury, else he would have become one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time”.
Surely there was a West Indies bowler who wasn’t all that nice? Robin laughs. “There was Sylvester Clarke, not that he said anything at all but I always got the feeling that he was more than happy to hurt you, even more than taking your wicket. I even tried once to become friendly with him before a game at the bar. I bought him a few drinks, you know, and he very happily took them. “Oh thanks, I shall have one more. Great, thanks.” Next morning, his eyes seemed to reflect more rage as the bouncers kept flying around my face.”
But among all this, he still inss, and there was little doubt either when watching him during his playing days, that he absolutely loved facing pace. “Pace like fire as Tony Grieg called on air when I was swaying away from a Bishop bouncer. Perhaps, it was my upbringing in South Africa or whatever, I didn’t have fear facing fast bowling.”
Not fear, but why the love?! “Guess, it was the adrenaline kicking in. Howling crowds, pacer charging in and letting go, there was no time to think. You react, you sway or cut or drive or do whatever. It was a pure thrill for me. It’s the spinners like Shane Warne, and your readers in India might recall that dreadful 1992 tour there, who caused the issues.”
Even on that tour where he says his teammate Derek Pringle, “a highly educated man interested in hory and culture” dragged me to all sorts of places. Red Fort in Delhi, Agra, the bazaars, everything. Rest of my teammates were stuck in the hotel, we two were up and about. I loved India, guess it has changed a lot these days.”
Trains, rats, spin
That 1992 tour in particular was a bit crazy, on and off the field. Due to a flight strike across the country, England had to at times take long 20-hours flights in trains to get to the venues. “I remember one journey in particular, I had come nice and early to the station, and got on to the upper seat (berth). Graeme Hick was down and soon pleading with me, “Judge, please swap, there are rats running around!”
“Rats I might have had issues with, but otherwise I loved India. It was unlike anything, people were kind and great, lots of fun. Never mind how we played the spin! I was more nervous facing Warney than I was even Sylvester Clarke! No time to think is good you see!” he added.
But life after being cut off from cricket meant he had a lot of time to ruminate and wallow. That’s when the issues began for what essentially is a sensitive man. “I am very sensitive, emotional. Even yesterday while I was watching a documentary, I shed tears and my son goes, “oh no dad, don’t cry again!”
The bad times arrived when he moved to Perth with his family, with his two kids at school, a son and a daughter. He still hadn’t recovered from the way he was dropped from England without “proper explanation”. He played for Hampshire for a few more years before he had enough. Then, his business failed. “When your identity as a sportsman is taken away – I was just 32 when I last played for England, and this constructed identity of Judge in some ways is gone. I am left with Robin, and there is this tussle going on between the two.” When the business went and the marriage broke down, he began to hit the bottle.
Designing the end
Suicidal thoughts gatecrashed. “I had even planned how it would all end. Check into the Rendezvous Hotel, after a walk in the Scarborough beach, take a cocktail of drinks and pills, have a smoke, and leap off the balcony”.
Luckily, he didn’t carry it through though, once he recovered later the intervention of his partner Karin, he visited that place to detail the dark thoughts for his book ‘The Judge’. But what awaited him there shocked him further. “We had just come back to our room when we saw a body crash down from above, outside our balcony. We both ran and there was this lady wedged in the drain. Her eyes were still open, and Karin and I were holding her hand and waiting for the ambulance. When blood trickled out of her mouth, I said ‘f***’, she is gone.”

The thought that it could have been him at one point shook him, but a couple of years after his book, his partner went to work away from the city. His mother died. It shook his father, who turned even more fragile. This is when the demons returned. It started with a good intention of taking care of his father. “I urged him to come over rather than living alone, and I had a good place overlooking the waters. He wasn’t himself of course, but didn’t want to live in an age-care. I told him ‘don’t worry I will never let you’.
“I would bathe him, help him eat. I was working for my brother then, and the office was 20 kms away. But all that meant, just the travel to-and-fro meant I was on a straight path, and didn’t have time for much temptation. But with my dad’s health worsening, I had to stop work to take full care of him, which I very much wanted to do.”
But that meant loneliness re-entered his life. “I was too idle, and went drinking again. You would think here I am, having written a book about all that, opened my soul to the world, and would be more intelligent about the dangers. But that’s how it goes. What can I tell you; it’s a bloody spiral but deep inside you know you can’t blame anyone but you. But I was gripped again.”
Two days after a drinking session went overboard and he was taken ill, he was at the hospital. Soon, he heard what he heard from his doctor to his son. “Luckily I have survived. My father moved to an old-age home – and he is happy there. Phew. His fears dropped. The doctor said only 1% of people recover fully and retain their cognitive ability – and that I was lucky to do that.”
He is now back into counselling for alcoholism, learning lessons on not just recovery, but on the methodology and process of counselling others, so that he can talk to afflicted people like him. “If I can help even one person – and I firmly believe I can, it would be great. I know how this grips the soul, and what it can do to you. There are lots of youngsters here and around the world, caught in the drugs-alcohol world. A temporary fix that destroys lives. The underlying issues have to be addressed and one has to think of just small little steps. One tiny step a day.”

His last drink was a few days before being hospitalised. “I would be a fool to touch it again when I know I can die with one more drop.” He looks up, has this wondrous smile on his face, asks to contact him in case of any issues. “Remember, anyone with any such issue, just tell them, ‘there is a guy called Robin on the other side of the world who is willing to len.” And he envelopes with the warmest hug possible.