Prior to his innings, Smith had only faced 38 balls from four visits to the crease in the competition but made the most of his chance with a superb half-century as he and Sam Hain (48 not out) ensured Warwickshire cruised to their victory target of 154 with five wickets in hand and 10 balls to spare.<\/p>\n
“You never know when you’re going to get your next opportunity and you want to make sure that you grab it with both hands, so I was really pleased,” Smith said.<\/p>\n
“I just had to stay patient and always stay ready.<\/p>\n
“You never know what can happen so making sure that I still top up behind the scenes doing training sessions and things like that.”<\/p>\n
Currently in his second season of first-class cricket, Smith played in the first two County Championship games of the season but has not featured since with former captain Alex Davies taking over the gloves.<\/p>\n
Smith turned down the chance to play cricket overseas in the winter to work on his keeping at Edgbaston and he says, with more white-ball opportunities to come in the One-Day Cup, he is reaping the benefits.<\/p>\n
“Oh, massively. I realised how far I can actually go up the ranks if you become a solid keeper,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I’ve got my dreams and aspirations to become the best keeper in the country.<\/p>\n
“Growing up in Dubai, I haven’t had the experience keeping to the wobbling ball and the conditions here in the UK, so I had to work really hard on that front. <\/p>\n
“I decided to not go away last winter and actually stay the whole winter indoors and work on my keeping so I’m really pleased to see where that’s taken me.<\/p>\n
“It’s definitely felt like there’s a massive improvement compared to last year so I just need to keep my head down, keep working hard.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prior to his innings, Smith had only faced 38 balls from four visits to the crease in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":689386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-689385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/689386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}