One of the Best

The name Clive Smith won’t mean anything to anyone outside match fishing, but this 1970s giant of the sport penned one of its most enduringly readable and informative titles, a 1982 offering from the same Newton Abbot outfit I championed in my previous post:

Smith outlines the detailed and often cunning planning that went into his greatest individual and team victories – skipper of the mighty Birmingham team of the 1970s, he was especially renowned for his tactical nous – but in the final chapter he writes frankly of the crushing failure he experienced as a member of the England team fishing in front of a home crowd in the 1981 World Championships. In the same year his book was published he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and died, but he remains a giant in my eyes.