Smith reaping a rich harvest for Walden

It has not been much fun being a farmer this summer unless your name happens to be Tim Smith.

Harvest time has come nearly every weekend throughout the cricket season for the remarkable bowler who cannot just stop taking wickets for his local team, Saffron Walden, at the ripe old age of 47.

Farmer Smith's bumper crop of wickets has already helped his club race to the Essex League title and reach the quarter-finals of the National Knockout Cup.

This weekend's big target is a place in the final of club cricket's richest knockout tournament, the Evening Standard Challenge Trophy. Walden travel to Bexley on Sunday for their semi-final in the £12,000 event and victory will earn them a trip to The Oval on 9 September to face Wanstead or Lambeth Enterprise.

Smith's unconventional style of slow left-arm swing bowling has reaped 64 wickets in 11 League matches (an average of 5.8 per match). He took eight for 50 from 32.5 overs in last week's victory over Hadleigh and needs 16 more victims from four games, starting against Horndon-on-the-Hill tomorrow to break the League record set by Nigel Hillyard in 1984.

The good news for Bexley's batsmen is that Smith can only bowl 10 overs in Sunday's 50-over semi-final at Manor Way. The bad news is that his figures in the two previous rounds against Dartford and Radlett were four for four and five for 11.

The tall, rangy Smith who farms 500 acres of arable land in Henham, near Bishop's Stortford, admitted: "I've been playing cricket for 30 years but I've never known a season like this, it's been quite unbelievable."

Smith and fellow-farmer Steve Plumb, also 47, were members of the Bishop's Stortford team which lost two National Knockout finals at Lord's in 1978 and 1984.