Hundreds of people filled Winchester Cathedral on Monday for the memorial service for Robin Smith, the Hampshire and England cricketer who died at 62.

Mike Gatting was among those arriving for the service, while Allan Lamb also attended. Inside the cathedral, the choristers entered before Mark Nicholas addressed the gathering, followed by readings from Innes Marlow, who read The High Flying Bird, Chris Smith and Reverend Canon Andrew Micklefield. The turnout underlined the pull Smith still held with the game and with Hampshire, where he made his name.

That much is clear; what is not is how Smith died. No cause or circumstances were given, leaving the memorial to stand as the public marker of a loss that friends, former teammates and supporters have had to reckon with without a fuller account of what happened. For now, the cathedral service was the moment when that absence and that scale of grief met in one place.