Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

105 season was crowned with victory in the Gillette Cup. Comfortable wins against Glamorgan, Gloucestershire and Somerset brought a final against local rivals Worcestershire at Lord’s. On winning the toss Mike did not repeat his mistake of four years earlier, ensuring that it would be the Worcestershire batsmen who would face any autumnal help for the seam bowlers. Cartwright, with three prime wickets for 16 runs in his 12 overs, was at his best, with Webster, Brown and Bannister in support; but to see Barber augmenting the attack with more seam instead of bowling his leg breaks brought ribald comment from sections of the press, Ian Peebles, himself a former leg spinner, laying down a blueprint of how spin should have been applied to dismiss the tail. It barely mattered. Barber, with 66, ensured that a final Worcestershire score of 155 never looked adequate. In 1967 there were still only 11 batsmen in the county game averaging more than Mike’s 41.40. Among them was Dennis Amiss, who had been capped by England the previous summer and who now took over as Warwickshire’s leading batsman. Chosen to play for England before he had scored a championship century, he had taken time to find his feet in the county game but was now embarking on a career that would end with over a hundred first-class centuries and a record aggregate of runs for Warwickshire. Cartwright remained a captain’s joy, no bowler in England exceeding his 147 wickets, but vulnerable support batting and a dearth of spin bowling consigned Warwickshire to tenth place in the table, while early defeat by Somerset meant there was no solace to be had from the Gillette Cup. WhenMike lost the England captaincy it had passed to Cowdrey, the perpetual long-stop, but defeats in the third and fourth matches of the series against West Indies led the selectors to turn for the final Test at The Oval to a captain in a different mould, the hard- as-nails skipper of Yorkshire, Brian Close. Sandwiched between two modest performances by the tourists’ batsmen, England’s 527, memorably constructed around 165 from Graveney and an unprecedented 234 runs from the last three batsmen, raised Close to iconic status, the man with the answer to England’s problems. Next year he built on this success, his team pulverising the visiting Indians and Pakistanis. Though there were murmurings at Lord’s that the blunt Tyke might not be the best ambassador overseas, Close was scheduled to captain MCC in the West Indies. And so he might have done, had it not been for his on-field conduct at the end of Yorkshire’s The captain loses his crown