Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

106 The captain loses his crown championship match at Edgbaston. A closely fought match saw Mike’s team requiring 142 in 102 minutes. Four minutes were lost to rain, but Yorkshire, under Close’s captaincy, managed to bowl what in those days was seen as a niggardly 24 overs. With the ‘last 20 overs’ law still to be introduced, Yorkshire overtly wasted time, ensuring that their last two overs took eleven minutes to bowl. When their team ended nine runs short with five wickets in hand, Warwickshire supporters felt that they had been cheated. ‘Of course slowing the over rate went on,’ Mike concedes, ‘but on this occasion Yorkshire went well over the top.’ John Woodcock in The Times had no doubt about the iniquity of what he had witnessed, already bemoaning the thought that MCC might be taken to the West Indies by a man orchestrating such tactics. Close left after the match to pick the team for the final Test. ‘I wished it had been Mike Smith instead,’ wrote Woodcock, adding that ‘Smith had a good match, with the bat, in the field and in the spirit in which he played it.’ Yorkshire’s efforts gained them two unworthy points in their bid to retain the championship title. Their captain was censured by MCC, but contrition seemed an alien concept in his make-up. The upshot of Close’s refusal to kowtow to authority and apologise – and allegations of his involvement in a scuffle with a spectator at Edgbaston – was to return the captaincy of England in the Caribbean to the melting pot. Even before MCC’s specially convened hearing, it had become increasingly clear that the axe was hovering above the incumbent. And when it fell, who was to succeed him? Cowdrey, having been so recently deposed, hardly seemed the ideal choice, while Mike’s proven record as a leader overseas brought him back into the reckoning, the preferred choice of several commentators. However, Mike had already told Warwickshire that he was intending to retire, and he was not prepared to change his mind. Once it had been decided not to appoint Close, Cowdrey was the obvious alternative and he was duly appointed. With the birth in July of Neil, a son to the delight of his parents and a boy destined to follow his father into first-class cricket, Mike felt increasingly tied to his family. He had enjoyed the previous winter at home and felt that the time had come to settle down and find a job that would bring his globe-trotting to an end. He had been weighing up possibilities before deciding to accept an offer from a Warwickshire cricketing contact, Derrick Robins. It was a move that was to take him into a different sport and one with which he