Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

127 ‘a contrary body movement’. Accused by Mike of ball watching, he smiles as he remembers his retort: ‘Yes, I do watch the bloody ball because I can’t trust what you’re saying!’ ‘I found Geoffrey easier to run with,’ Barber adds, ‘I actually knew what was going on.’ A statistical enquiry to CricketArchive suggests that Mike’s propensity to be run out, 26 times in his career, was marginally below the average for players with 30,000 first-class runs. (The most careless, or perhaps one should say optimistic, runner was Reg Simpson, the most cautious Don Kenyon. The fate of partners goes unrecorded!) Mike’s theories on batting abound, but his approach to captaincy was disarmingly straightforward. ‘You can’t put in ability that isn’t there, but what you can do is mess up a decent side.’ Captaining sides all his life, Mike has never been one to revel in the status of office. ‘He didn’t like to be in authority,’ says Gerry Hopper of the boy who led the Stamford School cricket team for three years. ‘He didn’t like to rule the roost.’ Listening to those who played under Mike in later life makes clear how his approach differed from others who led England in the 1960s. There was the indecisiveness of Cowdrey amid a sea of theorising, the fragile attention span of Dexter, another with his own pet theories, and the ‘follow-me-out-of-the-trenches’ style of Brian Close, but there is no simple label for Mike. He was, above all, a players’ captain, one of the team and a leader who sought no perks for himself. ‘He was one eleventh of that side and didn’t want to be any more,’ says David Allen. ‘Well spoken, David,’ says Bob Barber on hearing these words, ‘Ted and Colin held themselves the way they did perhaps because the establishment wanted them to, but Mike never wanted anything other than to be one of the players.’ Robin Hobbs, offering the perspective of a younger player, takes the same view: ‘Although he was captain, he still remained one of the boys in all the dealings I had with him. He was highly respected by all the players who played under him.’ ‘You trusted him implicitly and you’d have walked on water for him,’ Hobbs adds. Barber, who played under Mike at Warwickshire and on two tours, experienced occasions when decisions went wrong, but still comments: ‘I don’t recall anyone ever thinking anyone else should be captain.’ It helped that Mike was the first to volunteer for the close fielding positions, while his bowlers at Test level appreciated his respect for their craft, expecting them to know the field they wanted and seldom imposing other ideas. It was not always so, Barber and Mortimore both commenting on A final balance sheet