Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

144 Triumphs and tribulations as Chairman been coaching lads since they were about ten and suddenly you get a couple of top-rate lads who get into representative cricket and you get so little benefit from them.’ Mike’s own county, for instance, sees all too little of Ian Bell after years of investment in him as a teenager. Mike has never been against overseas players, and he sees them as helping to redress the balance when centrally contracted players are lost to a county, but it is the number of them that concerns him. He is saddened to see them block the development of young cricketers, just as he is depressed by a ‘welfare-state system’ whereby established players of only modest ability extend their careers, sometimes switching counties, at the expense of promising youngsters. He is also opposed to two divisions in the Championship ‘because in county cricket you must acknowledge it’s not a level playing field.’ ‘You can be unlucky with the weather,’ he adds, still ruing a match in 1963 when Warwickshire went down to Hampshire in contention for the Championship and ‘we never opened our bags.’ But he points out that there used to be a positive benefit for a county ending a season with little to play for: ‘When there was only one division and you were lower middle order, if you had an outstanding youngster knocking on the door, you’d chuck him in for three or four games, whereas now they’d be saying “No, we can’t afford to, we need more experience.”’ In the challenge of developing players, Mike acknowledges a balance between net practice and match play, but he believes nothing beats experience at the right level in the middle, and his advice to the TCCB in 1995 was that our outstanding Under-19 players – he named Michael Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick – should be playing in their county sides. ‘If I am a senior coach at a county club,’ he says, ‘almost the biggest effect that I can have on a young player’s development is to get him playing in the first team, get him playing in the middle. Coaching plays an important part, but he’s got to produce it in the middle.’ * * * * * * * A highlight of Mike’s time in the Caribbean in 1994 had been seeing Brian Lara eclipse Garry Sobers’ record at The Recreation Ground in St John’s. As Warwickshire chairman, he could bask in the brilliance of Lara’s batting knowing that, just ten days earlier, the county had signed him as their overseas player for the forthcoming summer. With Allan Donald in the South African touring party, the club’s original choice had been Indian Test player