Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

13 as an author. Taking a ‘whodunnit?’ for holiday reading, Dexter concluded that he could write better detective stories. With the mind of a national crossword champion, he was soon to bring an iconic series to the nation’s television screens. Mike sits on the MCC Youth Cricket sub-committee as mentor for Oxford, one of the six university academies that receive very generous financial support from MCC. On one of his visits to The Parks, he met his old friend Dexter. The author recalled having planned to film a Morse scene in the Victorian pavilion. ‘There’s a high window ledge in the loo and he was going to have the body on it. He said they could get the body up there but they couldn’t get the cameras in. So they didn’t shoot it.’ Before his thirteenth birthday Mike was in the Stamford Eleven. Moreover, though his age meant that he was dwarfed by his team-mates, he was already batting at what would become his favourite position of number four. He was to play for the school for six years, the last three as captain. His precocious sporting talent meant that he quickly came under the influence of H.E. (‘Bill’) Packer, one of the school’s legendary figures, who died in 1996 after a life dedicated to Stamford. A boy at the school in the 1920s, Packer returned to teach French and coach the first teams at rugby and cricket. A wicketkeeper and useful batsman who played a few games for Leicestershire Second Eleven in the 1930s, he had also been an accomplished rugby player, but a serious back injury when playing fly half for the University at Oxford brought an end to his rugby career, and restricted movement diminished his chances of winning a Blue for cricket. A warm-hearted man, remembered as keeping bees and growing soft fruit, Packer was a cricket coach who nurtured a love of the game and encouraged freedom of expression. ‘The hours he put in coaching cricket at school were phenomenal,’ says Mike. Where a traditionalist might have railed against the MJK proclivity for working the ball to leg, Packer gave his prodigy free rein. Mike’s debut came against Oakham, Stamford’s greatest rivals. His captain that year was Mike Guffick, later to play as fly half for Leicester Tigers. In his first innings the twelve-year-old made 48. ‘Run out! My critics will say a forerunner of things to come,’ he remembers. And whose fault was it? ‘I was slow taking off,’ he admits, revealing a sharper recollection than of many of his later Test match deeds. His cricket master had a different view. ‘His pads were too big for him and he was suffering from exhaustion,’ Bill Packer was recorded as saying many years later. Finding a small enough bat