Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

16 Finding a small enough bat of 188 in an hour and three quarters. ‘It would be interesting to see how many of that team went on to play first-class cricket,’ Mike reflects. ‘At least half a dozen I would guess.’ The answer is ten – six obtained Blues, two others, Bob Gale and Charles Robins, played for Middlesex, while Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie went on to captain Hampshire and Nigel Paul played a few games for Warwickshire. The odd man out was Colin Dean, a left-arm spinner from Highgate, who was to reappear in the Schools team for the next two years. Writing in Wisden , that prickly but usually perceptive commentator E.M. Wellings remarked of Mike that he was primarily a back- foot player. ‘Well, that’s nonsense,’ says Mike with uncontrolled laughter, ‘totally wrong! I was always a front-foot player.’ ‘That he occasionally made a pleasing off drive suggested that he lacked confidence more than ability in the making of such strokes,’ Wellings added. Throughout his career Mike was to attract comments that belittled his style. The high elbow and the cover drives that distinguished the traditional public-school amateur never characterised his batting, but his cricketing brain told him that the business side was on the leg, where there were more open spaces to be exploited. ‘The bottom line is how many, not how,’ he says, looking back on a career that brought him almost 40,000 first-class runs. The match for the Public Schools had been preceded by Mike’s introduction to first-class cricket. His school record and his performance in a Club and Ground match may have persuaded Leicestershire, one of the weakest of the 17 counties, that the 18-year-old was ready for championship cricket. Looking back on his first match, in the Bank Holiday fixture against Northamptonshire at Grace Road, Mike takes a different view: ‘I never knew the ball moved off the seam and I’d never seen a googly in my life. Probably just as well – I’d got enough problems with everything else that was going on.’ He batted at number seven and he laughs at the memory of his first dismissal: ‘Caught Fiddling bowled Nutter – it sounds like something out of Monty Python!’ Out for a duck, he suspects the umpire had done his best to help him: ‘He gave me a no-ball to get me off the mark, but I didn’t get it away. These things happened in those days.’ The nightmare debut continued with a straightforward catch dropped at cover. Mike marked his return home from the Lord’s matches with a century for Leicestershire Young Amateurs out of his side’s