Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

18 Chapter Two Records fall at Oxford As Mike’s cricket developed, there was a parallel story of schoolboy successes on the rugby field. Always a fly half at school, he had also captained the rugby side. In his final year The Stamfordian reported him to be ‘by far the most dangerous’ of the backs. His scrum-half partner in his last two years at Stamford and a capable allrounder in the same cricket teams was Gerry Hopper, who arrived at the school on the same day in September 1943 and who was to become a lifelong friend and godfather of Mike’s younger daughter Carole. Hopper, who had been converted from a centre, remembers that should his service ever have strayed he had nothing to fear: ‘Mike could take the ball anywhere within eight feet, high or low.’ The laws of the game in those days, with no restrictions on when a player could kick for touch, also put a premium on accurate kicking. Here, too, Mike’s was an exceptional talent, and it stretched beyond finding touch. ‘He could tap the ball forward, lob it over the top and drop for goal,’ says Hopper. Mike had first played in the Stamford rugby team at the age of 15, and the next year he was chosen for the first fifteen at his home club Hinckley. To his safe hands and assured kicking he also brought an uncanny eye for an opening, which his fleetness of foot was adept at exploiting. With their half-back pairing settled, Hinckley first chose Mike to play at centre, never a position in which he was truly happy, but one in which he still took the eye. ‘Although only 16,’ wrote The Hinckley Times of his performance in a 16-0 win against Old Yardlians, ‘Michael Smith, the Stamford school fly half, played with confidence, ran well, passed with precision, and kicked with great length and accuracy.’ With his schooldays coming to an end and National Service looming, Mike’s eyes were set on a place at university. He was instinctively attracted to Oxford, where the door to St Edmund Hall, as Bill Packer’s old college, was always likely to be open for him. Yet, to gain some experience of the process, Mike first applied to St John’s College at Cambridge, only to find an interviewer less sympathetic to sporting achievement than he would encounter