Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

24 Cannings bowled first Bailey and then Kentish to snatch victory by one run. Mike was away taking Finals when the long-awaited victory came in the next match, a Free Foresters side of modest strength going down by 93 runs. When several senior players, their exams behind them, were able to join the team on tour, there were two further successes. Gloucestershire were beaten at Bristol, Mike contributing 126, and there was an innings victory over Warwickshire at Edgbaston. Mike had continued opening the innings at the start of the season, but the return of the old Blues allowed him to drop down to number four, and it was in his favourite position that he became the first, and still the only man to make hundreds in three consecutive Varsity Matches. On 80 overnight, Mike was dropped before adding to his score, but then went on to complete his century on the third morning. Dismissed for 117, he declared Oxford’s first innings 56 runs behind in the hope that Cambridge might be tempted to set his batsmen a reachable target. The captains dispensed with the tea interval but, as in 1955, Cambridge caution left Oxford too little time to mount a challenge. Though Robin Boyd-Moss was later to make three Varsity Match hundreds for Cambridge, Mike remains the only man to have recorded a century in three different matches. His tally in those encounters, 477, took him past the record set by the Nawab of Pataudi in 1931; only Boyd-Moss has scored more since, but his record came after playing in four matches. Mike’s final Oxford season brought him 1,001 first-class runs, lifting his three-year total to 3,009, a figure exceeded by several outstanding Cambridge batsmen but of Oxonians only by Mandy Mitchell-Innes and, later on, Abbas Ali Baig, both of whom needed four years in the Oxford side to do so. If cricket had been his only game, Mike Smith would be enshrined as one of the University’s legendary figures, but when his peers elected him President of Vincent’s, the club for Oxford’s sporting elite, he was already a rugby player of distinction destined, in his final year at Oxford, to play for his country. Records fall at Oxford