Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

42 the established pair of opening batsmen would be split up when the England selectors asked that Mike should face the new ball as he had done at Oxford. With a relatively settled side, there were no openings in England’s middle order, with May, Cowdrey and Graveney all established, but there was no obvious partner for Richardson. Cowdrey and Trevor Bailey had both filled a berth that neither relished without marked success. So why not try M.J.K. Smith? Though a bank of evidence was building up that he was at his least happy if the new ball was darting around on a fast pitch, Mike was happy to oblige. ‘The selectors said would I go in first. You do it, don’t you?’ So, in mid-season Horner moved down the order to accommodate Mike. The search for a new opener had begun in MCC’s two early-season matches at Lord’s. Against Yorkshire Maurice Hallam and Arthur Milton were tried. For the match against Surrey, the champion county, Mike went in first with Don Smith of Sussex, who had played three Tests the previous summer. The attack they faced may have lacked Alec Bedser and Tony Lock, but still included Peter Loader and Jim Laker. The two Smiths added 299, Mike making 160, his partner 173, as Surrey slid to their first innings defeat in five years. Back with Warwickshire, Mike took a hundred off the Combined Services, again as an opener, but he dropped down to number four against Sussex when the rested Gardner and Horner returned. Mike’s next visit to Lord’s was for MCC against the New Zealand Capped as an opener Prospects for play? Mike and the stand-in West Indies captain, Clyde Walcott, assessing weather on the last day of the Warwickshire v West Indies match at Edgbaston in August 1957. Walcott, vice-captain on the tour, told Mike he should have been captain.