Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

5 Introduction It was back in 2004 that I first visited Mike Smith’s home at Broughton Astley. I remember now the familiar, almost owl-like features as the door opened and I was welcomed in. So this was MJK, who had kindly agreed to chat about early days at Leicestershire. He looked no more than 60, but still unmistakeably the man I had seen coming out to bat at Old Trafford in 1959 and again at Lord’s in 1972. As I sat in a room almost bereft of reminders of sporting triumphs, I recalled a county chief executive relating how disarming he found it to sit with Mike Smith, a man who had captained his country in 25 Tests, ‘because he treated you as though your views on cricket were every bit as valid as his own.’ I soon discovered an ingrained reluctance to talk about moments of personal glory, with a preference for dwelling on his inadequacies when first setting foot in the first-class game or for shuffling the conversation away to some unrelated sporting topic. As the afternoon wore on and the room grew darker, he suggested having a beer. We went to the kitchen but there were no cans in the fridge. ‘We’ll have a bottle of wine,’ he said. Opening another cupboard, he found a bottle. Then we had to hunt for a corkscrew. As we settled back, enjoying a palatable glass of claret, I was pinching myself that this was really the only man in living memory to have played both rugby and cricket for England. I found myself using a word that kept springing to the lips of those who had played with MJK. ‘Ordinary’ was the word carefully chosen by both David Allen and Bob Barber, cricketers who played alongside and under MJK and the two men with whom I spoke at greatest length for this book. It was a word they used almost with reverence to describe and explain a captain for whom they had unswerving admiration and respect. Extraordinary though Mike Smith’s achievements undoubtedly are, it was his ordinariness that I also found myself stressing as I suggested to the committee of the ACS that he might be just the man to give the Association a higher profile as its President. His lovely handwritten acceptance to my letter expressed what seemed real delight at the prospect of involvement. The game’s quirky statistics have a fascination for Mike – and the rest, in ACS