Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

69 Barber. With 208 required to win, England slipped to 108 for five, but a century stand between Dexter and Barber saw them home. The Indian leg of the tour was to prove more of a grind. In the First Test, at Bombay, Barrington hit an undefeated 151 in a score of 500 for eight to give England the upper hand. Building on a lead of 110, the tourists were able to set India 297 in 245 minutes, but their bowlers could capture only five wickets, one of them falling to M.J.K. Smith. As the match ebbed to a draw, Jaisimha lofted a leg-side shot into Barber’s hands in the deep to become Mike’s only Test victim. Barber later confessed that he had been tempted to drop the ball. ‘You didn’t deserve a Test wicket,’ Mike remembers him saying. At Kanpur England had to follow on, but centuries from Pullar, Barrington and Dexter brought another draw. For Mike it was not a happy time with the bat. After making 36 in his first innings at Bombay there had been a second-innings duck, and Kanpur brought two more. Caught and bowled by Gupte in the first innings, he was manifestly lacking confidence when he batted a second time. With Gupte bringing his fielders in close, The Times reported that, ‘Smith, as if in a trance, thrust his leg and bat forward, hoping it would be the bowler’s stock ball, the leg break. But, in fact, it went straight through, and he was leg before.’ Nor did Mike’s luck improve in the rain-shortened Third Test at Delhi, where Barrington’s century was his fourth in consecutive Tests. To the special correspondent of The Times Mike was ‘like a rich man brought suddenly to impoverishment’. For the third time in a row he fell to Gupte, ‘beaten neck and crop’ as he stretched forward to a googly with only two runs to his name. With his reputation as a player of spin bowling and his Test match temperament called into question, this was the lowest point of his Test career. Mike admits to feeling less at ease against a leg spinner than those who turned the ball into him. ‘Gupte was a high class bowler,’ he readily concedes, but he points out that he had made runs against him in England. ‘But I didn’t play very well on that tour.’ The arduous nature of the tour was starting to take its toll. In Wisden’s words, ‘The English players never did accustom themselves to the different type of food, the all-too-many functions and the unusual living conditions.’ With his talent for understatement, Mike recalls that ‘the standard of hygiene was not like your top London hotels.’ But he has no hesitation in Endurance test in India