Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

74 mining community near Nuneaton, brings a look of sadness to Mike at the memory of a man capped at the age of 21 but lost to the game at 23. ‘Perhaps we should have done more to keep him on the straight and narrow, but they’re adults aren’t they? He never looked an athlete. He was a heavy smoker, but he’d got this natural ability to bowl, high class.’ In 1963, for the first time since joining Warwickshire, Mike’s runs totalled fewer than 2,000. The county played four fewer championship matches, but the principal cause of his shortfall was an accident in the second match of the season, when he broke his wrist protecting himself at forward short leg. Even so, he headed the national averages with 47.45. That same year Bob Barber joined Warwickshire. His appetite for the game diminished by years of internal strife with Lancashire, he was delighted to join a county where he found a united dressing-room with a sense of purpose. He was also finding greater freedom with the bat in the wake of the change to the no-ball law, which now prevented draggers from roughing up the length spot outside a left-hander’s off stump. There was an excellent allround season for Cartwright, while the loss of Bannister for all but five matches was offset by 80 wickets in the latter half of the summer from Rudi Webster, a Bajan studying medicine at Edinburgh University, and there were useful wickets from Barber’s leg breaks. The batting could be fragile, but fourth place reflected another good championship season, albeit one that could have been better had five of the county’s last six playing days not been lost to the weather just as they were mounting a challenge for the title. Mike was not the only cricketer to suffer a broken bone in 1963. Batting against the background of a Lord’s pavilion still without sightscreens, Cowdrey had suffered a similar and more traumatic fate in the Lord’s Test match against West Indies. Struck on the forearm by Hall in the first innings, he later stood at the non- striker’s end, his arm in a sling, for the last two balls of one of Test cricket’s most dramatic matches. So severe was his injury that he played no more cricket that summer. Nevertheless, with Dexter taking a winter off in the fanciful belief that, should a general election be called, he might unseat Jim Callaghan at Cardiff South East, Cowdrey was appointed to captain MCC in India in the New Year. Despite his struggles with the bat two years before, Mike was to be his vice-captain. Before the tour to India Mike was off to East Africa again, this time as captain of a side that was to play eleven matches, only ‘If you can stand up, you’re playing’