Lancashire are the county champions.
There is a sentence that has not been
written since 1934 (Lancashire shared the Championship with Surrey in
1950, but Lancashire supporters do not count that, just as Kent
people are reluctant to acknowledge the shared Championship of 1977).
Congratulations to the men of the red
rose. It is good when Championship pennant flies over unfamiliar
pavilions. One feels particular pleasure for the players such as Glen
Chapple and Gary Keedy who have played little or no international
cricket, but have been proud to call themselves county cricketers, a
term that has an obsolete solidity about it, like “milkman” or
“haberdasher”. I think also of those Lancashire folk of my age
and older who have waited all their lives for the day the
Championship was won, and who will go to their graves a little
happier.
Lancashire's victory is all the more
relishable for having been achieved on outgrounds while Old Trafford
is renovated and rotated, bringing Liverpool, Blackpool and Southport
back to the first-class schedule from another age. One half expects
Cardus to be filing for the Manchester Guardian. Ideally,
championship cricket would never be played on the bigger Test
grounds, where it rattles about like an old person in a large house
with the children long-gone.
From this distance, it appears the
County Championship appears in good health. There have been last-day
resolutions in several recent seasons, and the introduction of
promotion and relegation means that there are few meaningless games,
even in September. There is less coverage in the broadsheets than a
decade ago, but digital media have compensated, with plenty of good
reporting on the blogs and commentary on about half the games online
from the BBC.
The domestic one-day game (I mean the
longer form, rather than the T20) has, relatively speaking, gone
backwards.
As I write, I am watching a recording
of the Somerset v Surrey one-day final at Lord's. This is the first
opportunity I have had to watch one of these events since leaving the
old country in 1997. Sky New Zealand has added English domestic
cricket to its schedules in the last month, starting with the T20
final followed by Surrey v Durham from the last round of the league
phase, the semi-finals from Taunton and the Oval, and now the final.
What has brought this on, I don't know, but it is wonderful for a
county cricket castaway.
Players that I had heard or read about
– Maynard, Hildreth and Hamilton-Brown to name but three – have
acquired a form and style. I have been struck by how many good young
players Surrey and Somerset have. Jos Buttler, for example, has just
reached a hallmarked fifty in adverse circumstances (speaking of
youthful brilliance, I must mention Jonny Bairstow on international
debut in the final ODI against India; he began as if seventy not out
with ten years' experience, an innings which brought a tear to the
eye of those of us who remember his late father David, who always
looked as if he was enjoying himself when playing cricket, a
considerable achievement when playing for Boycott's Yorkshire).
It was good to see Taunton again.
Though plenty of building has taken place it appears to have
retained its character, with the Quantocks on the horizon one way, the
Mendips the other, and the two churches a six hit away. The southern
end retains its pleasing confusion of old stands, I hope still with
old leather armchairs with the stuffing coming out. It was an
intimidating place to visit when Botham and Richards were in their
pomp, and the locals (the Taunton Macoute) were cidered up. The end
of Kent's glorious era can be dated precisely to the day in August
1979 when they were Garnered for 60 in the Gillette Cup quarter-final
(it is still too soon to write more about that game).
There was not a seat to be had that
day. There were plenty visible at this year's semi-final, and Lord's
was little more than half full for the final. I attended twenty-five
one-day finals, all of them before a capacity crowd. Why the
difference? For one thing, the MCC website tells me that a
ticket to the final cost between £40
and £50. More significant
is that 50-over cricket has been squeezed between a surfeit of ODIs
and the shaken-up bottle of Pepsi that is T20.
So,
in tribute to Lancashire, let us go back forty years to a time when,
the Tests done with and ODIs barely thought of, the first Saturday in
September was the county game's big day: the Gillette Cup final of
1971 between Kent and Lancashire, a fine game most remembered
for a single moment of athleticism from an unlikely source.
Kent were there having beaten
Warwickshire soundly at Canterbury, while the BBC delayed the Nine
O'Clock News to cover the climax of the other semi-final at Old
Trafford, David Hughes smashing John Mortimore for 24 in one over in
the dark. The famously irascible umpire Arthur Jepson replied to an
appeal to go off for bad light with “You can see the moon, how far
do you want to see?”.
Though Kent were the 1970 county
champions, Lancashire were the dominant one-day team of the time
having won the first two Sunday Leagues and the previous season's
Gillette Cup.
We took our seats on the lower level of
the Lord's Grandstand on a beautiful morning. Mike Denness (standing
in for Colin Cowdrey who missed much of that season through illness)
won the toss and put Lancashire in. Kent, against the orthodoxy of
the time, usually chose to bat, but presumably Denness wanted to make
the most of the September dew that was such an influence on the
September final.
An early blow was the news that Norman
Graham was injured and would not play. Graham, who bowled penetrating
fast-medium from a great height, was very popular with the Kent
faithful despite being a poor fielder and a worse batsman. But his
replacement, the burly left-armer John Dye, removed Barry Wood lbw
for a duck in the first over.
For much of the rest of the innings it
was a good battle, each side fighting back just as the other looked
to be gaining the advantage. Class told. The best innings was 66 from
Clive Lloyd, and we'd have given him that at the start. Derek
Underwood tied up the middle of the innings, conceding just 26 from
12 overs. John Shepherd and Asif Iqbal were almost as abstemious, but
Bob Woolmer was unusually expensive, going for five an over, a fair
return these days, but as profligate as a footballer's wife then.
At 179 for seven things were turning
our way, but Hughes again, in partnership with his spinning colleague
“Flat” Jack Simmons (who I was to sit next to on a memorable
evening in a Sydney restaurant twenty-eight years later), put on an
unbroken 45 in the last few overs to take Lancashire to an
above-average score in the era before fielding circles, powerplays,
and special rules for legside wides. In the end, it was the
difference.
Kent started badly, losing England
opener Brian Luckhurst for a duck. It was a struggle to 105 for five,
the uncomfortable feeling that another wicket would bring the curtain
down. But Asif Iqbal was in, and that changed everything. Asif was in
his fourth of fifteen seasons as a Kent player, already as Kentish as
hops and the Medway. The same could be said of John Shepherd. Both
still live in Kent, just as Clive Lloyd and Farokh Engineer remain
Mancunians to this day (it would have been at about this time that
Lancashire chairman Cedric Rhoades, worried that the Indo-Pakistani
War would deprive him of his wicketkeeper, asked Engineer if he might
be called upon to fight, to which Engineer replied that he would have
to go when the fighting reached his home village; “where's that?”
asked the chairman; “Oswaldtwistle” [which is just outside
Blackburn] replied the keeper).
How things have changed where overseas
players are concerned. I hear that Martin van Jaarsveld is leaving
for Leicestershire, an odd choice given that they are almost as short
of cash at Grace Road as Kent are, and that it was only
Leicestershire's ineptitude that kept Kent off the bottom of the
Championship. And Marcus North has just signed for Glamorgan, his
sixth (sixth!) county.
Asif was at his best that day, dancing
down the pitch like Jessop and moving across the crease in a way many
batsmen do now but few did then. He was also whippet-quick between
the wickets – Tony Greig says the fastest of the players he has
seen. Cowdrey apart, no Kent batsman of that time made his runs in a
way that was so aesthetically pleasing.
For almost an hour the Lancashire
bowlers were driven (and pulled and cut, but mostly driven) to
distraction by him. He had reached 89, and looked odds-on for an
unbeaten, victorious century when he came down the pitch once more to
Simmons. Jack Bond, the dumpy 39-year-old Lancashire captain fell to
his right at mid off, but our eyes passed him to follow the ball on
its way to the pavilion fence. But where was it? The ball was still
red then, of course, so harder to spot in the September gloaming.
Asif must have timed it so sweetly that it had passed outside the
spectrum of human visibility.
Bond had it. His fall had been a full-length dive to seize from the air the ball, which had never got more
than a couple of feet off the ground. It was one of the famous Lord's
final catches, and it won his side the game, the last three wickets
falling for just three runs.
Kent were to return to Lord's for
finals five more times in the seventies, winning all but one. I hope
that Somerset shake off their second successive defeat at Lord's (as
well as two more in the T20 elsewhere) and return as successfully,
following their loss to Surrey. They still have some way to go to
challenge Kent's record of successive losses in finals at
headquarters though: seven (and counting).
