It was 9 September 1979,
around 7 pm. We Kent supporters were making our way from the St Lawrence Ground
in Canterbury. The team had lost the final Sunday League game of the season, to
Middlesex. Somerset beat Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge, so it was Brian Rose
of Somerset rather than our own Alan Ealham who received the trophy.
We were disappointed, but
not downcast. There had been ten trophies in the seventies, and there was no
reason to think that the eighties would be any less rewarding. The odd loss
like today’s merely sharpened expectation of the next, inevitable, triumph. Not
one of those people walking down the Old Dover Road that evening believed that
the day would be long delayed.
What fools we were.
It was 16 years until a Kent
captain raised a trophy aloft once more, and the 33 years that have passed by
since that September evening have reaped the paltry harvest of two Sunday
Leagues and a T20. The big prizes – a Lord’s final win and the Championship –
have been entirely elusive.
For many years I thought
that there should be a book that explained all this, and in 2010 it came along:
Trophies and Tribulations – Forty Years
of Kent Cricket by Clive Ellis and Mark Pennell. Ellis was a supporter
through the glory years before joining the Daily
Telegraph sports staff. Mark Pennell covered almost every game that Kent
played between 1993 and 2008 for the Kent
Messenger and now heads a sports reporting agency that performs heroic work
in keeping county cricket in the public eye.
After a perfunctory survey
of the first century or so of the club’s history, the authors adopt a
season-by-season format starting in 1967, the year Gillette Cup became the
first prize won since the First World War. Ellis deals with the first 26
seasons; Pennell takes up the narrative from 1993 to 2009. The quality of the
writing deteriorates with the handover; Pennell’s first paragraph would be a
worth a punt in a cliché-writing contest:
The Garden of England was transformed into a cricketing hot-bed [sic] when Kent’s team of the ‘glory years’ reaped 11 titles in 12 golden summers.
He might have checked the
precise meaning of “hotbed” before embarking on the gardening metaphor too. The
word would more appropriately apply to more recent periods in the county’s
history, dependent on significant quantities of manure as hotbeds are. And
wrapping a cliché in single quotes merely draws attention to it.
The book’s great
contribution to Kent’s history is the information that emerges from interviews
with surviving players and officials. The candour that comes with passing of
time illuminates several murky corners, and takes us a considerable way towards
answering the big question that could be the book’s alternative title: what
went wrong? The chronological structure of the book means that the authors do
not always organise the evidence they present into themes that cross the years,
but it is laid out clearly, allowing readers to join the dots easily enough.
The retirement of Les Ames
from full-time administration in 1974 was a crucial turning point. As
secretary-manager, Ames had led the club from mediocrity to the top of the
county game. One of Kent and England’s great players, Ames’ reputation,
strength of character and good judgment enabled him, the ex-professional, to
protect the county to a good extent from the meddling of the elected amateurs
on the committee.
With Ames gone there was no
counterbalance. The grey men were able to mess things up. It should surprise
few that Ellis and Pennell point to the committee room as the source of strife,
but interesting that the Band of Brothers – the wandering club side to which
many of the county’s establishment belong – emerges as the Opus Dei of Kent
cricket, emerging from the murk every few years to finish off another captain.
Chief villain is EW (Jim) Swanton,
who retired in 1975 as cricket correspondent
of the Daily Telegraph, from which
position he had become the Cardinal Richelieu of English cricket. At his
funeral the former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie said “Jim was not a
man plagued by self-doubt”. Swanton devoted the last two decades of his life to
interfering in Kent’s affairs, to an extent, according to Ellis and Pennell,
that was breathtaking. In 1996, as Matt Walker was about to overtake Frank
Woolley’s St Lawrence record score of 270, Swanton is said to have stormed into
the dressing room demanding a declaration so that his hero’s landmark would
remain intact.
Of course, the membership
has to take the blame for electing Swanton and the rest of the committee in the
first place. Edmund Burke – MP for Bristol, so a wise man – might have had Kent
County Cricket Club in mind when he wrote:
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
For some time, asterisks
appeared on the ballot paper next to the names of the candidates for election
to the committee that the committee itself favoured. A clearer admission of corruption
it is hard to imagine, but there are flocks of sheep that are free-thinking
iconoclasts in comparison with the Kent membership of the eighties, of whom few
followed my practice of voting only for those not supported by the
self-perpetuating elite.
The first sign of how
devastating the impact of Ames’ departure was to be came in 1976 with the
sacking as captain of Mike Denness. At the time this was incomprehensible to
most supporters. After all, there were two trophies in the cabinet at the end
of that season, and Denness left for Essex, making it clear that it was a
sacking, not a resignation. Denness says here that the whole affair would have
been managed much better had Ames still been in charge.
Despite his great success in
terms of winning trophies, Denness had always had mixed reviews as captain,
inside the dressing room and in the stands. Bob Woolmer, for example, wrote in
his autobiography Pirate and Rebel (or rather, his ghost wrote) that
Denness was the best one-day captain that he played under, but that Denness’s
communication let him down in the first-class game. It was in that knowledge of
views such as these were held by some of the team that Denness himself raised
the possibility of his standing down in favour of Graham Johnson for the 1977
season. This idea soon gained a life of its own, and a few weeks later Denness was
invited to take the revolver into the library and do the decent thing.
Asif Iqbal, not Johnson,
took over, led the side to a share of the Championship and was sacked because
of his involvement with World Series Cricket. Bizarre as this now seems, in the
context of the apoplectic reaction of the English game to Kerry Packer and his
plans, it was to be expected. The real surprise was that Alan Ealham was chosen
to succeed him.
There were several
candidates who appeared more likely. Woolmer had also signed with the Great
Satan, so was not considered. As vice-captain, Johnson might have been expected
preferment. Here, he says that he was seen as being a bit bolshie, based on not
much more than having been a student at the London School of Economics when it
was the centre of sixties radicalism. Ealham fairly points out that Johnson had
not played well in 1977. There are people reading this blog who hold to this
day the belief that the loveliness of Johnson’s eyes were grounds enough for
giving him whatever he wanted.[1]
John Shepherd also believed
that he should have got the job. Like Johnson, he would have done it very well.
“I don’t know whether Kent were ready for a black captain” Ellis quotes him as
saying. I believe that members of the committee were capable of holding just
about any prejudice going in late-seventies Britain (several of them will have
been rotating steadily in their graves when Shep became President of the club last
year), but I think that the more influential stereotype in operation here may
have been that bowlers do not make good captains. There may have also been the
feeling that Shepherd and Johnson were both their own men to an extent that the
committee would have been uncomfortable with, while Ealham had more
old-fashioned loyalty about him, so would be more pliable.
As it was the Championship was
won in 1978, and 1979 was not such a bad year (though we might have spotted the
all-out-for-60 rout at Taunton in the Gillette Cup quarter-final as a sign of
the coming apocalypse), so none of us were thinking about ditching the skipper
as we walked disconsolately down the Old Dover Road that September Sunday
evening. But 1980 was horrendous, quite as bad as any recent season, and at its
end Ealham was gone. In the circumstances, this was an understandable decision;
it was the shabby treatment of the ex-captain the following year that revealed those
in charge to be clueless about how to value people. Despite still having plenty
to offer as a player, Ealham was hardly picked at all in 1981.
Bob Woolmer would have been
the right choice, but instead they went back to Asif Iqbal, much more popular
with the supporters, but then reaching the end of a distinguished Kent career. Asif
is quoted here as believing that he should have retired at the end of the 1980
season. The speculation about his successor began at once. Much of the 1982
season became an extended trial between the two contenders, Chris Cowdrey and
Chris Tavaré who were joint vice-captains (which Cowdrey calls “a strange
decision, and a bad one”).
The account of the damaging
way in which this situation was handled is related here much as we perceived it
at the time. For genetic reasons Cowdrey was the man the committee room and the
Band of Brothers marquee favoured, but his form was not good enough to
guarantee him a place in the side, so they gave the job to Tavaré.
The first two years of what
we hoped would be the Tavaré era were trophyless, but promising, with two
Gillette Cup final defeats and improved performances in the championship. Had one
more Glamorgan wicket be taken in the final game of the season, Kent would have
finished third. What is more, despite his studious demeanour Tavaré had the
dressing room behind him (there were stories of the players willingly crawling
round ancient pavilions in search of insects for their captain – an Oxford
zoology graduate with a speciality in entomology – to identify and dissect) and
was popular with the supporters.
So they sacked him,
obviously.
The most commonly offered explanation
was that Tavaré had paid for mishandling Derek Underwood in both the Lord’s
final defeats. As far as 1983 goes, the accusation is groundless. Cowdrey,
brought on for an over or two, did well and was kept on, finishing with two for
29 from ten overs. If anything, this was a sign of alert, flexible captaincy.
It was the batting that lost that game, not the bowling.
In 1984, Underwood was taken
off with three overs left to bowl at a time when Middlesex were struggling to stay
in the game. I felt at the time that this was a mistake, and indeed when
Underwood returned to the attack he was not so effective. But that was one error
in two very positive seasons.
My theory was that Tavaré’s
fate was sealed at Lord’s a week before the Gillette final. Against a weak Sri
Lankan Test attack he laboured painfully from lunch to tea on Saturday for just
14. David Gower, the England captain, was moved to apologise at the close of
play for the stultifying nature of the cricket. Before that, it had been
expected that Tavaré would be Gower’s deputy in India that winter; after it, he
was not picked at all. I felt at the time that Kent would not have had the
nerve to have sacked the England vice-captain. But according to Ellis, the
decision had been taken some weeks before, so neither Lord’s Saturday made a
difference. It was a decision taken without consultation with the manager,
Brian Luckhurst, or senior players such as Derek Underwood and Alan Knott. The
Kent committee room was the only place in the cricketing world that would not
have regarded these two great players as being worth listening to.
So Chris Cowdrey was Kent
captain and the stripy-tie brigade congratulated themselves on restoring the
natural order. But it was a palace, not a popular, revolution, and the manner
of the succession meant that Cowdrey was never fully accepted by some
supporters (including myself and my wise friend Allen Hunt), and not by some of
the team. One of the many fascinating revelations in the book is Cowdrey’s
account of his first team meeting as skipper. “Possibly the most senior player
in the dressing room”, which has to be either Underwood or Knott, neither of
whom was ever a member of the awkward squad, “…told me he didn’t want to come
in” because of the way in which Tavaré had been treated.
We sceptics were never
persuaded from our view that the committee had replaced General Montgomery with
Field-Marshall Haig. Terry Alderman agreed with us. I know this because I was
part of a group talking to him in the Hammond Room bar at Bristol in 1988,
while he was having a season with Gloucestershire. Alderman had been asked by a
committee man during his second season with Kent in 1986 where the county was
going wrong. “Simple”, he had replied, “you’ve got the wrong captain”. Cowdrey
now agrees.
It’s hard to say they made the wrong decision to appoint me as captain, but I think they did.
The book does not make quite enough of the quantity of talent lost by Kent in these years. Laurie Potter, who had managed to captain both England and Australia at under-19 level, was seen more as a slow bowler than the fine batsman he might have become, and left for Leicestershire. Derek Aslett, leading scorer in both seasons under Tavaré, faded quickly under Cowdrey and, on Cowdrey’s call, was released in 1987. Oddest of the lot was the decision to release Eldine Baptiste as overseas player in 1987. Baptiste had performed handily since making his debut in 1981, averaging 30 with the bat and slightly less with the ball; a true all-rounder. He performed with obvious enthusiasm and commitment throughout. This was said to be part of a damn-fool move to build a squad consisting entirely of Kent-born or educated players. This at a time when even Yorkshire was close to abandoning its nineteenth-century stance on the origin of its players. In the event, he was replaced by Roy Pienaar, a classy batsman and trundling bowler, Hartley Alleyne, one of the worst-performing overseas players the county has had, and later by Tony Merrick, who was leading wicket-taker in 1991, but no batsman and a reasonable impersonator of a medium-sized shed in the outfield.
Since Cowdrey’s resignation
in 1990, the county has shown much more wisdom in its choice of captain, and
has usually picked the right (or at least most obvious) man at the right time,
and given them the time to improve in post, though Matthew Fleming has an
interesting take on his two immediate predecessors.
If we could have found a captain who was a combination of Benson and Marsh, it could have been a great side. But Benny was too quiet and though Marshy was aggressive and pugnacious there was always an element to him.The club is fortunate to have had Rob Key as captain during the last few, difficult years. He could easily have gone elsewhere and is unlucky to have played in the only era in English cricket in which a degree of portliness was not considered a virtue in a Test player.
At the end of the book both
authors pick their best side from the four decades or so in question, and
irritate this reader no end in doing so. For a start, they get the selection
criteria wrong. Martin van Jaarsveld is deemed to be England-qualified (only
one overseas player is allowed), but John Shepherd is not. Yet Shepherd was
certainly England-qualified in his final few years in Kent; he went to
Gloucestershire on that basis. At least Ellis picks Shepherd. Pennell’s
incomprehensible choice as overseas player, and (you’ll need to sit down at
this point) captain is Steve Waugh. Yes, the Steve Waugh who played all of four
games for Kent, not one of them as captain (though Waugh did become the first
Canterbury-born player to be capped by Kent, though the Canterbury in question
is a suburb of Sydney). Surely any compilation Kent team must be picked solely
on the basis of performances for the county. If not, I nominate WG Grace in my
all-time Kent team. Grace played once as a guest for Kent in 1877, scoring 50 in
his single innings. This gave him the highest career average of any Kent
batsman until Aravinda de Silva came along 118 years later.
And who does Pennell reckon
a better middle-order batsman than Colin Cowdrey, Mike Denness or Chris Tavaré?
Why, Trevor Ward of course. I enjoyed Ward’s batting too, but that he never got
close to an England cap at a time when mediocrity was not a barrier to
selection says it all.
Both authors pick Key and
van Jaarsveld, which, having seen too little of either batsman, I won’t quibble
with. Mike Denness was very good though, and remember to add ten to the
averages of batsmen who played mostly on uncovered pitches.
But enough carping. Trophies and Tribulations is an
invaluable resource for Kent historians and answers a good many questions that
have troubled some of us for too long. It is well-produced too, even if the
picture of the fallen lime tree on page 253 is back to front. Ellis and Pennell
are to be congratulated and thanked.
[1] A
question beyond the scope of this discussion is how did Johnson never play for
England when Geoff “Thriller” Miller did so on 34 occasions?
