This was the
week that Brian Close lost the England captaincy. Not at once; he was to lead
the side at the Oval in the final test, but the events of this week meant that
Colin Cowdrey, not Close, would take MCC to the Caribbean. I had always thought
of this as the establishment using a flimsy excuse to reinstall its own man,
but having watched the story develop through the week as it happened it does
seem that Close had much more of a case to answer than I had thought.
That an
England captain should be replaced after winning five out of six tests seems
incomprehensible now, but India and Pakistan were poor sides. Both had talented
batsmen, but their bowling attacks were weaker than those of most counties. Despite
this, at times England’s approach was absurdly cautious, treating jelly babies
like gelignite. Geoffrey Boycott’s 246 at Headingley set the tone. Close (who,
let us recall, had reportedly demonstrated impatience with Boycott a few years
before by picking him up and hanging him on a coatpeg) did little to hurry
Boycott up.
This week,
at Trent Bridge, Ken Barrington, assisted by his captain, laboured his way to a
century that was “careworn and comfortless” according to John Woodcock in The Times.
That
Monday’s play was washed out would have come as a relief to Woodcock, who used
the free column inches to question Close’s approach: “why…did the full toss
become inviolate?”.
England
completed a win on the fifth day, and how pleasing it is to find “mettlesome”
in a Times headline, referring to the pitch. But the victory did not lift
Woodcock’s dark and unforgiving mood, so it was unfortunate that his assignment
for the second half of the week was to follow Close to Edgbaston for
Warwickshire v Yorkshire (who were now the Championship leaders). When as fine
a writer as the Sage of Longparish deploys punctuation sarcastically—Boycott
spent all day in the pavilion with a “bruised” toe—trouble is in the air (there
were no restrictions then on where in the order absent fielders could bat, so
Boycott opened without a runner; an all-run four did nothing to foster the
illusion). Woodcock pointedly notes how comfortable those Yorkshireman who had
been captained by MJK Smith were in the Warwickshire captain’s company when he
was batting. Smith was sixth in the batting averages at this point, so the form
that partly caused him be dropped as captain after one test in 1966 was no
longer an issue.
On the third
day, the implicit advocacy of Smith became explicit after county cricket’s most
notorious time-wasting incident.
All this was
for just two points that Yorkshire obtained from the draw.[1]
Woodcock’s push for Smith was soon to be revealed as futile as Smith was about
to announce his retirement (though he returned after a couple of years and
played again for England in 1972).
As we know,
the Oval test the following week was Close’s last for nine years, until he was
recalled as a human sacrifice, offered to pacify the West Indies quicks. It was
Colin Cowdrey who led MCC on tour. Of course, we in Kent were delighted with
this outcome, though if positivity was what was being called for, Cowdrey was
an unreliable choice.
Knott and
Underwood performed splendidly in the test, though Underwood’s five wickets
were not to be enough for him to join Cowdrey in the Caribbean. Titmus, Pocock
and Hobbs were selected, with Lock following when Titmus lost some toes in a
boating accident. Woodcock was still writing a touch dismissively of
Underwood’s “cutters”, so in some quarters he was not regarded as a proper
spinner. Maybe the selectors thought better than pick another Kent man.
In the
County Championship Kent travelled this week to two grounds long since
disappeared from the circuit: Leyton and Burton-upon-Trent (I have watched
cricket at Leyton: the 1972 Gillette Cup quarter-final, won by Kent by 10
runs). With wins urgently needed after a draw and a loss at Canterbury, it was
a frustrating week: two more draws, just a few wickets short of a win in both
cases.
With
Underwood missing at Leyton, it was John Shepherd who bowled most overs this
week, which was pretty much how things were to be for the next 15 years. It
seemed that Kent captains would put Shepherd on at one end in April and take
him off in September. He took five in the first innings against Essex and
against Derbyshire bowled 49 overs in the first innings, finishing with six for
71. An oddity is that Underwood bowled only three overs. It was a green
seamers’ surface, but worth giving the country’s leading wicket-taker a try,
surely.
Kent’s
first-innings 159 came from 84 overs, Derbyshire’s 154 took 102. Just as well
that John Woodcock was not there, but a bit of a shame that neither was Alan
Gibson, who would be moved to lyricism by a backs-to-the-wall effort by PJK
Gibbs. Instead, The Times sent Peter
West, who was mild in his criticism (“Hard grafting indeed!”). Perhaps as a
Kent supporter he was prepared to sacrifice aesthetics for outcome; if so he
came away with neither.
Slow batting
had also lost Kent time at Leyton. So often in 1967, timidity was the default
reaction to difficulty or challenge. Perhaps, much more than those of us who
were then children realised, we were still living in the shadow of the World
Wars, and the fear that came from them. I have been reading Julian Barnes’ The Sense of An Ending. He wasn’t
writing about the County Championship, but he could have been: “But wasn’t this
the sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the
country”. I think he was referring to the minor counties.
With Godfrey
Evans unable to extend his return to first-class cricket, the gloves were
handed to David Nicholls, who thus, almost accidentally, began a decade as Alan
Knott’s stand-in, a role he performed most capably and jovially until Paul
Downton came along.
It was the
end of pirate radio this week, or was supposed to be. Radio London shut down,
but Radio Caroline carried on, Johnnie
Walker was cast in the press as an international fugitive, the Scarlet
Pimpernel of the airwaves. As Walker has since recounted, before long he was
returning home regularly, intercepted at the border only once and then for an
autograph for the immigration officer’s daughter.
René Magritte died in an appropriately surreal week.
[1] It was as a result of this incident
that a minimum number of overs in the last hour of Championship games was
introduced. In 1967 it was still by the clock.
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