We all have those times in life when
we count down to the last one, knowing it is coming. Days left before school
starts again, meetings to sit through before you leave a job, hugs from a child
before you go to the airport. Like many readers, I am currently experiencing
this with regard to one-day county cricket.
For a few years now most matches
covered by Sky TV in the UK have been shown here in New Zealand, and I am
working my way through this year’s collection (mostly, I know the result before
I see the game, but I don’t find that this diminishes the experience
significantly). Apart, I assume, from the final stages, next year’s
“development” competition won’t be televised, so, like a bear preparing for winter,
I feel the need to gorge while I have the chance.
Excluding overseas players and
arranging a clashing ODI against Australia, we will discover, are just the
beginning of the ECB’s secret plan to make watching the downgraded 50-over competition
as unattractive as possible. Fierce dogs are being secretly trained in the
tunnels under Lord’s as we speak, their task to patrol the gates, ready to rip
out the throat of anybody carrying the scent of a Playfair annual. Playing
music that only the more delinquent of the crowd’s grandchildren is under trial
as I write.
Sometimes, you have no idea that it
is the last time, and look back with remorse at not making more of it. So it
was for Kent supporters as we made our way back to the St John’s Wood tube
station on that July evening 41 summers ago. If you’d told us then that we
would be the last of our kind to walk away from a Lord’s final with the taste
of victory fresh in our mouths, we would have assumed that the nuclear apocalypse
was upon us. That Kent would simply not be good enough for the next four
decades we would have considered a more fanciful explanation.
Since 1978, only Glamorgan, the only
county never to have won a Lord’s final, have not known what it is like to make
that same short walk with the spring of victory in their step. Kent’s
subsequent run of eight losing Lord’s finals is without equal in sport, unless
someone would like to prove otherwise.
Where do we find the writer in 1978? I
was on what they now call a gap year, but had passed the previous six months,
not crossing the Andes or kayaking the Mekong as the bold young people of today
do, but working (applying the term loosely) in an insurance broker’s office in
Canterbury. I did have three weeks in Germany, most of which was spent trying
to find out the cricket scores.
Exam-free, I saw four of Kent’s games
leading to the final, starting on the first day of the season at St Lawrence
against Boycott’s Yorkshire. What nobody would have expected when the previous
season ended was that Kent would be led by Alan Ealham. Asif Iqbal had been
sacked because of his association with World Series Cricket, which also ruled
out Bob Woolmer. Graham Johnson had missed most of the 1977 season, so was out
of the running. Along with John Shepherd, here was a trio who could and should
have captained Kent but did not get the chance. Ealham did a good job, and
didn’t get sacked for winning two trophies as Denness had two years before. The
downside of Ealham’s appointment was that it meant the end of his career as a
boundary fielder, taking impossible catches and breaking the stumps with
William Tell throws.
Ealham’s captaincy career could not
have started better; he took the match award for a 53 that rescued Kent from a parlous
25 for four after Graham Stevenson ran through the top order. A total of 160
was worth more than it seemed. Boycott (in his last season as captain before
the outbreak of the Yorkshire Civil War) and Lumb groped their way like blind
men to 35 from 21 overs, which persuaded the rest of the team that run scoring
was impossible—114 all out.
Kent’s second home game in the
preliminary phase was played at Hesketh Park, Dartford, the first time I went
there. Kent’s most prosaic ground was by this time the only one close to the
metropolitan area in which a good number of Kent’s members reside. These days
there is Beckenham, which is right in London.
Essex were the opposition, a contest
now ludicrously labelled the “Battle of the Bridge”. There was no bridge then,
and the “Tussle of the Tunnel” didn’t have the same ring to it. Gooch and
Denness (warmly welcomed) put on 106 for the first wicket. According to Wisden,
McEwan and Pont “thrashed” 60 off nine overs, not a word that would be chosen these
days to describe a rate of under seven an over towards the end of the innings. Essex
finished on 222.
Graham Johnson anchored the chase,
with 75, Asif made 65, then Ealham and Shepherd hit 52 from eight overs (“a
savage stand”) to give Kent the win with two overs to spare. Shepherd, who also
took three for 24, took the match award.
Nottinghamshire, who beat Kent at
Trent Bridge in the zonal round, visited St Lawrence for the quarter-final. Alan
Ealham showed again that the captaincy was not a burden. John Woodcock was
there for The Times.
It was down to Taunton for the
semi-final. Somerset had still not won anything, but with Richards, Garner (though
he was absent here) and Botham alongside some above-average county players and the
Taunton Macoute behind them, the County Ground was already a forbidding place
to visit. I set off from Herne Bay on the 5 17, getting to the ground shortly
before play started and long after all the seats had been taken. From a series
of temporary perches I saw 41 overs before the rain came, with Kent an uncertain
149 for five, which Alan Gibson correctly judged was better than it seemed. He tells
the story of the episodic continuation of the match, which ended in Kent’s
favour two days later. Gibson seemed to enjoy Taunton more than any other
ground, and stayed in good form through the showers.
Readers too young to remember these
times will have realised that one-day cricket was a very different creature
then. The 226 Kent made at Dartford was the biggest of the four winning scores
in the matches discussed so far. In the games that I am watching on TV at the
moment the team batting first invariably passes 300 as a matter of routine. I
find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Michael Henderson,
whose monthly diatribe in The Cricketer
was, in the April edition, a lament that sixes have become humdrum. The balance
between bat and ball is out of kilter. Pushing the boundaries back to the edge
of the field would be a start, and a little leeway to the bowlers outside leg
stump would be worth a try too.
Back to 1978, and so to Lord’s.
There were four changes to the Kent team
that had lost to Gloucestershire the previous year. Johnson returned for
Clinton at the top of the order. Alan Knott took the summer off, passing on the
gloves to Paul Downton, who had toured Pakistan and New Zealand with England
over the winter. Bernard Julien had gone and Richard Hills was omitted. Chris
Tavaré and Chris Cowdrey joined Downton in a Lord’s final debut.
Fifth-bowler duties were shared between Asif and Johnson, the latter’s off spin
being used more often in one-day cricket than under Ealham’s predecessors, another
sign that the new captain had spent those years on the boundary observing and thinking.
It was Derbyshire’s second appearance
in a Lord’s final, the first being a loss to Yorkshire over 60 overs nine years
earlier. Having been soundly beaten the previous year by a team led by one
powerhouse South African all-rounder, we had noted that Derbyshire were led by another—Eddie
“Bunter” Barlow, brought in three years before to spark the most unfashionable
of counties into life. Barlow was as every bit the all-rounder that Procter
was. Not as fast a bowler, but one of the best top order batsmen of the time.
Derbyshire also had Bob Taylor, in
Knott’s absence established as the England keeper; Mike Hendrick shortly to
return to the test side; Geoff Miller, an England regular that summer; and
Peter Kirsten another South African of international quality. Kent had lost to
Derbyshire in the Sunday League at Maidstone just two weeks earlier, so there
was no complacency as we took our seats in the Warner Stand.
It was a dull game, the most moribund
of Kent’s fifteen finals. Derbyshire won the toss and chose to bat. Alan Hill
became the first man to bat in a Lord’s final wearing a helmet. John Woodcock
was unimpressed.
Kent bowled tightly, particularly Bob
Woolmer who conceded just 15 runs from ten overs, but were allowed to without
challenge as Derbyshire froze on the big stage. Just 60 came from the first 30
overs. Hopes of a late-innings acceleration disappeared when Kirsten was out
hooking at Asif, who looked an easier bowler than he was. The pitch was not easy—Woodcock
has a sighting of the ridge, cricket’s Loch Ness monster—but 147 was well short
of a winning score. Derbyshire were all out with just two balls of their 55
overs to spare.
Low scoring matches can be gripping,
but that depends on the team batting second losing wickets early. There was a
hint of this when Tavaré went for a duck
to make it 38 for two, but Woolmer was there to nurture the innings with a
third successive final half century. Of all the Packer players, it was Woolmer
who missed out most on a substantive test career because of his involvement
with WSC. He was comfortable in the conditions in a way that no other batsman
managed to be that day, and was the best bowler too.
Woodcock has a few what-ifs, though doesn’t
record Bob Taylor dropping Woolmer on 52 (a ball after Barlow dropped him)
possibly because he didn’t believe his eyes. On the day, it didn’t seem in
doubt, but the road to victory was across a featureless and unmemorable Nullarbor
Plain.
No highlights of this final appear on YouTube,
possibly mercifully; there was an industrial dispute which meant that the game
had been shown on Grandstand without commentary, but Richie-less highlights
were considered untenable, so were cancelled. We have a facility on Sky NZ that
can mute the commentary from some sources. In Scorecards Towers we call it the
KP button, and we wouldn’t be without it.
Kent went on to win the Championship that
season, but our salad days were almost at an end and the world was changing.
Mrs Thatcher would be in Downing Street within the year, though not in time to
take away my student grant as I headed for Bristol University.
Given that Kent reached Lord’s last season,
there was a hope that they would they would be the last Lord’s victors, tying
up that loose end of defeats. But I watched their first game, against
Hampshire, and it was clear that if a pop gun were added to the attack it would
treble its potency. That dull match in 1978 was when the glory days ended, and
our youth with them, not with a bang but with a whimper.
No comments:
Post a Comment