The Lord’s finals of 1980

55-over Essex v Northamptonshire

60-over Middlesex v Surrey

I can’t recall a wetter English summer than that of 1980. Rain made a nonsense of the Sunday League game that was part of Maidstone week, and not another ball was bowled until 5 pm on the Thursday. The Saturday of the Centenary Test Match was largely spent with Dickie Bird and David Constant agonising over the constraining effects of wetness, something that Mrs Thatcher spent a lot of 1980 doing in Downing Street.

The rain was the reason why I spent the afternoon of Saturday 19 July not at Lord’s for the scheduled 55-over final, but at the Criterion Theatre on Piccadilly Circus for the matinée of Tomfoolery, a collection of the satirical songs of Tom Lehrer starring Robin Ray of Face the Music fame. Lehrer said that he gave up satire when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, on the basis that life was making a better job of it than art ever could. I think of that whenever the ECB makes another announcement about The Hundred.

For Kent, the change from the sensational seventies to the egregious eighties could not have been more stark. I returned to Canterbury for a 55-over group game against Somerset that resulted in a defeat as shattering as the 60-all-out at Taunton in the previous year’s 60-over quarter-final. As in that game, all seemed relatively well at the halfway stage. Kent made 242, with fifties from Alan Ealham and Chris Cowdrey. But after only a few overs of the reply the inadequacy of the target had become all too clear.

Opening for Somerset were the captain Brian Rose and Sunil Gavaskar, on debut for Somerset as replacement for the touring Viv Richards. Gavaskar had now got past his apparent belief—36 not out in 60 overs on the opening day of the 1975 World Cup—that this one-day stuff was not worthy of an artist of his calibre, and made as easy a 90 as one could hope to see. However, he was the minority partner in the first-wicket stand of 241. At the other end Brian Rose was unbeaten on 137 as Somerset reached their target with more than 11 overs to spare.

Back in Bristol the following weekend, I watched the home team upset the holders Essex. Graham Gooch went off quickly, but after he went for 62 the innings lost momentum, as it was to do in the final. Mike Procter, took two for 26, but it was four wickets from Alan Wilkins that did most to limit Essex to 224. Wilkins became better known as a TV commentator than he was for playing; I had forgotten that he had brought his left-arm seam across to the other side of the Severn Estuary for three seasons. Andy Stovold guided Gloucestershire home with an unbeaten 73, supported by his brother Martin with whom he put on 57 for the fifth wicket.

Essex nevertheless made it to Lord’s once more. Their opponents were Northamptonshire, who had lost the 60-over final to Somerset the previous September.

There were sufficient of we, the indolent and workshy, to come close to filling Lord’s on the Monday. Northamptonshire won the toss and chose to bat. Both XIs were unchanged from those that appeared in Lord’s finals the year before, something else that would be improbable these days (aside from the obvious detail that there are no Lord’s finals now).

It one of those games that is more interesting in retrospect than it seemed at the time, because the team that looked routine winners for 85% of the match ended up losing it. 

John Lever set the tone by conceding just seven runs from his first six overs, but it was seamer Keith Pont who took the first three wickets. At 110 for three just before lunch, Northamptonshire had the capacity to reach a reasonable total, if they increased the tempo urgently. But three quick wickets meant that the rest of the innings would be attritional. That they struggled past 200 was thanks to a seventh-wicket stand of 59 between Allan Lamb and Jim Watt.

Watt had been recalled to the Northamptonshire colours from his second retirement two years before for his second spell as captain. This was in the era before counties acquired coaching staffs the size of royal courts. The choice of captain was crucial, in a way which is no longer the case. From 1969 to 1981 the England selectors went outside the team five times so as to get the right captain: Illingworth, Lewis, Denness, Brearley, Fletcher. These days, some captains have to have serious strength of personality just to avoid being controlled from the dressing room like a PlayStation character. Later in the afternoon Jim Watt was to show the value of good captaincy.

For the second year in a row, Allan Lamb played a Lord’s final innings of striking quality. Wisden called it “a match-winning innings of beautifully executed strokes, refreshing footwork and well-judged running between the wickets” while John Woodcock in The Times described Lamb as a “strong, orthodox and forceful batsman of high class”. It was thanks to Lamb that Northamptonshire reached 209.

Lamb was in the third of four seasons spent qualifying to play for England and was building quite a reputation. Of course, he went on to have a good international career, playing in 79 tests, but he didn’t quite live up to the hype. His average of 36 was decent, but ten or so fewer than might have been expected of him after two commanding Lord’s final innings and three successive seasons averaging 60. Not the anti-climax of Hick or Ramprakash, but neither the new Barry Richards for whom we hoped.

With little more than a hundred needed off 24 overs and nine wickets left, Essex were favourites of the magnitude of Shergar in a donkey derby. What went wrong? Perhaps Essex themselves were taken in by the situation as much as the rest of us and didn’t notice that the match was being taken away from them like a scammer emptying a bank account until it was too late.

In the next 19 overs Essex scored only 50 runs and lost four wickets. As well as bowling tightly and taking Hardie’s wicket, Jim Watts changed his bowlers cannily. As well as bringing Sarfraz Nawaz (three for 23) back early, he introduced Richard Williams’ off spin late and decisively, just as he had in the semi-final at Lord’s a few weeks before. A look through the scorecards of era tells us that, much more often than now, captains used only the minimum five bowlers, and to a formula at that. A skipper like Watts who was prepared to put the template aside and rely on his wits, was a huge asset.

Norbert Phillip took 30 off two overs from Jim Griffiths, leaving 11 needed from the last, but Phillip could not get the strike until the fourth ball of the over. Essex finished six short to give Northamptonshire their second Lord’s win following the Gillette Cup in 1976. It was the closest Lord’s final so far.

The week before I had paid my one, and so far only, visit to Headingley, for the second round of the 60-over competition between Yorkshire and Kent. It had been a sobering year for us in the Garden of England with our team spending the summer in the disreputable areas of the Championship and Sunday League tables and the 60-over competition was our last chance of glory.

There was early hope with Geoffrey Boycott in one of his more funereal moods. After 12 overs Yorkshire were only 29 for one. But he put on 202 for the second wicket with Bill Athey, and that was just about that.

Athey was hailed as the rising star of his generation when he made his debut in 1976, but his career stalled as will happen to careers caught in a civil war like the one that preoccupied Yorkshire CCC in these years. Only now did he receive his county cap, which carried more status and financial significance then than now. Most counties indicated uncapped status discretely; Kent players had a small II under the horse on the sweater and cap. Yorkshire went for ritual humiliation. Uncapped players wore navy-blue banding on their sweaters rather than the sky-blue, yellow and navy combination of the capped players. Athey had waited only four years. Arnie Sidebottom, capped on the same day, had made his debut seven years before. Athey stuck the atmosphere in the Ridings for a couple more years then moved to Bristol, where I enjoyed his stylish, organised batting for nine years.

Boycott made 87, Athey 115 and Yorkshire finished on 279 for six, a mountain for a side whose confidence was as low as Kent’s at this time. The report in The Times (by Keith Macklin, better known as a commentator on football on TV and rugby league on the radio) says that the third-wicket stand of 96 between Asif Iqbal and Woolmer had the match on a “knife-edge”, but my memory is that the required rate climb prohibitively throughout the partnership. The last eight wickets fell for 90, leaving Yorkshire 46-run winners. Sidebottom celebrated his cap with four wickets and that fine bowler Chris Old took three.

So to Lord’s on the first Saturday in September for an all-London final between Middlesex and Surrey, the top two in the Championship in 1980. The absence of bucolic partiality was to the liking of Woodcock of The Times, who described the atmosphere as “pleasantly orderly, smacking more of the saloon bar than the skittle alley”.

Three valedictories took place that day. It was the end of Gillette’s sponsorship of the county knockout competition (though my Blean correspondent and myself refer to any domestic one-day competition as ”the Gillette Cup” to this day).

It was John Langridge’s last weekend on the first-class umpires list (he also officiated at the Sunday League game at Canterbury the next day, where I was also present). Langridge should be in any XI of the best players not selected for England. He made 34,380 runs at 37.45, almost all for Sussex, and contended with Hammond as the best slip fielder of the era. Langridge was 70, but returned occasionally for a few seasons to come. Now, umpires have to retire at 65, an unnecessarily ageist rule, brought in, it was said, to usher umpire Bird from the stage without too many curtain calls.  

It was also the occasion of John Arlott’s last commentary. He had famously ended his final test match commentary the previous Tuesday with “and after Trevor Bailey it will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins”, but returned for an encore this day. Arlott’s departure created a tremendous fuss, including a front-page piece in The Times by his friend Alan Gibson, who wrote that Arlott had “a gift of phrase such as no other cricket commentator has possessed”. During one of his spells that day Arlott authenticated this by describing the tall, bald South African fast bowler Vintcent van der Bijl as being “like a young Lord Longford, only not as benevolent”.

The game resembled the earlier 55-over final closely, but without the late negligence that cost Essex that game. Surrey never really got going against an attack that Woodcock rated as superior to England’s: Daniel, van der Bijl, Selvey, Emburey, supported by Hughes (Edmonds did not play here). They only passed 200 (just) thanks to some late aggression from David Smith and Intikhab Alam.

Woodcock noted that Intikhab’s 12 overs were the first leg spin he had seen all summer. As I write, I am still working my way through the 2006/7 Ashes, Shane Warne’s last, magnificent, bow. Leg spin was not dead. The best was yet to come.

Mike Brearley adopted the same cautious approach that had been so disastrous in the World Cup final the previous year, but on a slow pitch with 90 fewer to chase, it was more appropriate here. Brearley finished unbeaten on 96. Middlesex had been at Canterbury for the previous three days and the scorecard of that game tells me that Brearley had made 104 the previous day. I was there and generally have a good memory for events, something on which these pieces are predicated, but I can’t recall anything of that century. I was going to make a crack about Brearley’s academic style of batting, but here was the game’s highest score on a turning pitch against Underwood, who finished with seven wickets, so this was quite an innings, worthy of memory. I’m pretty sure that, unlike Boycott at Folkestone in 1977, Brearley won’t have loitered behind the lines at the non-striker’s end, partly because he is a man of integrity and partly because Phil Edmonds would have run him out had he tried.

Two hundred runs under pressure in two days shows that Brearley was a better batsman than his England record suggests. It prompts me to issue my periodic reminder that Brearley once scored 300 in a day. It was at Peshawar on the North-West Frontier, captaining MCC Under 25s against North Zone. It wasn’t a club attack either; Intikhab Alam bowled that day too. Brearley reached his hundreds in 155, 125 and 50 minutes respectively. To add to the quizzicality of the occasion, his opening partner was none other than Alan Knott, who scored his maiden century. Knott was the second-highest scorer in the Championship match that preceded the final, sweeping Emburey and Edmonds like Franz Beckenbauer.

Back at Lord’s, Roland Butcher provided the game’s most attractive batting to finish the match off with six overs to spare. His 50 included three sixes and five fours. Butcher became one of a series of cricketers around this time to be selected for the winter tour after a good September final performance. He made his test debut in his birthplace of Barbados a few months later.

It wasn’t all bad in the sodden summer of 1980. I was at the Oval for the final day of the fourth test, when Peter Willey and, less probably, Bob Willis batted long enough to save the game. Also at Lord’s for the fourth and best day of the Centenary Test against Australia. We hoped that 1981 would be a better year, but could not have hoped it would be that much better.