“McKenzie’s Over of Agony at Folkestone”

 Kent v Leicestershire, 40 overs, Folkestone, 19 July 1971

In 1971, the Sunday League was in its third season, and well-established. On 18 July there were 18,000 at Headingley for the Roses Match. In The Times, John Woodcock noted that the New Road crowd was the largest since Worcestershire last won the Championship six years earlier. At Glastonbury, there were record receipts for a Somerset home game, for the second week in a row.

I was at the Cheriton Road Ground in Folkestone, which was also packed out. Outside St Lawrence, Folkestone was the best of all the Kent grounds in terms of spectator accommodation. A stand about ten rows deep embraced half of its circumference, not quite the Great Southern Stand at the MCG, but a step up from Maidstone’s planks balanced (or not) on logs.

All of us there that day saw something that none of us have seen since, for which we should all be grateful. Graham McKenzie of Leicestershire and Australia bowled eight no-balls in one over, and kept bowling them even when he cut his run-up down to three paces.

Leicestershire had batted first and made 168 for nine, a better score in 40 overs than it will appear to be to the modern spectator, but a little disappointing given that Barry Dudleston (unaware of the presence of a future remedial skiing student in the crowd) and Mick Norman put on 49 for the first wicket. Inevitably, it was Derek Underwood who reined them in, with four for 26. Two of the four were tailenders, which suggests that Underwood bowled at the death (as we didn’t say then), which was most unusual. Bob Woolmer was as effective, with two for 22. Woolmer was one of the best one-day bowlers around, and it was in that capacity that he was first picked for England the following season.

None of the home crowd would have regarded victory as inevitable. For a start, Graham McKenzie was opening the bowling for the opposition.

McKenzie is not much mentioned when the great Australian fast bowlers are discussed, which is an omission. He opened the bowling with Alan Davidson at the start of his career, and with Dennis Lillee at the end. At that time he had 246 test wickets, two short of Richie Benaud’s then record. He was not to play test cricket again, but he would have had the record had the wickets he took against the World XI in the following Australian season counted.

Glimpses of McKenzie’s run up on You Tube are surprisingly fleeting, but there is enough to be reminded that it was a rolling action, with none of the beauty of Lillee’s approach nor the menace of Thomson’s. I have trying to work out who it reminds me of. Were it not for the threat of a letter from McKenzie’s legal representatives, I might suggest Darren Stevens.

He wasn’t out-and-out fast, but was quick enough. Gideon Haigh writes that “when stirred he possessed a wicked bouncer”. He would extract what help the pitch could give him like a Tudor torturer seeking their preferred version of the truth.

All of which makes what happened that day on the Kent coast one of the strangest things that I have ever seen on a cricket field. Dick Streeton was there for The Times. I have borrowed the headline on his report as my title.

People forget about the 15-yard restriction to the bowler’s run up in the Sunday League, but it existed for most of the duration of the 40-over competition, showing that fixing the rules so that the game fits a TV slot is not a new thing.

The limit caused surprisingly few problems; most bowlers adjusted remarkably well. Mike Procter managed to summarise most of the quirks of his 30-yard charge to the crease; Bob Willis swayed out and in again. JSE Price of Middlesex, who had a run up of a man who was not very good at orienteering, extracted maximum value from the fact that a straight line marked the 15 yards, running parallel to it for some of the way before turning 90 degrees to port.

Many will not understand the talk about the front-foot law, and will not know that no-balls have been defined in any other way than part of the front foot having to be behind the popping crease. There is a clue in that the line on which the stumps are pitched is the bowling crease, for that was the line that the old law demanded that the back foot stay behind. Over the years, some bowlers developed the art of “dragging” the back foot, allowing the ball to be delivered closer to the batsman than the law intended, which is why it changed. The transition from back to front foot was messy. Some countries operated under one law, some under the other. In England in 1963, the front-foot law was used in the Championship while the back-foot was applied in test matches. The change became accepted, though Fred Trueman complained about it to his dying day.

I have been reading about Simone Biles, a great gymnast who had to withdraw from most of her Olympic events because of an attack of the twisties, the equivalent of the golfer’s or slow left-armer’s yips, but more frightening as the sufferer may be upside down in mid-air when they strike. What afflicted McKenzie that day seems to have been something similar; a sudden, unexplained inability to perform an action at which he had previously executed with skill and expertise. As far as I am aware, it was a one off, the demons departing almost as soon as they arrived.

The striking thing about Streeton’s report is that nobody offered McKenzie any support; the sight of Illingworth taking up a position in the covers would simply have indicated to the bowler how desperate things had become.

The only time I have seen anything similar was on the television coverage of an ODI between New Zealand and Australia in Auckland in 2005. Daryl Tuffey began the game with four no-balls. Four wides followed as he struggled to complete the over, but he was never reduced to three paces as McKenzie was.

Kent, mostly Denness, took 31 from the over. It should be remembered that in those days no extra was recorded from a no-ball if runs were accrued in another way; it would have been more under contemporary laws (as many as five of the no balls were not scored from because would not have bothered to take singles as they had the extra already). Victory came with 14 overs to spare for the loss of only Dave Nicholls.

A strange day.