The Cricket Magazines: October 1972

I have fallen behind in my surveys of the cricket magazines of half-a-century ago. My summer holiday task is to catch up, starting with the October editions.

The focus of both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly was the fifth test at the Oval that concluded the best Ashes series in England since the Second World War. It was decided on the sixth day, the last test in England to have such a provision until the final of the World Test Championship in 2021.

Centuries by both Chappells gave Australia a first-innings advantage of 115, but debutant Barry Wood’s 90 led a strong response to set a target of 242, a cinch in the era of Bazball but quite a challenge in 1972.

England were handicapped by the depletion of their attack through the second innings: D’Oliveira had a bad back, Illingworth turned his ankle and Snow had the flu, “sick and shaking” as he managed a single over with the second new ball.

At 171 for five, Jack Fingleton, according to Basil Easterbrook, “groaned and said ‘It’s too many for us now’ ”, but Paul Sheahan and Rod Marsh took them home without further loss.

England’s top scorer in the match was Alan Knott, with 92 and 63. The other day one of the Australian TV commentators said that Adam Gilchrist had re-written the book on how wicketkeepers batted in test matches. Gilchrist, brilliant as he was, merely added a chapter to Knott’s draft. This match was one of many on which Knott had a critical influence with the bat, and in a way that ignored cricket’s geometry. He would have broken the bank in an IPL auction.

Both titles agree that Australia deserved to (at least) draw the series. Easterbrook’s summary put it in historical context.

Australia won both their victories after losing the toss. They had the series outstanding bowler in Lillee, the best supporting bowler in Massie and their batsmen produced five centuries, whereas the best England could manage were three innings in the 90s. If Australia, who were beaten in vile weather in Manchester and on an unworthy pitch at Leeds, did not have the luck this time it perhaps went some way to compensate for the period between 1961 and 1968 when three Australian sides in no way superior to England…undeservedly held on to The Ashes.

John Woodcock agreed that Lillee had a decisive influence, which he expressed in the language of the time.

He runs a tediously long way; yet to see him pounding in to bowl, and to put oneself in the batsman’s shoes, is to know one is watching a man’s game.

Not quite how I would put it, but Lillee running in, shirt billowing, with a Dick Dastardly scowl, was one of the great sights of cricket.

Clive Lloyd made one of the finest Lord’s-final centuries in the first World Cup in 1975. Three years earlier he made another as Lancashire won the Gillette Cup for the third successive year (Jack Bond, Lancashire skipper, is pictured with the trophy on the cover of Playfair). It was the centrepiece of the reports by Michael Melford for The Cricketer and Gordon Ross for Playfair. Melford noted the power of Lloyd’s drives:

…most of them, off fast bowling, went at such a pace that the bowler, deep mid-on and deep mid-off scarcely moved before the ball was past them.

For Ross, it was the cross-bat shots:

Three times he cleared the boundary ropes with massive pulls, and it made no difference whatsoever who was bowling; this was utter domination of the attack.

Bryon Butler’s press review in The Cricketer collected more acclaim for the Guyanan, from Arlott, Swanton, Marlar, and from Dennis Compton, who got quite carried away in the Sunday Express:

This was the greatest innings I have ever seen at Lord’s at any level. I have seen and played against Sir Donald Bradman, Walter Hammond, Stan McCabe, Sir Frank Worrell, Clive [sic] Walcott, Everton Weekes and many other great players in full flow: but I have never seen an attack torn to pieces like this.

The October editions cover the first ODIs—or one-day tests as they were referred to—played in England, the first anywhere except for the hastily arranged inaugural at Melbourne the previous year. England won an entertaining series two-one. In the first game, Dennis Amiss became the first century-maker in this form of the international game.

It will surprise many to see that, in the absence of the injured Illingworth, England were captained by Brian Close. A more obvious choice might have been Tony Lewis, already named as captain of MCC’s tour of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known). Illingworth, along with Boycott and Snow, had made himself unavailable for a gruelling schedule that included eight test matches over more than four months.

EW Swanton’s editorial in The Cricketer once again deployed the royal pronoun in critiquing the tour party:

We must admit to disappointment that the promising new material among the 21-25 brigade has been overlooked.

The only player under 25 was Chris Old. The India correspondent of The Cricketer, KN Prabhu, reported on an underwhelmed response to the selection. The editor of a sports magazine demanded that the tour be called off if England were to be represented by a second XI. The Indian Express was barely less damning, saying that the team

…might be well balanced in that the standard of its batsmanships [sic] and bowling are likely to balance each other in mediocrity.

Prabhu himself was not so quick to write off the tourists, noting the success of various members of the party as members of an International XI some years before.

England won the first test in India before losing the next two narrowly, by 28 runs and four wickets. The final two matches in the series were drawn, as were all three in Pakistan, a reminder of how historically difficult it has been to attain a positive result on those pitches. The achievement of the McCullum/Stokes team in winning three-nil in similar conditions is one of the great achievements of the intervening half century.

       

       

Christmas Eve at the Cricket

Wellington v Otago

Women

Men

Until the 1970s, provincial cricket was played on Christmas Day in New Zealand. There would be a late start to allow for the hasty opening of presents and the bolting down of some turkey, but the afternoon could be spent on the bank at the Basin, Lancaster Park or Carisbrook. Perhaps it is as well that the practice was abandoned; the ensuing negotiations would be tricky in many households.

In Wellington we have the pleasing new tradition (this is its third year, so “tradition” passes, just) of Christmas Eve cricket, a T20 double-header, to be precise.

All fixtures in New Zealand’s domestic T20 competition—not merely the “Smash” but the “Super Smash”—pair a women’s game with that of the same men’s teams, the women usually (but not always) playing first. All games are shown on television, with 18 of the men’s games and 15 of the women’s free-to-air (with the imminent closure of rights-holders Spark Sport, from next season all domestic and international cricket in New Zealand will be free-to-air for three seasons).

The Basin is at its best at this time of year. The cricket-ball red flowers of the puhutukawa trees bloom for Christmas, draping a crimson ribbon round the ground and up the hill to Government House. The bank was near-full, with an increasing number of spectators arriving in time to take in most of the women’s game. Despite the presence of Billy Bowden, Rain-deviner-in-chief, the sun was out, and all was right with the world.

Otago will look back at both games with the ruefulness of a child who wakes up on Christmas Day to find that Santa has stolen their presents from under the tree. They could and should have won them both.

When both Kerr sisters were out with the score on 110 in the 17th over it seemed that Wellington would be some way short of setting a challenging target, but Maddy Green and Leigh Kasperek took 31 from the final two overs to finish the innings on 146 for five, very attainable with Suzie Bates opening for Otago.

With Ebrahim, Bates put on 49 for the third wicket, but five was the most scored from any over between the third and the ninth, which left an asking rate of almost ten an over, unsustainable against an attack of the quality of Wellington’s. The innings subsided like a sherry-filled grandma into an armchair after the Christmas pudding. Wellington won by 19 runs. Kasperek was the best bowler with three for 16. Her omission from New Zealand’s World Cup squad last year remains mystifying.

For the men, Adam Milne made his Wellington debut, after 12 years with Central Districts. As Kent fans know, Milne is a quality bowler who offers a desirable combination of pace and smarts, so the Basin faithful were pleased to hear that he was coming to the capital. However, some of us were sceptical that we would ever see him in a Wellington shirt on the field of play, given that he is a regular in the white-ball national squad, in demand from the franchises, and more prone to breakage than a Chinese vase in a situation comedy. Yet here he was.

The match followed the pattern of that of the women. Wellington batted first and reached an underwhelming 152. It was only thanks to Rachin Ravindra that it was that many. Regular readers may be rather bored by my regular extolling of Ravindra’s qualities and class, but I can merely report what I see. Here, once more, time appeared to move more slowly when he was at the crease, such was the facility of his shots.

A team chasing a modest total and that is 80 for one after 12 overs, as Otago were, should not lose. But they blew it. Run rates that were unimaginable twenty years ago are now commonplace. Ten an over is the new six an over. But this is not an entitlement, as Otago demonstrated here. They were complacent, expecting to go up through the gears as they wanted. When 29 came from overs 17 and 18 they would have considered themselves on track, but no further boundaries ensued and they lost by eight runs. They had the chance to secure the game earlier and should have taken it.

 

 

A Restful Time at the Basin Reserve

 

Wellington v Auckland, Plunket Shield, Basin Reserve, 5 – 7 November 2022

Scorecard

Restful would be as good a description of this game as any. The scoring rate clung to two an over like lion cubs fearful of straying too far from their mother. I was there for the first two days. The Basin was a picture in the sunshine, but the southerly kept me in the Long Room where the main topic of conversation was whether the pies are as good as last year’s.

Wellington were put in. With spring moving into early summer, the pitch was not such a radical shade of green, official rather than provisional, if you will. The movement it provided was not extravagant, but was constant. I have not, for a long time, seen the ball pass the outside edge as often as it did on the first day. It was this that explains the slow scoring, provoking the batsmen into an abundance of caution. The pitch was not particularly slow, with good carry through to the keeper.

Auckland’s left-arm opening bowler Ben Lister was unlucky to take only the wicket of Georgeson. On another day he could have had five or six, but might his response to constantly beating the bat without finding the edge have been to pitch it up a fraction more?

Tom Blundell was, yet again, top scorer. He came in at 102 for four, not a crisis, but the innings was in need of taking more exercise and being put on a better diet. Troy Johnson, with 42, was the only other Wellington batter to get more than 20. Somebody said that Johnson had scratched about and looked out of form, but it takes a decent player to scratch about for three hours.

The wickets were shared around the Auckland attack, including two for off-spinner Will Somerville, who is the Flying Dutchman of New Zealand cricket, doomed to sail the Seven Seas forever and never see home, as a test player at least. All six of his test appearances have been in the heat and dust, and he may get the call to go to Pakistan over the New Year. Look at Somerville and the way the selectors have treated Jeetan and Ajaz Patel over the years and you might conclude that in New Zealand we treat dogs better than we do spinners.

Auckland’s first innings was, in many respects, a copy of Wellington’s. Solia was the dogged presence at the top of the order, and Ben Horne the keeper who bolstered the innings at No 6. But the chorus was more vocal for the visitors, with 44 from George Worker (a member of the Aptly-named XI, along with Boycott and PJ Hacker of Notts, among others) and a tenth-wicket partnership of 55, so though it looked much the same, a lead of 124 was the outcome.

The pace was just as stately. It was as if Derek Shackleton was bowling at one end and Tom Cartwright at the other. It was 1969 all over again, cricket with Nixon in the White House and Harold Wilson in Downing Street. I found it calming.

There was a short flurry of excitement when, after 96 overs Auckland found themselves 44 short of the second bonus point, available for the first 110 overs of the first innings. Horne was provoked into a temporary abandonment of pacifism and 250 was reached in just eight overs, after which tranquillity was restored, with just nine from the next seven overs.

In my absence on the third day, Wellington were shot out for 132, leaving Auckland with just seven for victory. Lister was more successful in locating the edge of the bat, with four wickets, and Somerville took three more.

And that is it for me and the Plunket Shield for this season. Yes, in the equivalent of early May I have seen all the domestic first-class cricket available to me in 2022/23. With two tests at the Basin when the competition resumes next year, Wellington’s home fixtures are all scheduled before Christmas. In fact, with India using the ground for practice ahead of a T20 at the Cake Tin, the fourth (and final) “home” game was in Palmerston North, two-and-a-half hours away and not in Wellington at all. Yet Fitzherbert Park is an appropriate alternative to the Basin in that it is the only other ground I know of on which the prevailing weather is a gale sufficiently strong to gather up small dogs and children and deposit them in neighbouring streets.  

Shorter forms of the game dominate the fixture list for the next couple of months.

 

 

 

Early Adventures in the Plunket Shield 2022

Wellington v Northern Districts, Basin Reserve, 18-21 October 2022

Wellington v Canterbury, Basin Reserve, 26­-28 October 2022

The early-season blogger faces a perennial challenge when reporting the first games at the Basin Reserve: how to convey the sheer greenness of the pitch. Peter Jackson’s movie studios are nearby. Having limbered up on Tolkien, are they applying their CGI artifice to Wellington’s cricket blocks, producing a verdance that nature cannot match?

As we have established before, a surface of that hue is not necessarily as pernicious as it would be in England. Northern Districts made 225 batting first in the season opener, and that was the lowest total of the match. The case for the pitch’s defence became more shaky for the second game, in which Wellington’s aggregate total was their lowest in 116 years of the Plunket Shield. However, their innings were punctuated by Canterbury’s 338 for eight declared, with a century for Tom Latham and a fifty from Henry Nicholls. Throw in Matt Henry’s seven for 44 in the match and it becomes clear that this was a pitch that sorted the wheat from the chaff with considerable efficiency.

I was able to be present for only one session of each match. For the Northern Districts game it was pre-lunch on the fourth day. ND started the day 225 ahead with six wickets remaining, apparently heading for a declaration close to lunchtime, but seamers McPeake and Sneddon expunged all six for just 23, leaving Wellington with a target of 250. It was one of those collapses that give the team that suffers it a greater chance of victory, closing the innings earlier than a more cautious declaration would have dared. This was a whisker from being the case here.

The highlight of both my mornings at the cricket was the batting of Rachin Ravindra. He puts me in mind of the young Ramprakash (though our man is left-handed) for the precocity and fluidity of his shots. Of course, that comparison raises questions about whether the class will translate to the top level. I hope that the national team management desists in using him as a No 7 who can bowl a bit of spin, and waits until he can be given a decent run in the top four. On this morning he hit several sumptuous cover drives before getting out to a legside strangle.

When I left at luncheon (as John Woodcock would say) Wellington were 77 for four, so ND would have considered themselves to be ahead. I caught up with the live stream (a more basic affair than in the UK, with just a single static camera) when Wellington were about 20 short with eight down. That they were this close was down to Tom Blundell, who performed an innings resurrection like those he undertook with Daryl Mitchell during the recent tests in England. Adam Leonard went in a manner similar to Ravindra with six left to get, and it was last man Hartshorn who secured an inside edge to the fine-leg boundary for the winning runs. This was four-day cricket at its best.

There was no such tension when I got to the Basin for the third morning of the match against Canterbury. The weather forecast was for rain in the late afternoon and for much of the following day, so the visitors had declared on the previous evening, setting Wellington a target of 378. They started the day on nine for two.

Again, Ravindra’s batting was worth the trouble of going to the Basin. He hit three offside fours off the otherwise near-unplayable Henry that were Goweresque in their languidity. This time it took a good one to get him, a ball from O’Rourke that rose a little and left him on off stump. With nightwatchman McPeake in support, that wicket did not fall until we were into the second hour, but thereafter only Blundell and the agricultural Newton made double figures. It was all over in time for lunch.

Despite the crushing defeat, Wellington have the same points as Canterbury and the two teams lead the Plunket Shield table after two of the eight games. 

The Cricketer & Playfair Cricket Monthly September 1972

 

Excavations in the cupboards of Scorecards Towers have unearthed a second magazine to provide an insight into the cricket of half a century ago: the Playfair Cricket Monthly. The April 1966 edition of this publication was the first cricket magazine that I owned; The Cricketer did not become a regular fixture until five years later.

The Playfair magazine complemented the annual of the same imprimatur. Both were edited by Gordon Ross. The annual remains a must-have for the serious cricket watcher in the UK to this day, but by September 1972 the magazine was in its final months. It was swallowed up by The Cricketer in 1973. Playfair concentrated almost exclusively on the international and first-class game, while its senior rival encompassed cricket at all levels.

The September editions of both focussed on the third and fourth tests of what was becoming one of the finest Ashes series since the Second World War. John Woodcock reported for The Cricketer, while Basil Easterbrook was there for Playfair.

Easterbrook’s name will ring a bell with those who have Wisdens of the 1970s on their shelves, as he has a feature in almost all of them, on subjects ranging from ducks (“the dreaded cypher”) to county cricket’s workhorses, the Mohammad family and Compton’s summer of ’47.[1] He was cricket correspondent for the Kemsley regional newspapers, so his byline rarely appeared in the national press, which was their loss; he writes lightly and perceptively.

Here is an extract from Derek Hodgson’s obituary of Basil Easterbrook in The Independent:

Like most of his generation, he was unenthusiastic about the advance of commercialism but he was once put in charge of the Press Box hospitality at Worcester by a new and happily naive sponsor. The hacks were duly impressed on the first lunchtime when a bottle of Chablis arrived at each seat. Easterbrook beamed.

The next day more wine arrived accompanied by a fly-past from the Red Arrows. Challenged to top this, on the last day, Easterbrook smiled and pointed out of the window to where, under the shadow of the cathedral, the groundsman's hut had gone up in flames.

He was a small, bright, perky man who could be waspish with fools and angered by injustice. He always had a new humorous story. We had not seen him in the box since 1983 but we still miss him. He spent his later days watching Torquay United, not always happily, but he was always keen to tell you of the latest developments with the Gulls.

England and Australia went to Trent Bridge for the third test at one-all. Ray Illingworth astonished the cognoscenti by putting Australia in. This seems nothing nowadays; at the Basin Reserve there would be widespread swooning if the skipper winning the toss did not insert, but this was the era of uncovered pitches, rest days, and unreliable weather forecasts. A captain giving the opposition first use of the pitch on Thursday morning was gambling on there being no rain from Saturday on.

Losing such a wager was to be the downfall of Mike Denness at Edgbaston three years later. Illingworth got away with it here, though the pitch gave little of the expected help to England’s seamers, though there were a succession of dropped catches on the first day. Things got worse in this regard. Woodcock says that England’s fielding in the second innings was “the worst anyone could remember from an England side”.

Keith Stackpole’s century headed Australia’s 315. England replied with only 189, and an unbeaten 170 from Ross Edwards left a target of 451. Brian Luckhurst led the rear guard with 96 over five-and-a-half hours. It was England’s top score in the series, which made it all galling for we Kent people that he was dropped after Headingley. England lost only three wickets on the last day, on a pitch Easterbrook calls “this gentle featherbed”. In these days of Bazball England would have had a go at scoring 340 in the day, but in those more timid times it was out of the question, particularly as a draw meant that Australia would have to win the next two tests to win the series.

It is easy to throw around emotive words like ‘disgrace’ and ‘scandal’ as labels for the pitch on which England won the fourth Test by nine wickets with two days and ninety minutes to spare, but rather more difficult to justify them.

So begins Easterbrook’s report in Playfair. Mention this game to an Australian fifty years on, and those words will be the least of the vocabulary that is offered in response. That the match saw the return of DL Underwood to the England XI fuels the conspiracy theory. He took ten for 82 in the match and, as Woodcock wrote, “Whichever side Underwood had been playing for would almost certainly have won”.

Bryon Butler’s In the Press in The Cricketer quoted two distinguished Aussies who started as their compatriots have gone on. Ray Lindwall in The Sun:

Call me an Aussie squealer if you like [OK, we will­-Ed] but I am angry and disappointed that we should lose the Ashes this way. These spinners’ pitches have cropped up too often in England for me to shake them off and say ‘Hard luck, isn’t it?’

Jack Fingleton in the Sunday Times interviewed the groundsman in the presence of Joe Lister, the Yorkshire secretary.

When I mentioned the abnormal spin, Mr Lister intervened to say “Well wait and we will see how the Englishmen handle this pitch.” I replied “But we have no Underwood or Illingworth.” Mr Lister said he didn’t like the inference[2]. I told him I would reply to him later. It was the pitch I was interested in.

Twelve of the other 21 wickets also fell to spinners. The two reporters have contrasting explanations for the spin-friendly nature of the pitch. Easterbrook blames a thunderstorm three days before the game that flooded the field and hampered pitch preparation. Woodcock says that the groundsman, alarmed by a hand injury inflicted by Willis on Boycott in a Gillette Cup game a couple of weeks before, took too much grass off the pitch.

On the afternoon before the Test it was obvious for all to see that the pitch was to be a burial ground for fast bowlers.

Stackpole’s 52 apart, none of the Australians contributed more than 26 in the first innings, though Easterbrook cites Inverarity and Mallett’s eighth-wicket partnership of 47 in defence of the pitch. I recall watching on TV (we got our first colour TV that year, from Radio Rentals) as Underwood tied them up in an afternoon session in which Australia lost six for 40 (though coverage was interrupted by racing from Goodwood; the deprivations we suffered in the seventies).

That England secured a lead of 117 was largely down to the 104 that Illingworth and Snow put on for the eighth wicket. I have written often enough that Illingworth is as good an example as Brearley of a captain picked for his leadership rather than his runs and wickets, but he was most likely to come up with a gritty fifty when the top order had not delivered. Snow had considerable ability with the bat, when he could be bothered. He finished his career opening the batting for Warwickshire in the Sunday League.

Paul Sheahan’s unbeaten 41 was the best Australia could manage in the second innings, and Luckhurst hit the winning run before the end of Grandstand. Five of the England team turned out for their counties in the Sunday League the following day.

Playfair featured the Captain’s Column. In past years a different captain had contributed each month, but in 1972 it was the sole preserve of Kent’s Mike Denness. How things have changed over half a century.

…two of my own county’s Test cricketers, Alan Knott and Brian Luckhurst, battled through a five-day Test against Australia and were faced with an eight-day break before the next Test.

…as a county captain I have found the greatest difficulty this year I keeping the players at their peak with long breaks between games.

…we have found in Kent that we have had no cricket on two Saturdays. I would have thought that Saturday is the one day we must play cricket.

Both titles reported on the first Benson and Hedges Cup final. John Arlott was there for The Cricketer. It was as unmemorable as a final could be, with Leicestershire taking 47 overs to overtake Yorkshire’s 136, though it was Leicestershire’s first trophy in any competition.

Arlott found one aspect of the day distasteful.

The mass singing which accompanied the prize-giving was a stern indication of the difficulties cricket speech-makers are likely to encounter in the future.

I generally found the B&H final to be more raucous than the 60-over equivalent, presumably because it was outside the football season.  

Here is more on Basil Easterbrook from The Questing Vole (aka Patrick Kidd).

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[1] In researching Easterbrook’s writing I have discovered that my 1971 Wisden is missing pp149-152. Is it too late to return it for a refund?

[2] It must have been the pressure of the moment that caused Mr Lister to confuse “inference” with “implication”.

 

The Cricketer August 1972

The Ashes of 1972 was one of the best: four positive results out of five (there had been just nine in the previous 26 Ashes tests), some fine cricket directed by a couple of great captains, and, best of all, a couple of conspiracy theories that provoke anger and resentment to this day.

Mention Headingley ’72 to an Australian and watch their brow furrow and the phrase “doctored pitch” form on their lips. England fans of that era will reply with a question: from where did a bowler from the dry air of Perth summon a degree of swing of which Sinatra would be proud to take 16 wickets in his debut test?

Bob Massie was the bowler and it earned him a place on the cover of the August edition of The Cricketer. John Woodcock, reporting from Lord’s on the second test, supplied various explanations. The atmosphere was “heavy and humid” for the first three days; Massie “confounding England’s batsmen by bowling round the wicket at them” (the bounder); England replaced an unfit Geoff Arnold with JSE Price, a paceman, instead of Tom Cartwright, or another bowler better suited to the conditions.

But for Woodcock the main reason was a failure of batting.

And at no time did England’s batsmen bat as England batsmen are meant to.

He lists the most recent individual scores of England’s top three, Boycott, Edrich and Luckhurst, all Ashes winners 16 months previously, and finds only one century and three half centuries in 34 visits to the crease.

It was possible to bat on the Lord’s pitch. Greg Chappell did so sublimely, making 131 in what he rated his finest test innings. For Woodcock:

It was a superbly judged piece of batting, and technically of the very highest quality.

Richie Benaud profiled Massie in August’s Cricketer. Benaud is renowned as cricket’s finest commentator, but this piece reminds us that his profession was not leg spin, but journalism. It makes us regret that his writing was mostly limited to the News of the World. It is superb, the best thing in the magazine.

Benaud does not share Woodcock’s critical view of the English batting.

I derived some amusement that day from the people who besieged, perhaps attacked is a better word, me, with advice as to how the England batsmen should have countered Massie’s bowling. Had that advice been conveyed to them and had they acted on it, we would have watched a wonderful spectacle: batsmen allowing the outswinger to pass and hitting the inswinger, or allowing the inswinger to pass and smashing the outswinger over cover point. In addition, they would have had to take block outside the leg stump, and on the leg, middle and off stumps; kept side-on in the stroke and opened their stance à la Barrington when the bowler operated around the wicket.

Massie’s 16 wickets at Lord’s constituted just over half the total of his whole test career. His star shot across the sky but, without the heat and humidity of Lord’s to keep it flying, it fell to Earth once more.

Some parts of the 1972 Cricketer could be inserted into the 2022 magazine with minimal alteration. Here is the opening of Jim Swanton’s editorial, headlined, with a topicality undimmed by the years, The Shape of County Cricket.

To say that everyone in county cricket is exercised about finding the best programme formula for the future may be stating the obvious; but it seems worth stressing, seeing how many people are dissatisfied with the fixture list à la 1972, with the Benson and Hedges Cup now brought in to make a fourth competition, and the average follower much muddled as to who is playing whom in what, and for how many overs. Ideally there should not be four competitions, but – but ideally county cricket should pay for itself.

With Swanton involved, the August edition was indeed august.

I am pleased to report that the great CJ Tavaré continued to score runs with abandon, with an unbeaten 152 for Sevenoaks. Other successful schoolboys who would later make cricket their career were Jeremy Lloyds (eight for 13 for Blundell’s) and Alistair Hignell (a century for Denstone).

Gillette Cup quarter-final Essex v Kent

This edition of the magazine is a touch more weathered than the others that have featured in earlier pieces. I think that is down to it being well-travelled. It would have been in my bag when I went to Leyton for the Gillette Cup quarter-final. There’s a sentence that sounds as if it comes from the Old Testament.

Essex was still an itinerant club in those days, pitching up somewhere for a week, then moving on. The caravan, including the scoreboard on the side of a truck, happened to be at Leyton when Essex were drawn at home against Kent, so that’s where the match was played, in the first week of August. It seems odd that, at the stage of the season when many counties headed for the seaside, Essex took themselves into London. The Hundred has adopted this counter-intuitive scheduling half a century later.

Leyton hasn’t seen any county cricket since 1977, but Google Maps still calls it the County Cricket Ground, and it has featured on cricket Twitter this very week, with the Cricket Writers taking on an ECB XI there. As an unusual 13-year-old who knew a surprising amount of cricket history, I was aware that it was the site of Holmes and Sutcliffe’s partnership of 555 for Yorkshire in 1932, and of the run that was lost, then found again to ensure that they had the record. It was Jim Swanton’s failure to meet his Evening Standard deadline to report the record that lost him the trip to cover what became the Bodyline Tour, thus removing a key peacemaker from the scene. According to Swanton, at least.

The Cricketer and I actually went to Leyton twice, by East Kent coach; it rained on the first day, and Wednesday’s soaking no doubt influenced what occurred on Thursday.

In 110 overs the two teams scored 264 runs between them, a substantially slower scoring rate than most test matches now produce. For the greater part of the game, defeat for Kent appeared inevitable. But just a few weeks before, I had been at Folkestone for the Sunday League game in which Kent’s last four wickets fell for no runs when two were needed for victory, so I knew that hope and despair should be kept close right to the last ball.

That Kent got as many as 137 was largely due to Asif Iqbal, who played the most out-of-character innings of his career, 52 in 39 overs. He was well supported by Woolmer and Shepherd. The margin of victory was the same as the tenth-wicket partnership between Underwood and Graham. The latter made four, in which I suspect that the edge of the bat played a critical role.

In those days, if you had 60 overs to chase a total it was considered proper to use most of them up. People would have fallen over in a faint had Bazball been explained to them.

In this spirit, openers Edmeades and Wallace put on 55 in 25 overs. There was method behind this caution. Derek Underwood, just back from taking ten wickets in the fourth test, came on as first change and the intention was to see him off. This was achieved. He conceded only 12 runs from 11 overs, but did not take a wicket.

It was John Shepherd who prised Essex open. His first five overs were all maidens, during which he took four wickets, all to catches at slip or behind. The last of these was that of Keith Boyce who had come from Barbados with Shepherd seven years before. Les Ames and Trevor Bailey had spotted the pair on a Cavaliers tour. Both became beloved by the supporters of their counties. Boyce, the pacier bowler, had a more successful international career with 21 tests against Shepherd’s five. Their post-cricket lives were contrasting. Boyce died of cirrhosis at 53, while Shepherd is still hitting golf balls 50 yards further down the fairways of north Kent than might be expected of a man in his late seventies.

Five wickets fell for 14 runs, but 69 at two an over with five left was not hopeless. Nowadays, there would be an attempt to hit bowlers off their line on the basis that the fewer balls that were faced the fewer their opportunities were to take wickets. In those more deferential times bowlers could maintain an undisrupted line and length and let the pitch do the rest.

The report in the 1973 Kent Annual says that “Asif was one of several outstanding Kent fieldsmen, urged on and inspired by Denness to rare brilliance”. This was one of the many attractions of being a Kent fan at that time.

From the fall of Boyce on, we felt the game to be in Kent’s hands but the later Essex order were determined, and a last-wicket stand of 19 between East and Lever had us holding our breaths once more.

Ever since those two games, at Folkestone and Leyton, I have regarded low-scoring one-day games, with runs had to mined rather than gathered where they fell, to be the best of the genre.

Canterbury Cricket Week

Regular readers of Scorecards will know that I am not sentimental about three-day cricket. As the years went on it became more-and-more two days of going through the motions with a contrived run chase on the third. But it could be wonderful, and the August 1972 Cricketer would have been with me at St Lawrence for a week of three-day cricket as good as you could wish for. It was the first time since 1938 that Kent won both matches at Canterbury Week. The opponents here were Glamorgan and Sussex.

It was Bob Woolmer’s week. He is remembered as a ground-breaking coach and a classy batter, but for Kent in 1972 his main role was as a medium-pace bowler, a designation that he never carried out more effectively than here, with 19 wickets in the week. Nine of these were bowled or lbw, five caught behind, three in the slips, so he was clearly dropping it on a sixpence. There was some assistance from a drying pitch in the Glamorgan game, always helpful in moving a game on, but both Alan Jones and Mike Denness made 150s, so it was not treacherous.

Both games followed a similar pattern. The visitors batted first, Glamorgan more effectively than Sussex. Kent replied with a score over 300, before dismissing the opposition cheaply, leaving a chase on the final afternoon. As well as the centuries there were fifties from Colin Cowdrey, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal, Brian Luckhurst, Graham Johnson and Malcolm Nash. Underwood took five wickets against the Welsh (most of them were Welsh unlike the ersatz version in the Hundred), and Alan Knott kept wicket sublimely.

What a place, what a time, to learn to love cricket.

 

 

 

 

The Cricketer: July 1972

 

The Ashes were the main attraction of 1972 and The Cricketer was fortunate to have John Woodcock as its test match reporter. The July edition carried his account of the first test, played at Old Trafford in early June.

England won a seam-dominated match by 89 runs. John Snow took eight wickets, backed up by Geoff Arnold and Tony Greig with five each. Greig was making his test debut, though this would have come as a surprise to him, given that he had appeared four times for England against the Rest of the World in 1970, contests that were regarded as test matches at that time. He was also ever present in the Rest of the World team that had played in Australia the previous winter, matches that were never categorised by the Australians as tests, though, as discussed here previously, they were manifestly of test quality. Greig also made two half centuries at Manchester.

Anybody who has read much of this blog will know of my admiration for John Woodcock, but he did have a blind spot when it came to the nationality qualifications of England cricketers in general, and of Tony Greig in particular. It will be remembered that he wrote that one of things that explained the Packer schism was that Greig was “not a proper Englishman”. His report here develops this theme.

The ideal England team would be composed of Englishmen, pure and simple. One might have said the same when Ranji, Duleep or Pataudi were playing, or when D’Oliveira was first picked. If I were an Australian I might wonder about the fairness of it all.

But then I might count up the number of Aborigines in the Australian team, find that there were none, and reflect that my team consisted entirely of players who were, in the great scheme of things, recent immigrants themselves.

Woodcock reports that only 36,000 attended the test, which lasted well into the fifth day. That is less than a third of those who went through the gates of Old Trafford for the equivalent fixture in 2019, a comparison that those who argue that test cricket is on permanent decline should note.

Alex Bannister, long-serving Cricket Correspondent of the Daily Mail (and no relation of Jack Bannister, as far as I know) had a series running featuring a different county each month. In July it was Worcestershire. The article ranges between the past and the present in a pleasing way. I learned several things, including that county secretary Mike Vockins was an agricultural biochemist (which might have come in useful when the Severn made one its regular visits to the Worcester outfield), and that the Nawab of Pataudi senior (the same as cited by Woodcock, above) became a Worcestershire player only after having been turned down by Kent. This would have been around the time that Lord Harris insisted that Walter Hammond had to serve a two-year qualification for Gloucestershire because he had been born in Dover while his soldier father was stationed there, so perhaps embracing Pataudi would have been a double standard too far, even for that scion of the aristocracy.

Bannister rated the 25-year-old Glenn Turner highly.

There are two Turners – one intent on crease occupation; the other a magnificent strokemaker. In either mood – and I prefer the latter – he is one of the world’s leading batsmen.

Another New Zealander, John Parker, was on the Worcestershire staff in 1972. Years later, when I was writing for CricInfo, Turner and Parker joined us in the press box at Seddon Park in Hamilton and reminisced about their New Road days. The conversation turned to the use of statistical analysis in modern coaching. One or other of them said something along the lines of:

We had a computer that gave feedback based on the study of the available data. It was called Norman Gifford and it used to stand at short leg giving insightful readouts such as “what the eff are you bowling that effing crap for?”.

I am writing on T20 Blast finals weekend, against which the ECB have scheduled an ODI against India, thus depriving the participating counties of their international players. A similar issue half a century ago saw the boot on the other foot. Surrey and Sussex both refused to release their players to appear for MCC against the Australians in the traditional pre-tests fixture, preferring to retain their services for the Benson and Hedges Cup. I generally avoid a romantic view of cricket in those days, but a time when counties could tell Lord’s to stuff it was a great one in which to be alive.

Denis Compton and John Snow both defended the decision, but the majority of the cricketing establishment was outraged. Crawford White of the Daily Express wrote that “as a member of Surrey for 20 years and more, I think that this is a disgraceful decision”.  MCC Secretary Billy Griffith called it “absolutely deplorable”, while EW Swanton, as Bryon Butler put it in his monthly press review, “drew his sword”.

History of a most regrettable sort has been made…It never occurred to me for a moment that this fixture would not be held sacrosanct…In football, one hears, England suffers from the selfishness of clubs. That is football’s affair. It is cricket’s affair to put country first rather than the short-term financial advantage of a sponsored competition, however good in itself…cricket has been done a grave disservice, which is sure to have strong repercussions.

This is vintage Swanton. “Football” and “sponsored” become terms of abuse. MCC is awarded dominion status. We see in our mind’s eye the oafish member of the lower classes to whom he slips sixpence for furtive news of the association game. And he gets it completely wrong. By the way, that whirring noise is Swanton turning like a rotisserie chicken at the news that the Varsity match has been exiled from Lord’s.

John Arlott profiles Peter Lever. His opening paragraph will move any of us who treasure county cricket.

The heart of English cricket is the county game; and the essence of county cricket is not the Test star who dominates it but the ordinary county cricketer who is there every day and gives it his constant and fullest effort. He does not, like the representative players, miss a dozen county games a year to play for his country. He is a man for all seasons; county cricket is for him an achieved peak and a fulfilment.

But the highlight of the July edition comes in the School Review. It is the historic first appearance in the press of the great CJ Tavaré. Then captain of Severnoaks School, he made 116 including 12 fours and—wait for it—ten sixes.

No doubt this news will provoke ill-judged and distasteful remarks from the class of person who in earlier times would have earned a crust by slipping news of Aston Villa’s away form to Swanton, and who know Tav only as the obdurate fellow who was the tax manual of England’s batting in the early eighties. But it will come as no surprise to those of us who knew the Sunday Tavaré, the man who would dismantle any attack in the country over 40 overs. Three of the Australians at Old Trafford would still be around in 1982/3 to play tests against Tavaré.

 

 

 

The Cricketer: June 1972

 

The touring Australian batter Doug Walters appears on the cover of the June 72 edition of The Cricketer, right knee almost grounded, bat above his head on the follow through, ball presumably clattering over the boundary at Worcester even as Patrick Eager’s shutter clicked. It was a shot seen only on county grounds that summer; in the tests he scored just 57 in seven innings. On his four tours to Britain, Walters never made a test century, an astonishing omission for a man who averaged almost 50 in that form of the game.

Henry Blofeld reported from the Caribbean on the final test of New Zealand’s first tour to that part of the world. It was drawn, as were the previous four games in the series. It was only New Zealand’s third five-test series. With none in the half century since, we can safely say it was our last.

The West Indies were in transition between the great side of the early and mid-sixties and that of the mid-to-late seventies. In the featured game, at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain, the bowling was opened by Vanburn Holder and Garry Sobers, now 35, who went for only 67 from 40 overs across the two innings.

The run rate for the match was well short of two-and-a-half an over. What a contrast to the turbo-charged series just completed fifty years on. Readers of these pieces over the years will be aware of my admiration for Brendon McCullum. We all have our XIs of favourite cricketers; McCullum is captain of mine.

But the most dedicated of his fans could not have anticipated the extent and speed of the change that he has brought to the England team, transforming them from the frightened, risk-and-esteem-free unit that we saw in Australia and the Caribbean into the warp-speed daredevils now before us. What he has done is make them forget that they are English.

At this rate, if he stays in post for the full four years he could change the entire fabric of British society. People will start talking to strangers on public transport. Beer will be drunk only if refrigerated. Café patrons will refuse to accept bad coffee.

For us in the South Pacific, it has all been a bit much. We feel a certain nostalgia for the days when you could block for a draw for five days, five times in a row.

Blofeld identifies four New Zealanders as “world-class”. Glenn Turner hit his peak and averaged 96. Like Turner, Bevan Congdon made two centuries in the series. The following year, Congdon was to score another pair of hundreds (both170s) in a losing cause; Daryl Mitchell has gone one better.

Another to reach a career peak in the sun was Bruce Taylor, whose fast-medium took 27 wickets at 17. More surprisingly, Blofeld’s quartet is completed by slow left-armer Hedley Howarth, whose contribution was “a much bigger one than his figures suggest”. You might hope so, given that those figures were 14 wickets at 50, At least Howarth was picked; Ajaz Patel has bowled all of two overs for the national team since he took all ten in Mumbai at the end of last year.

The most interesting piece in the June edition was Christopher Martin-Jenkins’ profile of Alan Knott. These days, it would be entirely unremarkable for a cricketer to speak of yoga (taught to him first by Bishen Bedi), training with a soccer team (Charlton FC) for better fitness, or pursuing perfection through continuous improvement. Knott, frequently mocked by away crowds for his stretching regime during play, was way ahead of his time.

CMJ reminds us that, earlier in 1972, a selection panel of Arlott, Cardus and Johnston had picked Knott ahead of Godfrey Evans as keeper in England’s greatest post-war XI for a computer Ashes test (featured nightly across a week on Radio 4 as I recall). It is gratifying to find that his genius was recognised by his contemporaries.

There is also a profile of Warwickshire skipper Alan Smith, better known as AC to differentiate him from MJK Smith, also of that parish. Those familiar with AC as a keeper-batsman good enough to play six tests will be surprised to see him pictured in mid bowl, deploying a Procter-like chest-on action. There is a piece to be written on keeper-bowlers. Something in the air at Edgbaston made custodians cast off the pads and grab the leather. Geoff Humpage was wont to have eight overs of a Sunday in the eighties.

With Deryck Murray now in the team, Smith was free to bowl more often, and did so with some effect in 1972, taking a five-for in both the Championship and the Sunday League. He was a frightening sight, ball in hand. His run up was that of a man charging a locked door, the teeth, bared in a clown’s smile, only accentuating the aggression. The ball emerged from a confusion of limbs, apparently an afterthought.

AC Smith later became one of English cricket’s leading administrators, famously (if Martin Johnson is to be believed) responding to a journalist’s enquiry with “no comment, but don’t quote me on that”.

A Sunday League catastrophe

Kent v Middlesex, 11 June 1972, Folkestone, 40 overs

The 2022 season has been a wretched one for Kent. In each of the county’s first five Championship games, the opposition made more than 500. The Sri Lankan Development XI did the same in an additional first-class fixture. The sequence may be a record. The dismissal of Northamptonshire for a mere 430 in the sixth Championship match was, no doubt, greeted by dancing in the streets of Tunbridge Wells.

If we expected Kent’s status as champions to give us solace in the T20, we were to be disappointed. Despite the recent win at Taunton, they remain ninth of nine in the southern group. Being able to watch the live streams of county cricket here in New Zealand is a wonderful thing, but breakfast watching has been a Groundhog Day of Kentish defeats.

My Blean Correspondent and I have been wondering whether 2022 displaces 1980 as the annus horribilis of our times. In that wet summer, Kent were kept off the bottom of the Championship only by a win over Warwickshire off the penultimate possible ball of Canterbury Week. There were exits at the earliest possible opportunity in both knockout competitions, and Sundays were spent adrift in the bottom half of the league.

Allen Hunt and George Murrell always maintained that the fifties were universally grim. One day, I mentioned that in 1951 Kent had a run of 20 Championship games without a win. George just said “Ah yes” as if remembering a summer spent in a foxhole and preferring not to talk about it.

So it is tempting to take refuge in the past, to return to the seventies when the sun shone every day on a never-ending series of Kentish victories, except when it didn’t.

Exactly half-a-century ago today as I write, Kent played Middlesex in the Sunday League at Folkestone. I loved the Sunday League, but it is in the nature of the shorter forms that many of its matches have not stuck in the mind. I look at scorecards knowing that I must have been there, but struggle to excavate corroboration from the memory.

Not this one. Kent v Middlesex at Folkestone in 1972 is a contest that I have thought about more than any other that I have watched. It was again in my mind just last week as I willed New Zealand to take some wickets even as England were within a couple of shots away from victory at Lord’s. Remember Folkestone ‘72, I thought as I invariably do as cricket matches reach their conclusion with one team well ahead, either from caution or hope, depending on whether it is my team that is winning or losing.

For this was a game in which Kent snatched defeat not just from the jaws of victory, but from its lower intestine, almost fully digested.

It was a top-of-the-table fixture. Kent had won four from five thus far in 1972, Middlesex were unbeaten. The first Ashes test was taking place at Old Trafford so Kent were without Luckhurst and Knott. Middlesex had no international absentees, through Price and Parfitt were both to feature later in the series. The Times sent Peter Marson along. His report supplements my memories and is reproduced below.

Kent won the toss and put Middlesex in. We can’t deduce anything about the pitch from this; it was what usually happened on Sundays in 1972. The visitors struggled from the start. It is unusual to write about a Middlesex one-day match in the seventies and eighties without mentioning a match-winning innings of nudging and nurdling from Clive Radley, but here he was run out for three. With MJ Smith and Parfitt also going for single-figures, Middlesex were 15 for three.

Norman “Smokey” Featherstone and Mike Brearley started a cautious rebuild, but both were out with the total at 40. Brearley was in the second of twelve seasons as Middlesex captain, and had not yet attained the mythical status with which he was later to be invested, but his apprenticeship with the Jedi was well under way and may have been behind the mysterious turn that events were to take.

That Middlesex reached 127 was down to a partnership of 54 in nine overs between former England keeper JT Murray, and Keith Jones, who was from Central Casting’s plentiful stock of bits-and-pieces seaming all-rounders.

Derek Underwood, incomprehensibly omitted from the test team for Norman Gifford, took two for 28, but it was John Shepherd who was the meanest of the Kent attack that day with just 12 runs from his eight overs.

Norman Graham took two for 29, getting Smith and Murray both caught behind, no doubt from balls that did just enough, and bounced a little more than expected off the most inconvenient line and length. As I have written before, Graham probably wouldn’t pass the two-skills athlete test to be a cricketer these days, and the game is poorer for it.

Bernard Julien took three wickets, Parfitt early and Titmus and Price to finish the innings. On the basis that he was West Indian, a left-arm bowler who mixed a little wrist-spin in with the quicker stuff, and had unquestioned talent, Julien was lumbered with the worst of all labels: the new Sobers. Ridiculous as that was, he was potentially a high-quality player who never quite achieved what he promised. It didn’t help that for Kent he, the maker of two test hundreds, was a perennial No 9.

As ever, we should remember that 127 was, in 1972, not quite the cinch that it would be now. But it wasn’t far off. For the greatest part of the chase, Kent made it look easy. Dave Nicholls opened the batting at the ground where, nine years before, he had made 211 against Derbyshire, one of only two double hundreds in the County Championship that year. He was bracketed with Luckhurst and Denness as the future of Kent’s batting in the annual report. But it was eight years until he made his only other first-class hundred. He might have drifted out of the game had it not been for Kent’s lack of a deputy for Alan Knott when the great keeper began his England career in 1967. It was a role that Nicholls filled most capably for a decade. In 1972 he made regular appearances as a batter even when Knott was available. In this game he opened, put on 51 for the first wicket with Graham Johnson and was sixth out, for 54, going for the run that would have levelled the scores. No doubt he returned to the pavilion thinking that a good job had been done.

Denness and Cowdrey were both out for five, and Asif Iqbal was unable to bat at his usual place as he was ill. As so often, it was Alan Ealham who moved things along, with 24 of a fourth-wicket partnership of 33 with Nicholls. Only 19 were needed when Ealham was out, only ten when Shepherd’s was the fifth wicket to fall.

Neither Woolmer’s duck two runs later, nor Nicholls’ departure caused us any worries. People round the ground were packing up their picnic baskets, folding their chairs and making for car park or railway station. Some of them may have gone to their graves ignorant of the catastrophe that unfolded as they left the ground.

Only when Julien edged Selvey behind for the second of five noughts on the scorecard did it sudden occur to us that the victory that had seemed captive since the opening overs was tunnelling beneath our feet and had almost reached the perimeter fence. But still it was only two runs to win, one for the tie.

The next sight offered no reassurance. Peter Marson reported that Asif, who now walked down the pavilion steps, was unwell and running a high temperature. The story that went round at the time was that he had malaria, and had gone into quick decline shortly after the toss. He had left the field not long into the Middlesex innings. Now, this most swift footed of cricketers appeared to be using his bat as a walking stick as he made his way to the middle.

The simple act of scoring a run now seemed akin to splitting the atom or running a four-minute mile. Asif appeared incapable of lifting the bat with sufficient purpose to play a shot, nor of getting down the other end if he had, when normally he would have been there and back in an instant. Twice he watched the ball go by before the desperate attempted slog against Mike Selvey that resulted in the loss of a stump.

It was telling that, so ill as he obviously was, Asif was still considered a better bet to win the game than a perfectly well Norman Graham, in whose hand a bat was as effective as a bow and arrow when charging machine guns. I am not sure if Norman received a ball when he replaced Asif. Marson makes it clear that Underwood was faced the last over, bowled by Sam Black. The “dire alarms” sounded by the first two balls of the over were wild swipes as the collective hysteria that overtook the Kent lower order spread to the usually phlegmatic Underwood.

Frankly, the leg before decision given to the third ball was a relief as much as anything, so unbearable was the tension, so improbable the scoring of even a single run. There was an awful silence as the ground emptied, as spectators tried to work out what they had just seen.

Four wickets fell for no runs when only two were needed for a win. If ever you need to cling onto hope a little longer as your side nears defeat, or if you want to guard against complacency when victory seems certain, say to yourself as I do, “Folkestone ’72”.