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”.