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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).
