The Cricket Magazines: March 1973

What a treat to find two articles by Alan Gibson in The Cricketer. The first is a profile of Tony Greig, England’s outstanding player on the tour of South Asia at the time of publication. I maintain that Greig has never been given quite the recognition he deserves for being one of the best of his time, and one of England’s finest all-rounders across the eras.

Gibson hints that Greig was undervalued at this early stage of his international career too. After two years in Sussex Seconds while he qualified as an overseas player, Greig was an immediate sensation, with 156 on Championship debut. It should be remembered that he committed to playing for England before South Africa’s exclusion from international cricket, yet it seemed that English cricket, presented with such a gift, was unwilling to unwrap it, fearful that it might be a bit showy or extravagant.

Greig eventually made his test debut (or so we then thought) in 1970 against the Rest of the World. Gibson reports:

In the second match at Nottingham, which England won (probably the best performance by an England side since the Second World War) he had as much as anyone to do with the victory, taking four wickets in the first innings and three in the second. The batsmen whose wickets he took were Richards (twice), Sobers (twice), Kanhai, Engineer and Barlow. 

Despite topping the bowling averages, and scoring a fifty in the third match, Greig was omitted from the Ashes tour party that winter, and left out throughout the 1971 season, the selectors’ preference being for the more pedestrian Richard Hutton. 

Both players were selected for the Rest of the World squad that toured Australia the following winter.

No doubt both were chosen in the first place because of Australian determination not to pick a Rest of the World side that approximated to the real strength of the Rest of the World: but it did not turn out to be so pointless a series as was intended, and of the two English all-rounders it was Greig who made his mark.

Gibson concludes by reporting the opinion of his colleague at The Times, John Woodcock, to whom he refers by the usual sobriquet.

The Sage of Longparish is not himself a tall man, and has not always been enthusiastic about Greig in the past. What he really feels is that all the best cricketers are five foot three. A judgement from this quarter is therefore convincing.

Gibson’s second piece is titled Cricket in Fiction. It is an amiable ramble that touches upon, among others, Richards, de Selincourt, Dickens, Sayers and, of course, Wodehouse. Also JL Carr, whose recently published A Season in Sinji is mentioned in the opening paragraph, and to which Gibson returns near the end.

I would have enjoyed it if he had left out the cricket.

He forces his analogies, he strains his language, to show that life is just a game of cricket, which is neither more or less true than that life is just a bowl of cherries, some of them going bad, or a sack of potatoes, or – well, whatever analogy happens to come to you. 

Mr Carr is very strong on breasts and lavatories, which I suppose is mandatory in the modern novel. Just as I was beginning to get interested in the bosoms, there was a piece about cricket; and just as I was beginning to get interested in the cricket, back came the bosoms, and the dirt, and the violence. No doubt life is like that : but since we all have to experience it anyway, I doubt if we have any obligation to read about it as well.

Both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly reported on the third and fourth tests between India and England. The hosts took a two-one lead in the third, but only by four wickets. England could not cope with the most renowned of spin trios, Bedi, Chandrasekhar and Prasanna. Fletcher’s unbeaten 97 apart, no England batsman made more than 20 in the first innings, and none more than 21 except Denness’s 76 in the second. These were notable innings by both future England captains, but they went almost unnoticed. Pat Pocock took four wickets as India made hard work of their target of 86. As the Sage writes, “With another 50 runs in the bag [England] would probably have won it”.

One thing that I learned was that Derek Underwood could not play in this game, having awoken with a temperature on the first morning. I had thought that Underwood, round-shouldered smoker that he was, had never missed a test match for fitness reasons, but this was illness, not injury. “If any wicket in India was likely to be suited to Underwood’s many talents it was this one in Madras” said Playfair’s anonymous correspondent, who had probably cobbled the report together from press reports, given that the magazine was now an issue away from oblivion. 

In the fourth test, England achieved a lead of 40, but India’s first innings occupied the whole of the first two days on a slow pitch that offered bowlers little, so a draw was the outcome. The highlight was captain Lewis’s 125, his sole test century. The Sage:

Having said that the time had come to attack the Indian spinners, Lewis, in Kanpur, did something about it. When he came in Bedi had bowled nine overs for eleven runs and England were 48 for two…Lewis at once jumped out to hit him over mid-on for four. He had got 70 against Bedi on a turning pitch in England last season by using his feet, and this is what he did now.

Tony Lewis might have been picked for England at any time in the previous decade. The list of batsmen no better than him who were is long. As Woodcock says, the innings showed what Lewis might have achieved “had he had the advantage of playing on better pitches than those in Glamorgan”. 

Another tour is featured in both magazines, that of Kent, as Sunday League champions, to the West Indies. I have written about this tour before but was unaware that both The Cricketer and Playfair carried extensive reports on it, by Michael Carey and Howard Booth (of the Daily Mirror, if memory serves) respectively.

In my original article I called out Wisden’s description of my former skiing instructor Barry Dudleston’s bowling as “chinamen” as wrong, given that the Playfair annual consistently listed him as “SLA”, but it seems that it was indeed wrist spin that he purveyed on this tour.

According to Booth, Colin Cowdrey “rated him a more effective bowler than Ken Barrington on these pitches”. He got Rohan Kanhai out first ball, although it needed a brilliant catch by Alan Ealham off a full toss.

One promising Antiguan batsman was noticed in both reports. This is Carey’s description:

The locals made an entertaining fight of it, largely due to Vivian Richards, a 23-year-old batsman of sound technique and bold method. Cowdrey felt he would play for the West Indies soon.

In Playfair, Cardus laments “the virtual disappearance of the spin bowler”, which was to overstate the case when most counties still went into matches with two slow-bowling options. He tells a story about SF Barnes (and we must remember that in matters of factual accuracy Cardus was the Fox News of his day) and a match that celebrated his eightieth birthday. Barnes was to bowl the first ball and was asked what he intended. “I’ll bowl the first ball but I don’t know about a full over. I can’t spin now, my fingers are too old. I suppose I’ll have to fall back on seamers—any fool can bowl ‘em”.