The Cricketer, May 1973

Dennis Amiss is on the cover of the May 1973 edition of the newly-styled The Cricketer with Cricket Monthly, the title now alone in the cricket magazine market. I noted last month that good performances on MCC’s tour of South Asia had barely registered due to the lack of broadcast coverage. The most acute example is Amiss’s performance in the three-test series in Pakistan.

I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that he made a century in each of the first two tests and 99 in the third, perhaps the best overseas performance by an England batsman in a shorter series until Harry Brooke went one run  better late last year in Pakistan for three hundreds in three games. Amiss is going strong at 80, and was recently interviewed at length on the Final Word. 

Ken Barrington, with his average of 58, is the most underrated English batsman since the Second World War, but Amiss (46, 51 when opening) is not far behind. His achievement in this series did not convert John Thicknesse to his cause in a piece about the options for England’s selectors. Of Amiss and Fletcher (for whom this was also a breakthrough tour) he says “I hope it’s not uncharitable to say that neither has yet done much more than make people reconsider”. About as uncharitable as buying a poppy with a foreign coin, I’d have thought.

Incidentally, anyone not familiar with the Final Word should do themselves a favour and check it out. It is a podcast run by Adam Collins and Geoff Lemon, with occasional help from others such as Dan Norcross and Bharat Sundaresan. They usually put out two lengthy shows a week, one on current events and the other on cricket history, with donors sending them amounts based on cricket statistics that they then have to work out. Collins and Lemon are cricket’s most interesting audio journalists and I look forward to SEN’s commentary on this summer’s tests in England with Collins leading the team.

The three tests in Pakistan were all drawn. John Woodcock reports that “in each of these there was a time on the last day when a result was possible” and, of Pakistan captain Majid Khan, “There were two occasions when, with more aggression, he might have forced an issue”. Nevertheless, all three games faded away into draws, an outcome that accounted for 16 of the 24 tests played between the two countries in Pakistan before last December’s series.

All the more reason to regard the three-nil victory by Stokes’ team on those same dead pitches as one of the greatest achievements in my time watching cricket, Bazball’s finest moment (so far). 

Two pieces of trivia from the 72-73 series: as well as Amiss, Majid Khan and Mushtaq Mohammad also made 99, the only test in which three have fallen one short of the ton; also, both sides were led by current county colleagues. 

The second and third tests between the West Indies and Australia got considerably more column inches than the series in Asia. Pitches were also a focus for Tony Cozier’s report. That for the second test, in Bridgetown, “offered the bowlers minimal help and simply got progressively slower as the [match] progressed”, rather like those in Pakistan. The strip in Trinidad, however, “readily responded to spin throughout and gave uneven bounce”.

We were now just a couple of years away from the emergence of the West Indies pace quartet that, like the Rolling Stones, changed its personnel from time without compromising its place at the head of the pack. So who opened the bowling with Keith Boyce in Port of Spain?

It was none other than Clive Lloyd, whose dobbly medium pacers could be quite effective in the Sunday League, but whose function here was to remove the shine from the ball as quickly as possible, an action that was to be considered heretical around the Caribbean for at least three decades thereafter. 

Lance Gibbs “was the pick of all the bowlers and was never handled comfortably” but it was Australia’s trio of leg spinners, O’Keefe, Jenner and, more surprisingly, Stackpole, who led the way to a 44-run win, along with Doug Walters’ “truly great innings” of 112. 

There are interviews with two Essex players, John  Lever, and Brian “Tonker” Taylor, just appointed to the selection panel. The byline for the latter is that of Martin Tyler, still Sky’s lead football commentator 50 years on. Tyler wrote a couple of cricket books and commentated for ITV regions on Roses matches, but his best-known link with the game is that he was Bob Willis’s flatmate when the fast bowler was called up as a replacement for the 1970/71 Ashes tour.

As both football and cricket have expanded into twelve-month assignments, cross-fertilisation between writers and broadcasters on the two sports has almost disappeared, which is a loss. It used to be usual for journalists to cover a winter and a summer sport. 

ITV’s Brian Moore was a Kent fan. I sat next to him and an older man (his father, possibly) at a knockout match at St Lawrence in the early 90s. His first appearance on TV was on Sunday Cricket in 1965 (Desmond Lynam also made his TV debut on Sunday Cricket, seven years later). The BBC tried to poach Moore in the 70s, and offered him Peter West’s job as presenter of cricket to sweeten the package, but to no avail. 

On the radio, Peter Jones and Maurice Edelston were both occasional commentators on county cricket, and Jon Champion, Mark Pougatch, Mark Saggers and Arlo White all made appearances as callers on Test Match Special. The sports pages at the height of summer often featured football writers at leisure, including Jimmy Armfield in the Daily Express. Best of all was David Lacey’s annual appearance in the cricket pages of The Guardian, usually at Hove. I came across a Lacey line new to me the other day. In a report on a drubbing of Manchester United by Barcelona he wrote:

Pallister and Bruce appeared to be auditioning for the role of Juliet: “Romario, Romario, wherefore art thou Romario?”

The News of the Month has this:

G Boycott has disclosed that the risk of harm to his health following an operation for the removal of his spleen prompted him to declare himself unavailable for the recent MCC tour of India and Pakistan.

Given the tenor of Boycott’s subsequent commentaries, it is to be wondered if they got it all. 

The Cricket Magazines: April 1973

This was the last edition of Playfair Cricket Monthly. Founder and editor Gordon Ross was to become executive editor of The Cricketer incorporating Cricket Monthly. This is presented as a marriage of equals, a blend of the two titles, but my memory is that The Cricketer, which does not mention the merger, remained much as it was, with the coda to its masthead disappearing fairly soon. The spirit of Playfair continued in The Cricketer Quarterly, edited by Ross, a compendium of scores and statistics that filled the gap before the information became available in the following year’s Wisden.

The magazine emerged from the Playfair Cricket Annual, which started in the forties and which Ross continued to edit until his death in 1985. He passed away at Lord’s at the end of a day’s cricket, a departure that any of us might wish for ourselves. The Playfair Cricket Annual continues; this year’s will arrive in our mailbox yesterday, and it is still the most convenient way of looking up a wide range of information. 

A flick through shows why magazine one survived while the other did not. The Cricketer is attractively laid out with photographs on almost every page. Playfair has great slabs of text and lengthy paragraphs. It appears to be short of advertising.

There is plenty of international cricket recorded this month. England’s series in India ended on a flat pitch in Bombay (as it then was), with centuries for Engineer, Vishwanath, Fletcher and Greig, the last two both maidens. India therefore won two-one. A million-and-a-quarter spectators attended the five games. John Woodcock describes it as:

…the series which England should have won; as the one they threw away with some really rather faint-hearted batting in the second and third Test matches.

That was not the end of the tour. A victory by MCC against Sri Lanka is reported this month (test status was still nine years away), and then it was off to Pakistan for three more tests. 

The hosts in that series were recently returned from New Zealand, where they won a three-test series one-nil, as RT Brittenden reports in The Cricketer. What a batting line-up Pakistan had. Zaheer Abbas, Kent’s own Asif Iqbal, Majid Khan, Wasim Raja and Sadiq and Mushtaq Mohammad. The bowling—Sarfraz Nawaz, Saleem Altaf and Intikhab Alam—was not too bad either. In no country has the mismatch of talent and achievement been so large as Pakistan’s. Peter Oborne’s excellent history of Pakistan’s cricket, Wounded Tiger, explains why this is so. More recently, Wasim Akram’s Sultan, ghosted by Gideon Haigh, shows how undermining internal division and rivalry could be. This one was a Christmas present from my wife, a convert to the view that there is no such thing as too many cricket books.

Pakistan’s victory came at the old Carisbrook ground in Dunedin, built on 201 from Mushtaq and 175 from Asif. But here in New Zealand the series is remembered mostly for the world-record breaking tenth-wicket stand of 151 at Eden Park between Brian Hastings and Dick Collinge. The previous record was held by Wilfred Rhodes and RE Foster during the latter’s famous 287 at Sydney in 1903. The Cricketer asked the 96-year-old Rhodes for his memories of a stand that lasted little more than an hour. “I made 40 in that time. I weren’t just defending” said the great man.

Tony Cozier reports in The Cricketer on the first test between West Indies and Australia in Jamaica, a high-scoring draw. I notice that Rod Marsh was out hit wicket for 97, so the air would have been as blue as the sea. 

Of the five tests featured this month, only one was not drawn. The rest were all a day or so off a definitive result. Such matches are now quite unusual. It is a paradox that now, when test cricket’s existence is under threat, the long form of the game itself is much more entertaining than it was fifty years ago. 

Both magazines devote several pages to events in South Africa, particularly the recent tour by the DH Robins XI, ostensibly a private affair but bearing a marked resemblance to an England A team, including Bob Willis, John Hampshire, John Lever, Frank Hayes and several other future test players. 

You wouldn’t think it possible to devote seven pages to cricket in the Cape in this era without using the word Apartheid, but they manage it. The extent of the self-delusion is massive, that cricket can exist in splendid isolation, free of all social and political context, and that the non-white populations should be content with a small amount of money to improve facilities and a few days’ coaching. 

Gordon Ross reported on his recent visit to the Republic. After two pages of crayfish mayonnaise and trips to the races he eventually addresses the issue, but shamefully so:

We paused for some time at the section reserved for the Coloureds [at Newlands]. How absorbed they were in the cricket; how magnificently behaved they were. I couldn’t help but see in the mind’s eye, a D’Oliveira somewhere among them, and fervently hoped that they might enjoy better facilities than ‘Dolly’ did. I am interested only in cricket and cricketers; not politics, race or colour. I only wish somewhere there was a solution to it all.

There was Gordon, yes there was. 

Alan Gibson reviews four books by the same author, who, having been dead for 57 years, was in no position to rebut; it was WG Grace, or rather, his ghostwriters.

Of course, the books were ‘ghosted’, though that practice was not quite so common in his day as it is in ours, nor so widely accepted by the public. Had WG been exposed on television, his most innocent admirers might have wondered where all those fine phrases came from.

Arthur Porritt held the pen for what Gibson considers the best of these books. In his own autobiography, Porritt describes the challenges of this collaboration:

Grace was choke full of cricketing history, experience and reminiscences, but he was a singularly inarticulate man, and had he been left to write his own cricketing biography it would never have seen the light. …Grace accepted me as collaborator with his utmost heartiness, and, although the task of getting the material from him was almost heartbreaking, I enjoyed the work immensely.

The Cricketer has an account by Mike Brearley on his winter travels, first in India, covering the first three tests for The Guardian and The Observer, then in the Caribbean, guesting for Kent, as described in the March editions. He reflects on the challenge of being a current player who turns reporter.

I found cricket-watching enhanced by the journalistic duty; my concentration was sharper and I like having to formulate my response to the day’s play…As a colleague of the players I felt faintly inhibited from any harsh words I might have thought, partly by a sense of solidarity in the face of a public which can be unappreciative, partly by the fear that criticism from me might be taken to imply a belief in my own ability to do better.

The next time England played in India, Brearley was a member of the team, allowing judgment to be made on this matter.