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.