The Cricketer, June 1973

 The Cricketer, June 1973

This month’s edition was likely in my bag when I spent three days at St Lawrence in the late-May half-term holiday for a three-day game between Kent and MCC. Matches between these sides have an interesting history. If I had a cricketing time machine, one of the first places I would head would be August 1876, to see WG Grace score 344, to this day the highest individual score made at St Lawrence. What’s more, MCC were following on, and WG had bowled 77 overs in Kent’s innings. These were probably, but not certainly, six-ball overs. Six was the norm, but could be varied by agreement of the captains. Over the three days, 398 overs were bowled, 130 or so a day not being excessive for the time.

By the seventies, MCC usually only played a county in the season opener against the champions, so this fixture is a curiosity. Apparently, it came about because of concern of lack of first-class cricket early in the season. Kent fielded a full-strength side, lacking only the injured Brian Luckhurst. Led by Intikhab Alam, half MCC’s side might have been contenders for the test side given a good season. Frank Hayes scored a century on debut against West Indies a couple of months later, and Jackman, Stead, Edwards and Harris were among the better county players of the time. Younis Ahmed added some class. Bob Carter of Worcestershire was notable for an idiosyncratic running style, with arms flailing, that attracted the scorn of the younger element of the crowd. Kent topped the team up with Dave Nicholls, and Peter Topley, slow left-armer and brother of Don. Modern players would be horrified that pacemen Stead and Jackman considered 20 Championship games as insufficient opportunity to display their craft, and were keen to bowl another 33 and 39 overs respectively, and that their counties were happy for them to do so.

The match was played seriously, but just a degree more carefree than a Championship game. I remember it most for Asif Iqbal’s 72-minute hundred on the last morning, all road-runner feet, and laser driving. Of all Kent’s talented, attractive batters, Asif was the most joyous. He was 80 the other day. Happy birthday. The finish, an eight-run win for Kent with nine balls left, was as close as I had seen. 

The cover star this month is Glenn Turner, touring with the New Zealanders and on his way to a thousand runs in May, the last to do this except Graeme Hick in 1988. The exiling of the County Championship to the extremities of the season makes this one of the few old records that are more likely to be achieved these days. 

EW Swanton, now editorial director, laments the lack of young talent in the English game. 

How many young men of Test potential have come onto the scene in, say, the last five years? The sombre fact is that of those who went with MCC to the East last winter…only Tony Greig and Chris Old might not equally have been representing England in 1968. 

Swanton makes a good point. Of the Kent XI that played MCC, only left-arm quick Richard Elms was under 25 and qualified for England. Most counties were the same. This may have been no more than a glitch in the timeline; just three years later Botham, Gooch, Gatting and Gower had all emerged from an unchanged structure. 

Swanton identifies other reasons for this dearth of precocious talent.

It’s impossible for anyone in regular touch with the county to be impressed by the ability of most of the official coaches. One hopes that the calibre improves as the jobs become better paid.

He regrets that counties favour the skills likely to bring success in the one-day game, but chooses an unfortunate example as illustration.

A team of [Keith] Boyces would not, however, have much chance in a five-day test match.

Within three months Boyce was leading wicket-taker and decisive performer in West Indies’ two-nil test series victory over England. The Great Pontificator’s conclusion will still resonate with county cricket’s many supporters with only minor adaptation.

…the one institution suited to producing the complete and balanced England XI of the future remains the County Championship. The one-day competitions…do not produce players, they only exercise those who have been brought on by the traditional system.

Tony Cozier reports on the final two tests of Australia’s visit to the Caribbean, in which Boyce and his colleagues were less successful than they were to become. The fourth test was lost by ten wickets, despite Clive Lloyd’s hometown 178. The fifth was drawn with Australia a session away from making it three-nil. 

Cozier will have re-used his description of the defeat in Guyana time and again over the following two decades, substituting the names of the home team and its players.

Indisciplined batting against spirited fast bowling by Hammond and Walker backed by aggressive out-cricket resulted in a comfortable Australian victory…

Alan Ross reviews the 1973 Wisden, and reproves editor Norman Preston for including the 1970 series between England and the Rest of the World in the test records after the ICC had declared otherwise. Here, I am on Preston’s side. The cricket in that series was of a quality rarely equalled before or since, and we regarded them as tests at the time. Anyway, why should a governing body determine how data should be sorted? Statisticians should feel free to be creative.

A more recent example is the directive to include all international games in T20 records, which has rendered them meaningless (what is the second highest score in a T20 international?; the Czech Republic’s 278 for four against Turkey in 2019, of course). So the Scorecards database says that Derek Underwood has 304 test wickets, not 297, and will not enter into any correspondence. 

Speaking of Underwood, the News of the Month records that the great man took eight for nine at Hastings against Sussex, who were skittled out for 54. Not mentioned is that these were not Underwood’s best figures at this ground. For those not familiar with the geography of south-east England, Hastings is in Sussex, so it was an away ground on which Underwood would play once a year, if that. In 1964, he took nine for 28, three years later 14 in the match. Fast forward to 1984, when he made his only first-class hundred there, the day after he took six for 12, his best performance in the Sunday League. 

It wasn’t just Hastings; Deadly was partial to Sussex grounds in general. In 1977, when they came up with the cunning plan of moving the game to Hove, he took the only hat-trick of his career (I was there for that one). 

In checking a couple of facts for this piece, I discover that Underwood was the retrospective No 1 ranked test bowler from September 1969 to August 1973. So he must have been selected for the test team in June 1973? He was not, Ray Illingworth’s curious preference for Norman Gifford (none for 142 in the first two tests) triumphed again. 

Gifford was in charge of The Captain’s Column this month. A topic of the time was the requirement to bowl 18.5 overs an hour (or 111 overs in a six-hour day). Gifford asks for the co-operation of spectators behind the bowler’s arm. He would have loved me. On my headstone will be the inscription “He never moved behind the bowler’s arm”.