1975: Setting the Scene

Eight years ago I retrospectively chronicled the English cricket season of 1967 as it unfolded, a half century after it happened. Daily posts on Twitter, as if it had existed in the time of flower power and Tom Graveney, were supplemented by weekly blog posts using hindsight to the full. The cricket was placed in the context of events of the day. This was great fun to do and attracted favourable reviews, notably from Brian Carpenter’s annual round-up of the cricket blogs in Wisden (sadly missing from the 2025 edition). 

I have not repeated the exercise since, largely through lack of time. For six of the intervening years I was House advisor to the New Zealand government of Labour PMs Ardern and Hipkins, responsible for wrangling the government’s programme in Parliament, which kept me busy. The result of the 2023 general election reversed that role into one of undermining the government. Happily, the new administration is doing such a fine job of that themselves that I have been able to cut my hours, and have the time to repeat the exercise in cricketing retrospectivity, this time looking at the cricketing summer of 1975.

Why 1975? It continues the fifty-year-anniversary theme. But mostly, it was a great summer, both for cricket and the weather. There was the first World Cup, the Ashes and county cricket everywhere, all the time. And the sun shone through high summer more than any other in my life to that point (but not as much as the following year).

English cricket began the season in a state of shock following the drubbing received over the winter at the hands of Australia in general and Lillee and Thomson in particular. Kent’s Mike Denness was the incumbent England captain, but it was not yet confirmed that he would still be when the World Cup started in early June. Hampshire’s Richard Gilliatt led MCC in the season opener against champions Worcestershire. The obvious successor was Tony Greig, an option found distasteful by the cricketing establishment mostly because of Greig’s brash approach to cricket and life. His close-of-play riot-provoking running out of Alvin Kallicharran at Port-of-Spain the previous year was still held against him.

The County Championship of 1975 was a contest of 20 three-day matches per county. A possible 60 playing days was only four more than the current programme of 14 four-day games offers, though the Championship then was for high summer not the scrag ends of the season. The 55-over competition started with a group stage of four games a side preceding the knockouts. Sundays were for the 40-over league, and the 60-over knockout took place over the second half of the season.

I am always suspicious of people who proclaim their youth as the best of times. Usually, they are merely regretting that they are no longer young. Nevertheless, I contend that the mid-seventies were a golden age for county cricket. Every county (except Yorkshire, for self-imposed reasons) could sign a world-class player or two. This meant that young English players could learn by bowling to the likes of the Richards, or facing Andy Roberts or Sarfraz Nawaz. Paying at the gate to watch a county game came with a virtual guarantee that an international star or two would be on the field, and, with four trophies to contend for, every county had a chance.

As before, I will mix the cricket together with news and events of the time, one generally regarded as low point in modern British history, with inflation rarely used without its companion adjective “runaway” and strikes, be they lightening, wildcat or other dominating the news. Two of the most prominent television news journalists were Peter Sissons and Ian Ross, industrial correspondents of ITN and the BBC respectively.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson struggled to maintain a bare majority in the Commons, a battle brilliantly recounted in James Graham’s play The House, and one that fascinated me as I was drawn into the world of parliamentary process and procedure as I had been into the world of cricket a few years before. For Christmas that year I asked for the first volume of Richard Crossman’s Diaries of a Cabinet Minister to sit on the shelf alongside Wisden.

Internationally, as the first balls of the season were bowled thousands of Vietnamese associated with the collapsing government of South Vietnam struggled to escape as Saigon fell. Gerald Ford (another Republican who we now view with unexpected nostalgia) was President of the USA; Giscard d’Estaing led France; Gough Whitlam was Australian PM, but was to fall to the Governor-General’s DRS later in the year; Labour’s Bill Rowling was New Zealand’s PM, but was gone by the end of the year.

One change from last time: daily social media updates will be on Bluesky rather than Twitter. I can be found there as @kentkiwi.bsky.social with username Cricket1975. As with 1967 eight years ago, the dates fall conveniently on the same days of the week as they do in the present.

I’d welcome contributions from others with memories of the summer of ’75.