24 – 30 May 1975 A Good Week for Mike Denness

 

24 – 30 May 1975

This was the first week of the 1975 season that followed the pattern familiar to followers of county cricket in the seventies: three-day games beginning on Saturday and Wednesday with a 40-over game interposed on Sunday. For spectators it was a brilliant arrangement, particularly in Kent where the season was divided largely into cricket weeks, each at a different venue around the county: Canterbury, Folkestone, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells.

For the players, it looks like madness, more a motoring rally than cricket season, particularly the year in question when it was decreed that counties should play different opponents on Sunday to those they were against on Saturday and Monday. So this week, Yorkshire had to drive down to Edgbaston from Manchester for the Sunday game, returning to resume the Roses match on Monday; Northamptonshire went from Leicester to Bristol and back (this on a bank holiday weekend).

The present-day schedule is much more forgiving, allowing time for travel and preparation (the latter in 1975 probably being a euphemism for extra drinking). The English season has been stretched into the extremities of April and September to accommodate this. Yet still the players complain that there is too much cricket in too short a time. I have less sympathy than for their (much lower-paid) predecessors. Obviously, the workload of fast bowlers must be very carefully managed, like lead pitchers in the MLB, who play once every four or five days. Counties have a duty of care for all their players, and any deserve a break when their physical or mental health demands it.

The larger squads that counties have these days should make that possible without reducing the number of fixtures. I cannot accept that having to play T20 games on successive days once or twice a season is an intolerable burden. Even with a generous margin for wides and no balls, that adds up to no more than 60 balls for a bowler, about what our baseball pitcher would expect to throw in a game.

There were hundreds this week for stalwarts of the county game: Roger Tolchard and Jack Birkenshaw of Leicestershire; Jack Hampshire of Yorkshire; Peter Graves of Sussex, Dudley Owen-Thomas of Surrey, Phil Slocombe and Brian Close for Somerset; Alan Jones (not to be confused with Alan Lewis Jones) of Glamorgan; David Turner of Hampshire; Jim Foat, a folk hero in Gloucestershire (his maiden century); and Bob Woolmer and Graham Johnson of Kent. Johnson had a fine season in 1975 with 1300 runs and 36 wickets. Had England toured that winter he might well have been selected. It remains a minor scandal of that time that Geoff Miller of Derbyshire, a similar player, appeared in 34 tests, while Johnson played in none. His best form never coincided with a vacancy.

Alan Gibson was at Bristol for the Jones hundred.

 

As ever, Gibson reported on what happened around the ground as well as on the field. He came across the injured David Shepherd (later a famed umpire), who, he tells us, “was wearing a sweater of violent purple as though contemplating applying for a job on The Guardian”.

There were also centuries for Barry Richards and Alvin Kallicharran, both more than stalwarts. Richards was reeling them off, and was well ahead of rivals at the top of the batting averages. And one for Mike Denness, who had whose 171 against Derbyshire ended a run of indifferent form.

Bowling performance of the week was by Worcestershire’s Brian Brain, eight for 55 against Essex. “He looked like a young sociology don at Harvard” wrote Gibson. Despite this career-best, 34-year-old Brain was released by Worcestershire at the end of that season, but took a further 316 wickets in six years with Gloucestershire. His diary of the 1980 season Another Day, Another Match was an outstanding example of the genre (if anybody has a copy I would be happy to pay the postage to New Zealand). John Arlott’s brief review in the 1982 Wisden said that it was “an account of pleasure and pressure; a blend of shrewd and thoughtful observation; of humour and anxiety; the story of one man’s job – but a job that is lit by the romanticism which is in every full-time cricketer”.

The same match saw an achievement that surpassed even Brain’s. Essex leg-spinner Robin Hobbs took his thousandth first-class wicket. “No other leg-spinner, I am afraid, will do it again” wrote Gibson, echoing the universal view that leg-spin was on its way out as surely as black-and-white televisions and half-day closing. You want to reach back through the years and say “there’s this five-year-old in Melbourne…”. Of course, as far as English leg-spinners go, it was a point well-made, though in all forms of the game Adil Rashid is well clear of a thousand, including, I was surprised to discover, 512 in first-class cricket. For comparison, there were 18 players listed in the 1975 Playfair with a thousand wickets at the start of the season. Only Jimmy Anderson is past the mark in this year’s edition.

It was a good week for Denness, who was confirmed as England captain for the World Cup. John Arlott’s Monday commentary in The Guardian tells us that the decision was not straightforward.

 

Some of the criteria that got Denness over the line tell us a lot about English cricket at that time: “well turned out…good manners and bearing.” A curiosity is that this was the first time that the selection panel consisted entirely of ex-professional players.

In The Times, John Woodcock had the inside line on the selection meeting. Reporting that Charlie Elliott (a test umpire for many years, including one at Lancaster Park, Christchurch in 1971) and Ken Barrington favoured Greig, while Sir Len Hutton and Alec Bedser backed Denness. Woodcock favoured Greig, despite his established reservations about the Sussex all-rounder and his acknowledgement that others may be relieved that they did not lead MCC in Australia. He is interesting on Boycott, who announced his unavailability for England selection hard upon the confirmation of Denness. The claim from the Fitzwilliam Firebrand that he has found “peace and contentedness” with Yorkshire is hard not to smirk at when hindsight gives us knowledge of the blood letting that characterised Yorkshire cricket over the following decade or so. Here is Woodcock’s Monday commentary in full:

 

As well as being cricket correspondent of The Guardian, Arlott was also its wine writer. This week he offers advice on cooking with wine. He always followed his own advice that “it is better to be generous than cautious”.

Headline of the week, from The Times, is as applicable now as it was then:

Why Kent take so long to bowl out the opposition on good pitches.

Today, the old county languish at the bottom of Division Two and my Blean Correspondent and myself fear that it could be the worst season since the annus horribilis of 1980.

The 1975 season had been scheduled as a one with a full tour by South Africa. The World Cup and four-test series with Australia came about with the continued suspension of cricket with the apartheid state. Those who thought that sport was separate from politics might have asked themselves how that could be conceivable under a government that enforced laws in the manner reported by Stanley Uys in The Guardian. Uys, by the way, was described by a minister of the Vorster Government as "probably the most unscrupulous liar in South Africa and a self-confessed traitor", a badge of honour indeed. 

 

 

 

17 - 23 May 1975 The Appeal of the Shoreditch Sparrow

This week in 1975 was given over to one-day cricket, with the final two rounds of the zonal stage in the 55-over competition and the Sunday League. Again, the scoring was generally as modest as a Jane Austen heroine. Minor Counties (North) were dismissed for 67 (Nottinghamshire’s left-arm quick Barry Stead five for 26), MC (South) for 94 and 83, Oxbridge for 93. Worcestershire fell 49 short of Northamptonshire’s 152. Another left-arm seamer tending to the portly, John Dye with five for 30, was central here too.

At Lord’s, Kent made just 137 for nine in 55 overs, of which John Shepherd contributed 96, a Bannermanesque[1] proportion of the total. Otherwise, only Underwood made double figures. Shepherd came in unusually high at No 5 here, which is where he would have batted regularly for most counties rather than his perennial No 8 for Kent. There are any number of similar examples of Shepherd making runs when others failed. His three for 21 ensured that his runs were just enough for Kent to win. No player contributed more to Kent’s success in the seventies than John Shepherd.

Alan Gibson was there. I do agree with him that low-scoring one-day games are the most interesting kind. It is a measure of the financial development of the game in the subsequent half-century that now it is the fast bowlers who break down. Then it was their cars.

 

Later in the week Gibson was at the Oval for Surrey versus Gloucestershire, which meant that he was sure to report on the performance of one of the main players in his repertory company, Robin Jackman aka the Shoreditch sparrow.

 

Jackman was a magnificent appealer, quite the best of his generation. With a noise sometimes mistaken for a passing aircraft he would turn, throw his arms in the air and continue backwards down the pitch, finishing close enough to the batter to shake hands, this after a run up double of the length that the subsequently generated pace suggested it should be. That his dash to the boundary did not prevent an all-run four was no shame; the Oval field in those days was vast, barely contained within a single postal district.

In a footnote to Gibson’s account it was reported that in the 52^nd over of Surrey’s reply umpire Peter Rochford failed to add an extra ball to the over for a wide. The match finished with the scores level but with Gloucestershire the winners having lost fewer wickets. These days, even in a non-televised match, such an error would be picked up by the match referee and communicated to the middle. In the past, counting mistakes were more frequent than might be thought, and, like other umpiring decisions were more widely accepted as part of life’s rich tapestry.

At Chelmsford, Brian Edmeades of Essex was caught on the boundary, but fielder Roger Marshall told the umpires that he could not be sure that both feet had remained inside the boundary (I’d bet that it was marked by a painted line rather than a rope). Edmeades was reprieved, and was unbeaten at the end of the innings. When the numbers were crunched at the end of the day that one wicket enabled Middlesex to qualify for the quarter-finals at the expense of  Sussex. Perhaps Sussex skipper Tony Greig had renounced the law of the jungle as urged by John Woodcock (see last week).

More slow scoring in the Sunday League. I was at Canterbury for the visit of Yorkshire, another game that fails to register in the memory, but the scorecard attests that I was there. 

The Times reporter was Michael Horsnell, at the beginning of three decades as a staff reporter. He covered crime and other issues rather than sport, possibly the result of his experience at St Lawrence that day.

 

Derbyshire had a bad week. On Saturday they lost to Lancashire by 67 runs. “Since for them any total over 150 constitutes and unseemly run orgy, it was clear that Derbyshire would have to rise above their usual mundane level with the bat to win” wrote Derby-based reporter Michael Carey (later to be come cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph). Later in the week Brian Bolus resigned as skipper, to be replaced by Bob Taylor.

Trawling the archives provides a reminder of stories that took up a lot of space at the time, but are now forgotten. One of these was the question of whether Montreal’s the new Olympic stadium would be ready for the 1976 summer games. Such was the level of doubt that this week Mexico City offered to dust down the 1968 stadium as an alternative.

The upcoming referendum on membership was the biggest continuing story. Like referenda on anything, the protagonists presented their view as the universal elixir while the truth lay ignored halfway between them.

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[1] In what is now regarded as the first test match Charles Bannerman, who faced the first ball, went on to make  167 out of a total of 245, which remains the highest proportion of an innings contributed by one batter in a test match (67.35%). Shepherd’s innings was 70.07% of the total. 

10 - 16 May 1975 The Good and Bad of Geoffrey Boycott

 

Geoffrey Boycott was the focus of much attention this week, as he was so often in these years. Against Worcestershire, he made an unbeaten 152 and thus became only the third Yorkshireman (after Sutcliffe and Hutton) to register a century against the other 16 counties also his fiftieth in the cause of the white rose. Wisden said “Few of these previous efforts can have been technically better”. Nobody else passed fifty, except a bludgeoning Chris Old when the game was dead on the third afternoon.

The excellence of Boycott the batter was universally acknowledged, even by those who thought that he might speed up in his interest of his team from time to time. The following day the praise turned to blame, as it so often did. Boycott refused to respond to Norman Gifford’s declaration 101 in arrears by setting a meaningful target, an approach that John Woodcock did not care for:

 

These were more cautious times; later in the season I was at Canterbury when Richard Gilliatt of Hampshire was booed off the field for failing to set a target in similar circumstances.

Boycott had not yet answered the question of the day: would he play for England this season? As Woodcock records, he had been absent more than present for several years.

 

The great man’s reluctance to don the England cap has sometimes been put down to a reluctance to face the fast bowlers of the time. This is unfair. He had dropped out after the first test against India the previous year when there were runs to be harvested despite his habit of falling to the pedestrian left-arm seam of Erinath Solkar. When he pulled out of the tour to Australia in the winter Lillee was widely considered to be finished because of his back and Thomson was never mentioned. It was because Denness (and before him Tony Lewis in 1972/73) had been preferred to him as captain. Had he grimaced and borne it, Boycott, rather than Greig, would probably have succeeded the Kent man in 1975. Woodcock had a bit of a blind spot re Greig, even pre-Packer, but his appraisal of the Sussex captain’s chances of leading the national team: “His appointment would have to be conditional upon his renouncing altogether the law of the jungle” would have been widely shared in the St John’s Wood area.

The only opener who might claim more renown than Boycott was Barry Richards, probably the best in the world in 1975. His unbeaten 96 took Hampshire to victory and the top of the Championship table. Alan Gibson was at St Helen’s to rhapsodise.

 

I was at Canterbury on Saturday to see Kent lose to Sussex in the 55-over competition, a vengeful John Snow (11-4-11-3) keen to demonstrate to Denness the foolishness of his omission from the winter’s tour. I recall a spectator who was right behind the arm describing on the bus home the late swing of the ball that trapped our beleaguered leader lbw for one. Snow was at the crease to guide Sussex home in the 55^th and final over. Two hundred and fifty-two runs in 106 overs would have the marketing people these days phoning the Samaritans, but the low scoring games are often the most fascinating. “Kent’s golden touch has deserted them” wrote former Kent player Tony Pawson in The Observer. This was to be the case for most of this season, the worst of the seventies for Kent.

Sunday saw fewer overs but more runs, including a record aggregate for the Sunday League with Somerset’s 270 topping visitors Gloucestershire’s 255 at Bristol. Here, it was the other great Richards, (IVA), who set it up with 126 not out (six sixes and 13 fours). Sadiq Mohammad made 131 in reply, but with insufficient support.

Who said “there’s a mistake there, Gloucestershire would be at home in Bristol”? Not so. This was at the Imperial Ground in Knowle, south of the River Avon that marked the historic boundary of Somerset. I watched a Sunday League game there four years later.

That Sunday I was at Folkestone, or at least assume that I was, though I recall nothing of the game, even after reading the report in The Times by Gerald Sinstadt, better known as Granada TV’s football commentator. He highlights two things: the cold, but there have been so many cold days at the cricket that they stick to each other like buns too long in the freezer, one no more memorable than another. Also the running between the wickets of Mike Denness and Brian Luckhurst. When I see murmurations of  starlings performing their swooping impeccably synchronised displays, I think of Denness and Luckhurst stealing singles with wordless understanding.

 

Off-the-field cricket news concerned the standoff between the BBC and the TCCB (forerunners of the ECB) over the TV rights for the four test matches against Australia. The BBC had increased its offer to a “final” £116,000 (the equivalent of about £890,000 now according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator). The ECB’s current arrangement with Sky TV for all cricket is said to be worth £220 million a year. Of course the BBC had an effective monopoly. ITV, now with a daytime schedule, would not contemplate a rival bid.

The Godfather Part II was released that week. “Few movie sequels are as good as the films they follow and even fewer have about them an air of necessity. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is a rare exception” was the verdict of Philip French in The Guardian.

Most chilling headline of the week: “Inflation in Britain running at over 30%”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3-9 May 1975: Boyce and Lloyd a class above the rest

Saturday was FA Cup final day, an all-London affair between West Ham and second-division Fulham. A measure of what a big occasion it then was is that three of the 55-over group games were postponed from Saturday to avoid clashing with the big match at Wembley. TV coverage started mid-morning, giving the producers of Grandstand and World of Sport four hours or so to fill before kick off, something they did with various degrees of desperation. It’s a Cup Final Knockout was a perennial lowpoint in this regard.

As so often, the game failed to live up to the hype. David Lacey wrote that “It was as if the floats of the Lord Mayor’s Show had preceded merely a man in a taxi, in a grey suit, anxious not to be late for work”. East London triumphed over west two-nil, both goals by Hammers’ striker Alan Taylor. It was a curiosity that he also scored a brace in both the quarter and semi finals, but that is all he is remembered for. Bobby Moore and Alan Mullery both wore the white of Fulham.

The headliners in the 55-over games were Combined Universities, who bowled out Worcestershire for 92 to win by 66 runs. To be accurate, it was the combined Oxbridge universities that were on the field here. The result is not as surprising once we read their team list, which included Imran Khan, Peter Roebuck and the great CJ Tavaré, as well as others who had briefer county careers such as Chris Aworth of Surrey and Steve Coverdale of Yorkshire (and later CE of Northamptonshire). Vic Marks was absent, whether from injury or form isn’t clear. Imran took four for four against his own county, and Andrew Wingfield-Digby had three for 28. Wingers-Diggers, as he was later known, became both an Anglican clergyman and one of Alan Gibson’s repertory company of characters who would be guaranteed a mention regardless of how many runs and wickets they notched up. He also had a spell as chaplain to the England team, one of Ted Dexter’s ideas, and one of the more noble acts of self-sacrifice of the modern Church.

Again, the moderate nature of the scoring in this round is striking (or, rather, not). In addition to Worcestershire’s capitulation, Nottinghamshire were all out for 94 against Lancashire, Leicestershire amassed 148 for nine off the full 55 overs (it took Warwickshire 52 overs to overtake them), Middlesex bowled Sussex out for 101. At Bristol, Hampshire’s 129 was enough for a 67-run win. Essex’s 212 versus Kent was the highest score of the round.

The County Championship continued in midweek. In an attempt to shove the quart that was first-class cricket into the pint pot of three days, there was a rule for several years that the first innings of Championship games closed after 100 overs. I had forgotten this until I came across innings that were not all out but not recorded as declarations. These days, the last ten overs or so would be a slogathon, but the figures and my memory suggest that any increase of pace in the pursuit of runs in the final stages was usually barely perceptible, lest the decorum of first-class cricket should be compromised.

There was fast scoring at Chelmsford where Keith Boyce, Essex’s Bajan all-rounder hit a century against Leicestershire in 58 minutes, the fastest hundred in the Championship for 38 years. In the field, he took 12 for 73 as well as two catches, all on what Wisden describes as a spinners’ pitch. In June he would make a quick 34 and take four wickets in the World Cup final, but this is too often overshadowed by the memories of Lloyd’s batting and Richards’ fielding that day (I had forgotten and I was there). Essex folk of that era will never forget him.

“Clive Lloyd played one game yesterday and everyone else another” wrote John Woodcock of Lloyd’s century at the Oval. In the time that he made 109 , the other batters accrued 24. Worcestershire’s two New Zealanders made hundreds, Parker in the first innings, Turner in the second. Twenty-five years later I eavesdropped as they reminisced about their New Road days in the press box at Seddon Park, The other centurion in this round was the promising young Nottinghamshire batter Derek Randall, after a first innings 70. 

At Northampton, Alan Gibson was cold. You would not read a report on a cricket match like this now, and you wouldn’t have done so then by any other reporter.

 

I have a subscription to The Times, and, for the purposes of this exercise, have taken one to The Guardian archives (which also include The Observer). This was about the time when I began to read the broadsheets (as they then were) regularly, and trawling through them fifty years later reminds me how much they inspired a love of knowledge and writing. What writers there were. In The Guardian James Cameron, Barry Norman’s weekly column, Nancy Banks-Smith on TV and David Lacey on football, to name just a few. The Times had Bernard Levin (from whom I learned that you don’t always have to agree with someone to admire their writing) and Woodcock and Gibson on cricket. Above all, a Sunday morning walk to the newsagents to buy a copy of The Observer became a regular thing about now for, among others,  Nora Beloff, Levin (again) and AJP Taylor reviewing books, Hugh McIlvanney, Russell Davies, and, above all, Clive James on television. What a shame he wasn’t interested in cricket. Russell Davies is on Twitter. I posted a copy of one of his football reports. He responded, saying that he usually used fictional bylines for his football pieces as some readers did not approve of arts writers cheapening themselves in the sports section.

Here, from this week, is a typical opening to a Levin book review. You will notice the absence of a full stop. The sentence is just getting under way as we leave it.

 

In the pages outside the sports sections two of the continuing stories were the European referendum and the elusive John Stonehouse. In a month, Britain was to vote, in its first national referendum, to decide whether to stay in the EEC (as it was then known). This was Harold Wilson’s masterplan to resolve internal division in his party. The political skill necessary to execute this successfully was not fully appreciated until David Cameron tried the same thing forty years later and stuffed it up completely.

Wilson’s calling of a general election in the previous October had delivered a three-seat majority, which took considerable managing in a 635-seat Commons. This got more difficult a month later when John Stonehouse. Labour MP for Walsall North, went missing from a Miami beach, presumed drowned. He turned up, alive and well, in Melbourne a few weeks later. The Victorian police thought that they had caught Lord Lucan. Stonehouse explained that he was on "a fact-finding tour, not only in terms of geography but in terms of the inner self of a political animal". This week in 1975 the House was deciding whether it could expel him from its membership.

Headline of the week, in The Guardian:

Daily updates on Bluesky: Cricket1975 @kentkiwi.bsky.social and Twitter (or whatever) kentccc1975 @kentccc1968

 

  

1975: The Season Begins

 

Saturday 26 April 1975 – Friday 2 May 1975

There was no Cowdrey Stand; the white scoreboard and the lime tree would be a surprise. The incongruous brick dressing rooms between the pavilion and what we called the wooden stand would offend the eye. But take anybody who knows the ground only in the present back fifty years and they would recognise St Lawrence straight away. It is there that you find me, huddling for warmth in the wooden stand, as the 1975 season gets under way.

Anticipation of first day of the season kept us going through winter, which in cricket terms was longer then, beginning in early September and ending only now, in the last week of April. The season opener was not worth the wait: the Minor Counties (South) visited for the first of four zonal games in the 55-over competition. They were one of three teams included to make up a round 20, along with their northern counterparts and a combined Oxbridge side. The only opposition player with significant first-class experience was Keith Jones, who had a few years as a trundling lower-order all-rounder for Middlesex.

Put in by Mike Denness (who got into a putting-in habit that was to lead him into trouble  a couple of months down the line) the  MC South team were about grim survival, as if they were the inhabitants of a besieged town who had eaten the cats and dogs and were rounding up the rodents for stewing. They achieved their goal by being nine down after 55 overs, but for a total barely more than two an over. At first, Kent went about the pursuit with “aggravating patience” (The Observer), 44 ground out of 23 overs.  After tea Graham Johnson took things in hand, and finished with 85 while Brian Luckhurst stayed in low gear with 30 as Kent won by ten wickets with almost 20 overs to spare. Having spent the winter being pummelled by the Australian quicks, Luckhurst might be forgiven for wanting to face as much tepid trundling on a sluggish pitch as possible.  

Though the scoring rate at Canterbury was the most egregiously slow, it was not exceptional. Only Lancashire, against Yorkshire, scored more than 200. None of the 16 teams in action that day reached the stratosphere of four an over.

The innocuous three-day friendly between Oxford University and Sussex was deemed worthy of reports in the broadsheets (as they then were), and by two of the leading writers of the day, both of whom we will hear much more from as the weeks go on. Those familiar with Henry Blofeld only in his my-dear-old-thing mode may be surprised to learn that in the mid-seventies there was no writer who wrote better reports on a day’s cricket if what you were after was an account of what happened combined with perceptive analysis of why. In 1975 Blofeld was No 2 at The Guardian to John Arlott. If you wanted to be entertained, details of the cricket not compulsory, you went to Alan Gibson in The Times, for whom the play was incidental to the journey to the ground, the people he ran into, and any other tangential fun that was to be had. 

The County Championship began on Wednesday. Only two matches resulted in wins. Lancashire polished Warwickshire off in two days, Lancashire quick Peter Lee had the game of his career, taking 12 wickets including the extraordinary second-innings figures of 9.2-6-8-7. Lee was one of those players who, with better luck, would have played a few tests and could have done well.

Hampshire beat Essex. Barry Richards made 72 and 94. John  Woodcock, still the cricket correspondent of The Times described Richards’ batting in the first innings as “exhilaratingly good” and in the second “it was the batting of Richards that dwarfed all else”. Opening the bowling for Hampshire was Andy Roberts, who Woodcock tells us that in the year since Roberts made his debut for Hampshire had taken 207 wickets (though it was the more mundane Mike Taylor who took six in the second innings to seal the win). Gordon Greenidge was Richards’ opening partner. What a time it was for county cricket.

Woodcock notes that the 21-year-old Graham Gooch made 50 of a partnership of 67, but describes him as “heftily built (unless he takes care he will be vast before long)”. Perhaps it was these words that spurred Gooch to become a famously dedicated runner and trainer.

World news was dominated by the fall of Saigon, allowing a united Vietnam to rule itself for the first time in the twentieth century. The western consensus was that this was a domino falling and that the red menace would be as far as Singapore within months. Half a century later, Vietnam is still ruled by the Communist Party but you wouldn’t know it from photos of downtown Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon became), which is as full of the logos of the multinationals as anywhere else outside the communist world. I saw a TV report the other day that said that Vietnam’s young population is largely unaware of the victorious Vietnam War, on which the country does not dwell. Britain might follow this example.

Another contributor to The Times was Kim Il Sung, leader of North Korea. For reasons that remain unclear the comms team of the Democratic People’s Republic considered it worth paying for the Great Leader’s speeches (on Wednesday it was the one on education) to be reproduced in the newspaper of the British establishment, in the hope that its readers would cast aside their bowler hats and umbrellas and devote their lives to the revolution. Now, as regular readers will know, their main outlet for misinformation is the Basin Reserve scoreboard, which has been under their surreptitious control for some years.