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.