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:

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