9 to 15 August: Phil Edmonds makes a grand entrance

Australia went to Leeds for the third test with a degree of suspicion. Their last test match there ended in a three-day loss as Derek Underwood took advantage of a fusarium-infused pitch. They beat England there in the World Cup semi-final with six for Gary Gilmour as the ball swung like the Glenn Miller Orchestra, but at 39 for six in reply before Gilmour and Walters  steered them home, it was a nervous victory that will not have left them feeling positive about returning to Headingley. It was also clear that Tony Greig’s England now had Steele in their backbone.

The Northamptonshire batter had become a national hero on the back of 50 and 45 in the draw at Lord’s. He had reinforced the perception of him as a human Maginot Line by taking 102 off the Australians at Northampton earlier in the week. Younger readers will have to read that sentence several times to make sense of it, so improbable does it seem from today’s perspective that there should be such a fixture between test matches, let alone that one of England’s leading players should play in it.

The pessimism brought on by the winter’s drubbing was not entirely expunged as John Woodcock’s preview of the game made clear:  “Unless we get an opportune storm, or it becomes consistently overcast, it is not easy to see how England will bowl Australia out twice”.

Yet by the end of the second day, at the end of this week, England were on top, with Australia on 107 for eight in reply to England’s 288 (Steele top scorer with 73). What’s more it was a spinner who did the damage. Phil Edmonds played in 51 test matches over 12 years, but his performance on his first afternoon as a test bowler remained this best-remembered single performance. He finished the day with figures of 12-4-17-5, including Nos 3 to 6 in the Australian order. At the other end Derek Underwood took one for 12 in 13 overs.

After this series Edmonds was not picked for England again until the tour of Pakistan in 1978. The absence of a tour in 1975-76 meant that there was no momentum carried forward from Edmonds’ success at Headingley. After this series he never again played in the same team as Underwood, presumably because the selectors blanched at two left-arm spinners in the same team. If so, this was unfortunate. They were left-armers who asked the batters with very different questions at considerably different paces. John Woodcock’s report on the second day described Edmonds as having “a hint of arrogance” about him. As the years passed it was the “hint of” that was challenged, rather than the “arrogance”, and it may sometimes have been personality rather than talent that kept him out, to the chagrin of the selectors. But a player who put himself beyond even Mike Brearley’s man-management compass must take some responsibility for his fate.

I followed this test match on the radio. We were on holiday in south Devon, my objections to vacationing in a minor county being overruled. Living as we did in a smallish seaside town, it was my father’s natural preference to spend our annual week away in another smallish seaside town in a different part of the country  (Brixham in this case). It was an enjoyable week of happy memory.

Everybody thought that the test match was in for an exciting finish that was difficult to predict. We were right, in a way of which none of us could have conceived.

On Sunday Alan Gibson was at Leicester. A young player took his eye, though only after shenanigans on the railway of a kind that provided a common opening to his reports, much treasured by Gibson devotees.

 

Gibson over-estimated Gower’s devotion to the law, but not his talent with a cricket bat.

The common memory of Yorkshire in the seventies is of off-field division and on-field mediocrity. It therefore comes as a surprise to find us in the last month of the season with Yorkshire ten points clear at the head of the Championship. This week, Geoffrey Boycott cemented his place at the top of the batting averages with an unbeaten double hundred at Lord’s. His opening partner Richard Lumb (father of Michael) was not far behind him. As pitches developed August turn, Phil Carrick and Geoff Cope were among the wickets; five bowlers averaged under 30 for the season.

Non-Boycott County Championship performance of the week was Fred Swarbrook’s nine for 20 for Derbyshire against Sussex at Hove, the best bowling figures in the UK between 1964 and 1991 (acknowledgement to Derbyshire’s archivist and photographer @dgriffinpix for that, the best county-related X feed).

Not far behind was Basil D’Oliveira with 97 and 81 in a loss for Worcestershire at Surrey. At 43 (officially, but quite possibly a couple of years more) D’Oliveira was still making 1100 runs at 43 and had not lost his knack of breaking partnerships with the ball. It was his penultimate season; in 1976 at Lord’s I saw him hit 50 on one leg after pinging a hamstring to come close to winning the 55-over final against Kent. In his outstanding biography of D’Oliveira, Peter Oborne makes the case that only apartheid stopped him from being selected for South Africa’s 1951 tour of England. D’Oliveira’s story is one of cricket’s most remarkable; with a just government in his country it might have been one of the greatest.

The Guardian had an amusing piece on the evolution of England’s selection panel by Ian Peebles of Middlesex and England, one of the first to go from dressing room to press box ghost-unassisted. His Woolley, Pride of Kent was one of the first cricket books I had.