Everyone of my age remembers the summer of 1966, almost all of them for the same two hours or so on the afternoon of Saturday 30 July. They think they remember Kenneth Wolstenholme and “There are people on the pitch…they think it’s all over…it is now” as the first-class cricketer Geoff Hurst (Essex 1962) bangs home the decisive fourth goal. I doubt they actually do. Wolstenholme’s words were quite obscure until they were popularised as the title of the comedy sports quiz They Think It’s All Over, which started on the radio in 1992 and on TV three years later. In the digital age it is hard to understand that recordings of any part of the 1966 final would rarely crop up on television in the two or three decades after it was played.
Wolstenholme, incidentally, was a regular radio commentator
on county cricket in the north of England from 1947 to 1950. John Arlott, Brian
Johnston and Rex Alston rarely ventured north of Worcester, so Wolstenholme was
heard from county cricket grounds just as often as any of them.
I didn’t hear him say “they think it’s all over” that
afternoon in ‘66 because I was at the cricket, to which we will come later.
The opening match of the tournament was a torpid
nil-nil draw between the hosts and Uruguay. My attention drifted early in the
first half and did not return for the duration of the competition. Besides, earlier
that day I had been to St Lawrence for a couple of hours of Kent hosting the
touring West Indians, so perhaps had my heart even before they kicked off at
Wembley that evening. I see now that the contrast between these two contests on
one Monday was critical on my journey to cricket badgery.
As I have written before, I got Sobers’ autograph alongside Cowdrey’s that day and may have been there to see the first of the nine wickets that Sobers took, mostly with left-arm wrist spin, as he won the game with career-best figures.
This match occurred in a month-long hiatus in the tests
while the football took the nation’s attention. This was the first series in
which I took an interest, match-by-match. At that stage the West Indies led
two-nil, with the Lord’s test drawn.
I was at home for the first test, recovering from the
measles, so watched Conrad Hunte square cut the first ball of the series for
four. I may not have known much about cricket then, but there are things that a
child of seven can understand with absolute clarity, and I knew that this was a
different approach to the game, one that made it seem an adventure. Hunte made 135,
then Sobers took over with what Norman Preston in Wisden called a “devastating
exhibition”, making 83 in the final session of the day and continuing to 161
the following morning. It must have been that day when I first raised my collar
in admiring impersonation of the great man. It remains there as I type this.
There were plenty more Caribbean runs to come in the
remaining tests. Kanhai and Nurse both made hundreds, Basil Butcher a double at
Trent Bridge (that seemed to go on for days) and two more from Sobers, 163 at
Lord’s, saving the game alongside his cousin, David Holford (105) and 174 at
Headingley.
The West Indians were probably not the first black
people I had ever seen, but they wouldn’t have been far off in the monoculture that
was north-east Kent. By the time of that visit to Canterbury I had been
sufficiently enchanted by the West Indies’ interpretation of cricket to know
that the prevailing racism of Britain in 1966 was without any merit whatsoever.
I had seen Garry Sobers and the rest play cricket, so I knew.
There were also stories and characters that fascinated.
Colin Milburn, who was the shape of my Uncle Ted and batted like a Bazball time
traveller. Tom Graveney, recalled to the England team despite being as old as
my father, which was very old indeed. John Snow and Ken Higgs, who put on a
chaotic 128 for the tenth wicket at the Oval, activating a lifelong fondness
for the anarchy and exasperation of last-wicket stands. And, of course, Basil D'Oliveira, prevented from playing from his own country because his skin was the wrong colour, something I found incomprehendable.
I would have watched the World Cup final, but a family
friend adopted the approach of the Jesuits—give me the child and I will give
you the man—and applied it to cricket. Offered the chance to accompany him to
St Lawrence for the first day of Canterbury week, I accepted, a decision I have
never regretted in the sixty years that have since passed.
It hailed. We listened to the end of the match on the
radio with the outfield a white lake of ice. The commentators were Brian Moore
(a Kent supporter), Maurice Edelston (a good friend of John Arlott and occasional
cricket commentator) and Alan Clarke (the BBC’s No 1 radio football commentator
at that time; he died at 49 three years later). Apparently, it was Clarke who
we would have heard describe the final seconds as follows:
"Twenty seconds, twenty seconds, and it's Hurst and Ball
charging wide on the right here and there's people on the pitch at the moment.
"And [Hurst] shoots and a goal by Hurst, goal by Hurst,
number four and the England players going down on the turf, hugging each other,
on their hands and knees.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36925699
But Colin Cowdrey was out for a duck, caught behind by
Roger Tolchard, for which a World Cup win could not compensate a young fan who
had nominated Cowdrey his favourite player.
Cowdrey did not have a good summer. He only just
passed a thousand runs, including only a single century (and that against
Oxford University). After the first test he inherited the captaincy from MJK
Smith, only to be sacked in favour of Brian Close for the fifth. His
consolation was that the young Kent side that he led came fourth in the
Championship. Derek Underwood topped the bowling averages with 157 wickets at 13.80.
Yet, a few weeks later, Cowdrey still found the time,
on a wet Bank Holiday Monday, to fetch Alan Knott from the dressing room to
sign an autograph for a young fan who thus learned that cricket had humanity at
its heart.
