The Cricket Magazines: December 1972

 

The first four pages of Playfair are, mystifyingly, devoted to a preview of the domestic season in South Africa, to be contested exclusively by white players, though the political context is referred to only obliquely. More commendably, The Cricketer had a correspondent on non-European cricket in South Africa, A Akhalwaya. He reports on the reaction to the end of Basil D’Oliveira’s test-match career in his homeland, reminding us how much it meant to the non-white population to have one of their own playing at the highest level.

Here in South Africa we found ourselves unabashedly supporting England. Whenever England played no more did we ask: ‘What is the score?’ Instead, it became ‘What did D’Oliveira score?’ or ‘How many wickets did he take?

…One wonders which country the schoolboys will now support.

The Cricketer has a review of the season by Tony Pawson that in structure is strikingly similar to Tony Lewis’s Journal of the Season in November’s issue. Could there have been a miscommunication that led Pawson to think that he was i/c the Journal in 1972? If so, it was a felicitous error, as Pawson was always worth reading. Occasionally, his path crossed with mine, for example in May:

Knott’s bewildering range of quick-footed shots brought him a century in each innings at Maidstone.

I was there for the second of these centuries. It was my first visit to Mote Park, a ground that became a favourite, the English venue that was most like our parkland grass bowls here in New Zealand. Pawson’s own batting for Kent, a generation earlier, was by all accounts similar to Knott’s in its fleetness of foot and scurrying between the wickets. Pawson also contributes portraits of Colin Cowdrey and Donald Carr.

Another day of fond memory is pictured, 10 September when Kent won the Sunday League by beating Worcestershire at St Lawrence. Guardian of the telephone in the Canterbury press box, Dudley Moore (who must have got tired of being asked where Peter Cook was) summed up Kent’s route to the title, culminating in chasing 190, the biggest target they faced all season. A century partnership between Luckhurst and Nicholls took them home.

David Frith made an early impression as Deputy Editor of The Cricketer by conducting an airmail interview with Clarrie Grimmett, the New Zealander who took 216 wickets with his leg spin for Australia. It’s fascinating. Grimmett says that his greatest regret was that he was not selected for the 1938 tour to England.

I had hoped to continue my great association with Bill O’Reilly; this breaking of our partnership was a terrific blow to both of us…The only reason I can think of for my omission is that I was thought to be too old.

As Grimmett was 46 at that time, he probably had a point. Though born in Dunedin, the leg-spinner learned his cricket at the Basin Reserve in Wellington, for whom he made his debut in the Plunket Shield when he was 17, leaving for Australia when he was 22.

Grimmett received an early lesson in the realities of Sheffield Shield cricket from New South Wales skipper Monty Noble, who berated him for getting through his overs too quickly (a six-ball over in a minute-and-a-half!) so not allowing the quickies a rest.

He nominates Stan McCabe as the greatest strokemaker he saw. Grimmett’s choice of the major batsman that he had a strong chance of dismissing is a surprise: Bradman.

          I always felt he was uncomfortable against good-length spin.

On modern cricket, he deplores short-pitched bowling, but blames the batsmen for it.

If they learnt correct footwork instead of ducking (and getting hit in the process) short bowling would die a natural death.

Both publications carry articles concerning Warwickshire’s Championship-winning captain AC Smith (the Edgbaston Smiths AC and MJK were known by their initials). Richard Eaton interviews him in Playfair, while The Cricketer piece carries Smith’s byline. Given his notorious statement to the media years later as CE of the TCCB: “no comment, but don’t quote me”, it is no surprise that Eaton’s is the more illuminating.

Warwickshire’s trip of brilliant West Indians, Gibbs, Kanhai and Kallicharran was supplemented mid-season by Deryck Murray who took AC’s place as wicketkeeper. Naturally, Smith turned to bowling instead.

I am a liquorice allsorts bowler. I think I can bowl cutters when the wicket is soft or broken, but I like to get the ball shone a bit and swing it on a good wicket,

He does not attempt to describe his bowling action, which was as chaotic as any I have seen, and accompanied by a pantomime villain’s grin at the point of release.

Mike Denness, in his Captain’s Column in Playfair, bemoans the travel demands made on county cricketers. One weekend began with a journey…

…from Folkestone on a Friday night to play Somerset at Glastonbury. On the Saturday night we motored up to Derby, returning on Sunday night to Somerset.

On the Tuesday evening we headed north to play Yorkshire at Bradford.

They played cricket on all these days, and the motorway network was nowhere near as developed as it became. It is surprising that there were not more injuries or deaths. As crowded as the fixture  list now remains, it is much more reasonable than it was.

This is the best edition of Playfair that I have come across so far. There is also Cardus on Ranji, Stephen Green on the Treasures of Lord’s and an interesting interview with the Glamorgan player Tony Cordle by Basil Easterbrook. Cordle was then about halfway through a county career that saw him take almost a thousand wickets, often in bowling partnership with Malcolm Nash.

He was one of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean, and suffered many of the indignities of that community when he arrived in London. Relatives whisked him off to Cardiff, where, most fortuitously for Glamorgan, a job interview happened to be held overlooking the Cardiff Arms Park cricket ground. He decided to join the Cardiff club, despite, unusually for a Bajan, never having played in an organised game.

There is an interesting video on YouTube of a recent interview with Cordle by Glamorgan historian Andrew Hignell.

 

The Cricketer: June 1972

 

The touring Australian batter Doug Walters appears on the cover of the June 72 edition of The Cricketer, right knee almost grounded, bat above his head on the follow through, ball presumably clattering over the boundary at Worcester even as Patrick Eager’s shutter clicked. It was a shot seen only on county grounds that summer; in the tests he scored just 57 in seven innings. On his four tours to Britain, Walters never made a test century, an astonishing omission for a man who averaged almost 50 in that form of the game.

Henry Blofeld reported from the Caribbean on the final test of New Zealand’s first tour to that part of the world. It was drawn, as were the previous four games in the series. It was only New Zealand’s third five-test series. With none in the half century since, we can safely say it was our last.

The West Indies were in transition between the great side of the early and mid-sixties and that of the mid-to-late seventies. In the featured game, at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain, the bowling was opened by Vanburn Holder and Garry Sobers, now 35, who went for only 67 from 40 overs across the two innings.

The run rate for the match was well short of two-and-a-half an over. What a contrast to the turbo-charged series just completed fifty years on. Readers of these pieces over the years will be aware of my admiration for Brendon McCullum. We all have our XIs of favourite cricketers; McCullum is captain of mine.

But the most dedicated of his fans could not have anticipated the extent and speed of the change that he has brought to the England team, transforming them from the frightened, risk-and-esteem-free unit that we saw in Australia and the Caribbean into the warp-speed daredevils now before us. What he has done is make them forget that they are English.

At this rate, if he stays in post for the full four years he could change the entire fabric of British society. People will start talking to strangers on public transport. Beer will be drunk only if refrigerated. Café patrons will refuse to accept bad coffee.

For us in the South Pacific, it has all been a bit much. We feel a certain nostalgia for the days when you could block for a draw for five days, five times in a row.

Blofeld identifies four New Zealanders as “world-class”. Glenn Turner hit his peak and averaged 96. Like Turner, Bevan Congdon made two centuries in the series. The following year, Congdon was to score another pair of hundreds (both170s) in a losing cause; Daryl Mitchell has gone one better.

Another to reach a career peak in the sun was Bruce Taylor, whose fast-medium took 27 wickets at 17. More surprisingly, Blofeld’s quartet is completed by slow left-armer Hedley Howarth, whose contribution was “a much bigger one than his figures suggest”. You might hope so, given that those figures were 14 wickets at 50, At least Howarth was picked; Ajaz Patel has bowled all of two overs for the national team since he took all ten in Mumbai at the end of last year.

The most interesting piece in the June edition was Christopher Martin-Jenkins’ profile of Alan Knott. These days, it would be entirely unremarkable for a cricketer to speak of yoga (taught to him first by Bishen Bedi), training with a soccer team (Charlton FC) for better fitness, or pursuing perfection through continuous improvement. Knott, frequently mocked by away crowds for his stretching regime during play, was way ahead of his time.

CMJ reminds us that, earlier in 1972, a selection panel of Arlott, Cardus and Johnston had picked Knott ahead of Godfrey Evans as keeper in England’s greatest post-war XI for a computer Ashes test (featured nightly across a week on Radio 4 as I recall). It is gratifying to find that his genius was recognised by his contemporaries.

There is also a profile of Warwickshire skipper Alan Smith, better known as AC to differentiate him from MJK Smith, also of that parish. Those familiar with AC as a keeper-batsman good enough to play six tests will be surprised to see him pictured in mid bowl, deploying a Procter-like chest-on action. There is a piece to be written on keeper-bowlers. Something in the air at Edgbaston made custodians cast off the pads and grab the leather. Geoff Humpage was wont to have eight overs of a Sunday in the eighties.

With Deryck Murray now in the team, Smith was free to bowl more often, and did so with some effect in 1972, taking a five-for in both the Championship and the Sunday League. He was a frightening sight, ball in hand. His run up was that of a man charging a locked door, the teeth, bared in a clown’s smile, only accentuating the aggression. The ball emerged from a confusion of limbs, apparently an afterthought.

AC Smith later became one of English cricket’s leading administrators, famously (if Martin Johnson is to be believed) responding to a journalist’s enquiry with “no comment, but don’t quote me on that”.