The season ends: 9 to 15 September 1967

The 1967 season ended with the World Cup, which will surprise those who take the orthodox view that the first World Cup was played eight years later. Neither was it the first, a similar event having taken place the previous year. The tournament consisted of a three-match round robin between England, Pakistan and the Rest of the World XI. All matches were played at Lord’s. The shortening evenings meant that they were 50-over contests at a time when 60 overs were the norm, or 40 on Sunday afternoons.

Just as the designation of the game played in Melbourne in March 1877 as the first test match is somewhat random, so there is a case for regarding these games as the first one-day internationals. The quality of the players was more than good enough to warrant the status, particularly the World XI, with its potent harmony of South Africans and West Indians. For years I intended to write about these matches as the first, lost ODIs, but was beaten to it by Philip Barker, who had an interesting piece on the subject in Wisden 2016.

Eddie Barlow made an unbeaten 74 against England, then took four for 23 against Pakistan. Barlow’s name is rarely mentioned when the great all-rounders are discussed, but it should be on the list, at least. He took 571 first-class wickets at 24, 15 less than his batting average. The margin in his 30 tests is +11. He was outstanding in the 1970 Rest of the World series, scoring two hundreds and topping the bowling averages with 20 wickets at 19.80. 

The three-day match at Scarborough between the World and England XIs had been watched by 30,000, but the one-day tournament met public indifference and was not repeated, which is odd given that domestic one-day cricket had become so popular. Perhaps they should have stayed in Scarborough and replaced the rather dour Yorkshire v MCC game in which Geoffrey Boycott made a century as indigestible as seaside rock. 

My cricket watching for 1967 concluded at Canterbury for the Gillette Cup winners challenge match against the touring side, the second and final such fixture.  The thing I remember best about that day was a six hit by Stuart Leary that cleared the famous in-field lime tree. Not the uppermost branches perhaps, but certainly those that bulged out to one side. I had forgotten that Alan Dixon took five that day, following the seven in the quarter-final. Leary and Dixon both had fine seasons. 

Yorkshire beat MCC, thanks to their young off spinner Geoff Cope. AA Thomson was at Scarborough throughout the nine-day festival, delighting Times readers as he had all season with phrases that said more than others would manage in a couple of hundred words. Barlow and Nurse’s partnership “contained every stroke from the book and several daring ones from the appendix”. Lance Gibbs was “the notorious master of guile, who by autosuggestion made them in turn pick the wrong ball to hit”. Milburn “had his leg stump uprooted and the spectators’ tide of pleasure inevitably receded”. 

These were the last cricket reports that AA Thomson wrote. He was too ill when the 1968 season began and died in early June. Here is his obituary:

Alan Gibson had turned from cricket to rugby and reported from three grounds in three days in the first half of the week. It was a surprise that the third of these was Bristol v Cardiff, one of the games of the season in those pre-league days, oddly scheduled for a Wednesday evening with a 6 30 kick off (presumably there were no floodlights at the Memorial Ground in those days—they had arrived by the time I first stood on the terraces in the late seventies, though a full moon in a cloudless sky would overpower them). Bristol led twice but were well beaten in the end, no disgrace when the opposition had Gareth Edwards and Barry John at Nos 9 and 10. 

Tony Nicholls was John’s opposite number, but not at No 10. He would have been wearing shirt F, in Bristol’s tradition of using letters instead of numbers. It was confusing when Leicester were the opposition; they also used letters, but in sequence from the front row, rather than the full back as Bristol did. If the game was boring spectators could find solace in Scrabble. Nicholls was head of geography at Cotham Grammar School when I did my teaching practice there (as a history teacher) in 1982.

Silbury Hill in Wiltshire was to be excavated. The Times report shows how little was known about it beyond that it was a pre-Roman artificial hill. The excavation found that it may date back as far as 2500BC, but deepened the mystery of why it was constructed, as it was found not to be a burial site. Why would people have spent thousands of hours outside, subject to the worst of the weather, on an apparently pointless endeavour? Perhaps they were passing the time while waiting for the County Championship to be invented.

One of the things I have enjoyed about the 1967 project is the realisation that there is little under the sun that is new. This week came a proposal from a civil engineering company to build an airport in the Thames Estuary, an idea that has resurfaced in recent times under the new ownership of Boris Johnson. 

Boris has not taken up another bright idea from fifty years ago—the inevitability of Britain switching to driving on the right-hand side of the road—but it is only a matter of time.

This ends the weekly series of pieces summing up the week fifty years ago. There will be three more posts over the next couple of weeks or so to finish off the 1967 retrospective, looking at the Gillette Cup final, thinking about cricket now and then, and reflecting on the process of recreating a cricket season through social media.

Maidstone week: 22 to 28 July 2017

Kent v Hampshire, Maidstone, 22 and 23 July 1967

Kent v Surrey, Maidstone, 26 to 28 July 1967

Maidstone week was always a highlight of the Kentish season.  I wrote about cricket at Mote Park a couple of years ago. It was at Maidstone that writers could bring out the thesaurus of high summer: shimmering…baking…sweltering, cricket played to the sound of eggs frying on the pavement. Much of this is nostalgia cleansing the memory of course; it was as likely to pour down there as anywhere else, but for many of us Maidstone week was the first element of the holy trinity of cricket watching in Kent, along with the weeks at Canterbury and Folkestone that followed, though in 1967 it would be another five years until I watched cricket at the Mote.

It was a cracker of a week, with an exploding pitch and a match-saving last-wicket stand. The week began with Kent making 296 in the first innings against Hampshire. John Shepherd was now established at No 3, and followed his semi-final 77 with 72 here. Shepherd remained at No 3 for the rest of the season, but never batted as high thereafter. He had the talent, but it was to be his lot to carry the seam attack for the next decade and more, so he usually found himself down at No 8, which was something of a waste.

On Sunday, 10,000 crammed into a ground that had reasonable seating for no more than a tenth of them; this just a few days after almost 17,000 had gone to Canterbury for the Gillette Cup semi-final. What a time, when everybody wanted to be at the cricket, and what a day they saw. There was a large worn patch at one end that Derek Underwood could use as a torturer uses a rack. He took seven for 35 in the first innings as Hampshire were skittled for 95. Their day got worse. The last six wickets in the second innings all fell at 31, the last five partnerships contributing not a single run. Nobody got into double figures. Underwood took five more, and Alan Dixon got four.

Hampshire captain Roy Marshall (six and one) fumed, describing the pitch as “an absolute disgrace to county cricket” saying that he had seen only three worse (oddly adding that they were all in the west country, as if in mitigation) in 15 years.

Charles Bray in The Times reports that Underwood made the ball “kick shoulder high”. It might be that these days the match would have been called off; anyway, the chances of a pitch being that bad are remote. We are worse off for this. It took a fine bowler to make the most of that rough patch and with 28 games in a Championship season the competition could indulge the odd piece of negligence by a groundsman here and there. 

Expecting more turn on another part of the square for the second part of the week, Kent brought in Graham Johnson for John Dye (Norman Graham and David Sayer were still injured). Against Hampshire, Underwood and Dixon between them had 17 for 73, not appearing in obvious need of assistance.

It was back to go-slow cricket on the first day as Surrey crept to 233 for five, finishing on day two with 354 from 155 overs, Underwood four for 100 from 63 overs. Yet it was not Underwood, but another young spinner, Pat Pocock, who had the better day, with six for 43 that made Kent follow on. Four of his victims (and two of Stuart Storey’s) were caught in the leg trap (do they still call it that?). 

Pocock was having as good a run as Underwood and was spoken of as the new Laker, an albatross to hang around anyone’s neck. It was him, not the Kent player, who was selected for the tour to the Caribbean the following winter, but in the long term Underwood  (297 wickets in 86 tests) did better than Pocock (67 wickets from 25 appearances). Given more opportunities, Pocock would have become a notable test bowler, but was not well treated by the selectors. Ray Illingworth’s tenure of the captaincy excluded him for four years, and later they favoured Geoff Miller and John Emburey, both inferior bowlers to Pocock but better batsmen.

At half past two on Friday afternoon Kent’s last pair, Alan Dixon and Alan Brown came together. No doubt some people were already making their way to the car park or to catch the earlier train. Yet, with the help of an hour’s rain break, they were still there at the end, having saved the draw and the two championship points that went with it. Dixon was having a brilliant season with bat and ball. Brown was a very capable batsman, but a hitter, so his restraint was all the more meritorious. The partnership was the stuff of legend, so I am surprised that I had never heard of it until excavating the archives this week.

With five weeks to go, Kent were top of the Championship and in the Gillette Cup final, and the word “double” was being whispered around the boundary.

The second test series of the summer began this week, against Pakistan at Lord’s. A better contest than that against India was hoped for, in vain it appeared at the end of the first day with Barrington and Graveney putting on 200. Kent people who so enjoyed Asif Iqbal’s batting over the following 15 years may be surprised to be reminded that his main role on that tour was as an opening bowler. On the second day he took three wickets, as did Mushtaq Mohammad and Salim Altaf. England lost eight for 86, but were back on top by the end of the day thanks to three wickets from the restored Ken Higgs. This was the last time England took the field in a test match, home or abroad, without a Kent player until the first test in Pakistan a decade later.

Elsewhere, the BBC announced that the reconstructed radio network would go by numbers: Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4, while solemnly promising that Radio 1 wouldn’t be too “mid-Atlantic”, which is precisely what had made the pirate stations so successful. They needn’t have worried. Needle time—the agreement with the musicians’ unions that restricted the number of records that could be played, thus guaranteeing work for their members—meant that in the early years the station was more perm than perfumed garden.  

Dixon’s great performance: 10 to 16 June 1967

England v India, first test, Headingley, 8 – 13 June 1967

Kent v Middlesex, County Championship, Blackheath, 10 – 13 June 1967

Surrey v Kent, Gillette Cup quarter-final, the Oval, 14 June 1967

No doubt about the performance of the week this week: Alan Dixon’s seven for 15 for Kent against Surrey in the Gillette Cup quarter-final at the Oval. I assume that he was in seam-up rather than off-spin mode, judging from what the report says about the pitch. One thing that seems constant through the ages is that people stand around pitches when the unexpected happens seeking an oracular explanation for what has occurred. 

Dixon’s performance was then the finest recorded in what we now call List A cricket. Half a century on, it still ranks as equal 17^th best, along with Richard Hutton for Yorkshire against Worcestershire in 1969. Keith Boyce took eight for 26 for Essex at Old Trafford in 1971, an extraordinary performance in a 40-over game where he was limited to eight overs, and against the only team to have won the Sunday League at that point. There have been only two other performances better than Dixon’s in games between first-class counties: Mikey Holding, eight for 21 for Derbyshire v Sussex in 1988; and Simon Francis, whose eight for 66 for Somerset against Derbyshire in 2004 comprised more than ten percent of his List A career haul. Derek Underwood’s eight for 31 against Scotland in 1987 is the only improvement for Kent in the intervening half century.

Alan Dixon is rarely mentioned when Kent supporters reminisce about the great days, probably because he retired before the trophy era gained momentum, but it is good to be reminded of what a fine season he had in 1967.

In 2017, the week has seen 50-over aggregates of 602, 834 and 743, with 370 an insufficient target at Chelmsford. Explaining this to the folk of 1967 would be like telling them about drones, iPads or Donald Trump—to them fantastic creations of fiction.

Back then, Yorkshire fell four short of Lancashire’s 194 in 58 overs and Somerset’s 184 beat Northamptonshire by 36 runs. The only quarter-final that hinted at the overcoming of ball by bat was at Hove where Hampshire fell nine short of Sussex’s 233. The reasons for the difference between the ages are well-rehearsed: pitches, fielding restrictions, but most of all mindset—an appreciation of what is possible. Then, making the stop press of the evening paper, now instant transmission around the world. 

Is it better? Backwatersman has recently recalled becoming bored by Dawid Malan’s hitting of sixes. An issue that many of us have with T20 is that it makes the extraordinary commonplace. This week (2017) in the Champions Trophy semi-final England were tested in trickier conditions than they are used to, and rightly so when a world championship is at stake. A virtuoso should have a wide repertoire. It is great that players these days have wifi shots at their command, but they should play more often in conditions that deprive them of their gadgets and leave them depending upon their mental arithmetic. Some of the best one-day games I have seen were played on tricky surfaces.

Bowling of historic proportions nevertheless left the Surrey authorities worried that the crowd of 8,000 (there were two bigger at the other games) would feel short-changed, so had the bright idea of the two teams playing a twenty-over-a-side match to fill the time “for the purse of 100 guineas” a healthy supplement to the winning side’s pay packet in 1967. So there we are. The first T20 county match was played at the Oval between Surrey and Kent on 14 June 1967. Kent won, but the details seem to have disappeared.

Just as T20 appeared like a temporal anomaly, so the possibility of white cricket balls was raised, not in the sports pages, but in the Times diary, reporting on the suggestion of 81-year-old Foster Sproxton, who, like many of us, could never watch a fast bowler “wiping a damp ball on white flannels without thinking of Lady Macbeth”. His central point—that a white ball is easier for spectators to see—remains sound, as does MCC’s response that white balls lose their colour too quickly (and these days, they don’t swing). That blue balls were used in late Victorian women’s cricket is a revelation, possibly an early example of mansplaining.

 

Earlier in the week, Kent played Middlesex at home starting on the day after the match between the two teams at Lord’s was drawn. Kent played two more sets of back-to-back fixtures later in the season, so it appears to be a scheduling feature.

The match displayed the best and worst of three-day cricket in this era. The first day was as uneventful as Theresa May’s adolesence, as Middlesex ground 239 from 104 overs. By the end of the second Middlesex appeared in control, 173 ahead with eight standing. The third day was a thriller, starting with a Middlesex collapse and culminating in a winning Kent run chase. Denness. Luckhurst and Cowdrey all made fifties, but it was Alan Knott who caught the eye of AA Thomson, attacking every ball “not rashly but with…dancing delight”. Thomson compares Knott’s batting with Compton, the ultimate praise for those of a certain age. Knott features in almost every report of Kent games as the realisation grew that he was something special.

The game was played at Rectory Field, Blackheath another venue that was to disappear from the roster in another five years and which I never visited. Like the Bat and Ball at Gravesend, it is still a cricket ground.

At Headingley, India started the third day looking as if they would lose by the end of the day; in fact they lasted well into the fifth, thanks to fine batting from Engineer, Wadekar, Hanument Singh and, especially, the captain, the Nawab of Pataudi junior, who made 129 to follow his first innings 64. Most of the talk was still about Geoffrey Boycott and whether or not he should be dropped after his deliberative double hundred.

  

Elsewhere, the Times diary featured Tom Stoppard (a big cricket fan). 

The play turned out to be The Real Inspector Hound, a more accessible work than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one that requires an actor to be on stage for the duration, playing a corpse. They always receive the loudest cheer of the evening.

The ITV franchises were redistributed this week, a change that would create Thames, London Weekend, Yorkshire and HTV. In a letter to The Times Alan Bennett pointed out the dependence of the new franchises on BBC talent. Bennett had a primetime Saturday sketch show On the Margin on BBC 1 with a supporting cast that included John Sargeant, to become one of television’s best-known political journalists.