24 – 30 May 1975 A Good Week for Mike Denness

 

24 – 30 May 1975

This was the first week of the 1975 season that followed the pattern familiar to followers of county cricket in the seventies: three-day games beginning on Saturday and Wednesday with a 40-over game interposed on Sunday. For spectators it was a brilliant arrangement, particularly in Kent where the season was divided largely into cricket weeks, each at a different venue around the county: Canterbury, Folkestone, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells.

For the players, it looks like madness, more a motoring rally than cricket season, particularly the year in question when it was decreed that counties should play different opponents on Sunday to those they were against on Saturday and Monday. So this week, Yorkshire had to drive down to Edgbaston from Manchester for the Sunday game, returning to resume the Roses match on Monday; Northamptonshire went from Leicester to Bristol and back (this on a bank holiday weekend).

The present-day schedule is much more forgiving, allowing time for travel and preparation (the latter in 1975 probably being a euphemism for extra drinking). The English season has been stretched into the extremities of April and September to accommodate this. Yet still the players complain that there is too much cricket in too short a time. I have less sympathy than for their (much lower-paid) predecessors. Obviously, the workload of fast bowlers must be very carefully managed, like lead pitchers in the MLB, who play once every four or five days. Counties have a duty of care for all their players, and any deserve a break when their physical or mental health demands it.

The larger squads that counties have these days should make that possible without reducing the number of fixtures. I cannot accept that having to play T20 games on successive days once or twice a season is an intolerable burden. Even with a generous margin for wides and no balls, that adds up to no more than 60 balls for a bowler, about what our baseball pitcher would expect to throw in a game.

There were hundreds this week for stalwarts of the county game: Roger Tolchard and Jack Birkenshaw of Leicestershire; Jack Hampshire of Yorkshire; Peter Graves of Sussex, Dudley Owen-Thomas of Surrey, Phil Slocombe and Brian Close for Somerset; Alan Jones (not to be confused with Alan Lewis Jones) of Glamorgan; David Turner of Hampshire; Jim Foat, a folk hero in Gloucestershire (his maiden century); and Bob Woolmer and Graham Johnson of Kent. Johnson had a fine season in 1975 with 1300 runs and 36 wickets. Had England toured that winter he might well have been selected. It remains a minor scandal of that time that Geoff Miller of Derbyshire, a similar player, appeared in 34 tests, while Johnson played in none. His best form never coincided with a vacancy.

Alan Gibson was at Bristol for the Jones hundred.

 

As ever, Gibson reported on what happened around the ground as well as on the field. He came across the injured David Shepherd (later a famed umpire), who, he tells us, “was wearing a sweater of violent purple as though contemplating applying for a job on The Guardian”.

There were also centuries for Barry Richards and Alvin Kallicharran, both more than stalwarts. Richards was reeling them off, and was well ahead of rivals at the top of the batting averages. And one for Mike Denness, who had whose 171 against Derbyshire ended a run of indifferent form.

Bowling performance of the week was by Worcestershire’s Brian Brain, eight for 55 against Essex. “He looked like a young sociology don at Harvard” wrote Gibson. Despite this career-best, 34-year-old Brain was released by Worcestershire at the end of that season, but took a further 316 wickets in six years with Gloucestershire. His diary of the 1980 season Another Day, Another Match was an outstanding example of the genre (if anybody has a copy I would be happy to pay the postage to New Zealand). John Arlott’s brief review in the 1982 Wisden said that it was “an account of pleasure and pressure; a blend of shrewd and thoughtful observation; of humour and anxiety; the story of one man’s job – but a job that is lit by the romanticism which is in every full-time cricketer”.

The same match saw an achievement that surpassed even Brain’s. Essex leg-spinner Robin Hobbs took his thousandth first-class wicket. “No other leg-spinner, I am afraid, will do it again” wrote Gibson, echoing the universal view that leg-spin was on its way out as surely as black-and-white televisions and half-day closing. You want to reach back through the years and say “there’s this five-year-old in Melbourne…”. Of course, as far as English leg-spinners go, it was a point well-made, though in all forms of the game Adil Rashid is well clear of a thousand, including, I was surprised to discover, 512 in first-class cricket. For comparison, there were 18 players listed in the 1975 Playfair with a thousand wickets at the start of the season. Only Jimmy Anderson is past the mark in this year’s edition.

It was a good week for Denness, who was confirmed as England captain for the World Cup. John Arlott’s Monday commentary in The Guardian tells us that the decision was not straightforward.

 

Some of the criteria that got Denness over the line tell us a lot about English cricket at that time: “well turned out…good manners and bearing.” A curiosity is that this was the first time that the selection panel consisted entirely of ex-professional players.

In The Times, John Woodcock had the inside line on the selection meeting. Reporting that Charlie Elliott (a test umpire for many years, including one at Lancaster Park, Christchurch in 1971) and Ken Barrington favoured Greig, while Sir Len Hutton and Alec Bedser backed Denness. Woodcock favoured Greig, despite his established reservations about the Sussex all-rounder and his acknowledgement that others may be relieved that they did not lead MCC in Australia. He is interesting on Boycott, who announced his unavailability for England selection hard upon the confirmation of Denness. The claim from the Fitzwilliam Firebrand that he has found “peace and contentedness” with Yorkshire is hard not to smirk at when hindsight gives us knowledge of the blood letting that characterised Yorkshire cricket over the following decade or so. Here is Woodcock’s Monday commentary in full:

 

As well as being cricket correspondent of The Guardian, Arlott was also its wine writer. This week he offers advice on cooking with wine. He always followed his own advice that “it is better to be generous than cautious”.

Headline of the week, from The Times, is as applicable now as it was then:

Why Kent take so long to bowl out the opposition on good pitches.

Today, the old county languish at the bottom of Division Two and my Blean Correspondent and myself fear that it could be the worst season since the annus horribilis of 1980.

The 1975 season had been scheduled as a one with a full tour by South Africa. The World Cup and four-test series with Australia came about with the continued suspension of cricket with the apartheid state. Those who thought that sport was separate from politics might have asked themselves how that could be conceivable under a government that enforced laws in the manner reported by Stanley Uys in The Guardian. Uys, by the way, was described by a minister of the Vorster Government as "probably the most unscrupulous liar in South Africa and a self-confessed traitor", a badge of honour indeed. 

 

 

 

How Green Were My Pitches: 19 to 25 August 1967

The issues of the week were the England captaincy and the race for the County Championship. Kent had a double-header (as it was not known then) against Glamorgan, first in Gillingham and then in Cardiff. Yorkshire played Essex at Scarborough, finishing on Tuesday, then started a game against Sussex at Eastbourne on Wednesday morning, suggesting that the fixture schedulers lacked basic knowledge of the country’s geography (or that they all had chauffeurs). 

Kent and Yorkshire started the week level on points. Kent went ahead after a last-gasp win at Gillingham, while Yorkshire lost from a winning position at Scarborough. But resounding wins for Glamorgan at Cardiff, and Yorkshire on the south coast put Yorkshire on top by four points with a game in hand at the week’s end.

Bert Lock had a busy week. He was the groundsman who had restored the Oval after it had been a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. After retiring from Surrey he became the counties’ pitch inspector, in which role he visited both Kent v Glamorgan games this week. Lock could do little more than offer groundsmen sage advice after the event. There were no sanctions at his disposal other than recommending a ban on the venue for the following season (a sanction already imposed upon Hesketh Park, Dartford, though why that ground was singled out from minefields on which Kent played in 1967 is unclear). 

Both matches were played on pitches that would be inconceivable these days, particularly that at Gillingham. I have watched cricket at the Garrison Ground, Gillingham, a Sunday League game in 1972. I don’t recall much about the ground, but it must have been a squeeze to get 10,000 in. “The whole of Kent seemed to be there” according to John Woodcock, who was enjoying his work at last. Stoics they were, with a scoring rate under two an over across the game as a whole, but when 26 wickets fall in a day, as happened on the third day, it wasn’t unrelenting dullness. Derek Underwood took 11 wickets and the win came in the final half hour.

Modern crowds wouldn’t tolerate such laborious scoring, but would they have to? Players of that era say that those pitches created superior techniques. Of course, today’s batsmen would be at sea on pitches foreign to them. But, knowing that their lifespan would be short, they would not be prepared to wait cowering in the crease for the bullet with their name on it, but would have a go at charging the machine guns. A bold, edgy 30 would have won several games this week.

It was Sophia Gardens’ first season as a first-class venue, Glamorgan having moved from Cardiff Arms Park over the winter to make way for the redevelopment of the rugby ground, so the pitches were still bedding in (well enough for the home side to make 353 for nine, bracketed by Kent collapses). It was a homely, pleasant ground whenever I visited; since then it has been turned into an arena, no less, taking much of the charm away in the process, I would think.

DJ Shepherd took 15 wickets in the three innings he bowled in that week. Fifty years on, he is being mourned with affection, having passed away six days after his ninetieth birthday. I saw him play, but remember him more as a superb radio commentator on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday afternoons, which I would listen to in Bristol in preference to the inferior local offering.  Shepherd and Edward Bevan would have adorned Test Match Special had they been given the chance; thus his career off the field mirrored that on it in its lack of just national recognition.

Just as Don Shepherd is most people’s pick as the best bowler not have played a test for England, so Alan Jones is the best batsman in that deprived position. Jones has the sweater and the cap, but not the test status, which was removed from the England v Rest of the World series retrospectively despite it being as high a standard as any tests before or since. This week, he made 44, Glamorgan’s top score at Gillingham, and 60 at Cardiff, both innings worth centuries in their contexts. Alan Jones often did well against Kent; I saw him score centuries in Canterbury Week 1972 and again ten years later

Welsh folk might have hoped that the easier access to the valleys offered by the opening of the Severn Bridge the year before would bring the selectors to Sophia Gardens and St Helens more often, but this does not seem to have happened. Tony Lewis tells the story of Wilf Wooller, Glamorgan’s secretary, manager and self-appointed patron saint, receiving a letter from EW Swanton of the Daily Telegraph requesting information on the form of certain Glamorgan players and enclosing a stamped, addressed envelope for the reply. Swanton was hugely influential at that time, widely regarded as a fifth selector. When the returned envelope was opened a few days later it contained only a copy of the London to Cardiff train timetable.

Don Shepherd was not Glamorgan’s most successful bowler this week. Left-arm paceman Jeff Jones took 16 wickets, including six for 27 in the first innings in which he and Tony Cordle bowled 16 overs each, unchanged. Jeff Jones is best remembered as father of 2005 Ashes winner Simon Jones, who inherited his old man’s ability to bowl quickly as well as a frame that did not bear up well to his doing so.

Yorkshire also had a mixed week, but in reverse order to Kent’s. At Scarborough they contrived to throw away a lead of 127 to lose by nine runs to Essex, who were second-bottom. Spinners Hobbs and Acfield took eight between them, and bowled 52 overs for 68 runs, illustrating my earlier point about the general timidity of batsmen in those days. Batsmen sharing a car with Fred Trueman would have spent an uncomfortable eight hours or so on the way to Eastbourne

There was redemption at the Saffrons, with (speaking as we were of very good players who did not play for England) Tony Nicholson taking nine for 62

England were building a good lead at the Oval in the third and final test, but the press and public focus was on the Close question. On Wednesday the England captain was “severely censured” by the Advisory County Cricket committee (copying The Times’ deployment of the upper case) for his leadership of the go-slow against Warwickshire the previous week. The Thunderer thought the matter worthy of a leader, which came down on Close’s side for the captaincy to the West Indies, but unenthusiastically so. By Friday, down the front page was the headline “Things look black for Brian Close”. As chance would have it, Boycott’s late withdrawal from the test due to illness meant that Close opened with Cowdrey, the only alternative after the retirement of MJK Smith.

Times' leader

Kent all-rounder LJ (Leslie) Todd died this week in 1967. I knew the name but not much else. His obituary in Wisden is an unexceptional, largely statistical, record of a career that lasted from 1927 to 1950. Over the years, one has rarely turned to the Kent Annual for good writing, but Todd’s obituary in the 1968 edition is a cracker.

It was written by JGW (Jack) Davies, an off spinner who was a Kent contemporary of Todd’s. However, Davies was a jazzhat summer-holiday amateur of a kind that pros like Todd (especially Todd, it may be inferred) held in some contempt. It should be noted that Davies’s profession was psychology. The result is an obituary that tells us what sort of man he was, as well as what sort of cricketer.