The Lord’s finals of 1980

55-over Essex v Northamptonshire

60-over Middlesex v Surrey

I can’t recall a wetter English summer than that of 1980. Rain made a nonsense of the Sunday League game that was part of Maidstone week, and not another ball was bowled until 5 pm on the Thursday. The Saturday of the Centenary Test Match was largely spent with Dickie Bird and David Constant agonising over the constraining effects of wetness, something that Mrs Thatcher spent a lot of 1980 doing in Downing Street.

The rain was the reason why I spent the afternoon of Saturday 19 July not at Lord’s for the scheduled 55-over final, but at the Criterion Theatre on Piccadilly Circus for the matinée of Tomfoolery, a collection of the satirical songs of Tom Lehrer starring Robin Ray of Face the Music fame. Lehrer said that he gave up satire when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, on the basis that life was making a better job of it than art ever could. I think of that whenever the ECB makes another announcement about The Hundred.

For Kent, the change from the sensational seventies to the egregious eighties could not have been more stark. I returned to Canterbury for a 55-over group game against Somerset that resulted in a defeat as shattering as the 60-all-out at Taunton in the previous year’s 60-over quarter-final. As in that game, all seemed relatively well at the halfway stage. Kent made 242, with fifties from Alan Ealham and Chris Cowdrey. But after only a few overs of the reply the inadequacy of the target had become all too clear.

Opening for Somerset were the captain Brian Rose and Sunil Gavaskar, on debut for Somerset as replacement for the touring Viv Richards. Gavaskar had now got past his apparent belief—36 not out in 60 overs on the opening day of the 1975 World Cup—that this one-day stuff was not worthy of an artist of his calibre, and made as easy a 90 as one could hope to see. However, he was the minority partner in the first-wicket stand of 241. At the other end Brian Rose was unbeaten on 137 as Somerset reached their target with more than 11 overs to spare.

Back in Bristol the following weekend, I watched the home team upset the holders Essex. Graham Gooch went off quickly, but after he went for 62 the innings lost momentum, as it was to do in the final. Mike Procter, took two for 26, but it was four wickets from Alan Wilkins that did most to limit Essex to 224. Wilkins became better known as a TV commentator than he was for playing; I had forgotten that he had brought his left-arm seam across to the other side of the Severn Estuary for three seasons. Andy Stovold guided Gloucestershire home with an unbeaten 73, supported by his brother Martin with whom he put on 57 for the fifth wicket.

Essex nevertheless made it to Lord’s once more. Their opponents were Northamptonshire, who had lost the 60-over final to Somerset the previous September.

There were sufficient of we, the indolent and workshy, to come close to filling Lord’s on the Monday. Northamptonshire won the toss and chose to bat. Both XIs were unchanged from those that appeared in Lord’s finals the year before, something else that would be improbable these days (aside from the obvious detail that there are no Lord’s finals now).

It one of those games that is more interesting in retrospect than it seemed at the time, because the team that looked routine winners for 85% of the match ended up losing it. 

John Lever set the tone by conceding just seven runs from his first six overs, but it was seamer Keith Pont who took the first three wickets. At 110 for three just before lunch, Northamptonshire had the capacity to reach a reasonable total, if they increased the tempo urgently. But three quick wickets meant that the rest of the innings would be attritional. That they struggled past 200 was thanks to a seventh-wicket stand of 59 between Allan Lamb and Jim Watt.

Watt had been recalled to the Northamptonshire colours from his second retirement two years before for his second spell as captain. This was in the era before counties acquired coaching staffs the size of royal courts. The choice of captain was crucial, in a way which is no longer the case. From 1969 to 1981 the England selectors went outside the team five times so as to get the right captain: Illingworth, Lewis, Denness, Brearley, Fletcher. These days, some captains have to have serious strength of personality just to avoid being controlled from the dressing room like a PlayStation character. Later in the afternoon Jim Watt was to show the value of good captaincy.

For the second year in a row, Allan Lamb played a Lord’s final innings of striking quality. Wisden called it “a match-winning innings of beautifully executed strokes, refreshing footwork and well-judged running between the wickets” while John Woodcock in The Times described Lamb as a “strong, orthodox and forceful batsman of high class”. It was thanks to Lamb that Northamptonshire reached 209.

Lamb was in the third of four seasons spent qualifying to play for England and was building quite a reputation. Of course, he went on to have a good international career, playing in 79 tests, but he didn’t quite live up to the hype. His average of 36 was decent, but ten or so fewer than might have been expected of him after two commanding Lord’s final innings and three successive seasons averaging 60. Not the anti-climax of Hick or Ramprakash, but neither the new Barry Richards for whom we hoped.

With little more than a hundred needed off 24 overs and nine wickets left, Essex were favourites of the magnitude of Shergar in a donkey derby. What went wrong? Perhaps Essex themselves were taken in by the situation as much as the rest of us and didn’t notice that the match was being taken away from them like a scammer emptying a bank account until it was too late.

In the next 19 overs Essex scored only 50 runs and lost four wickets. As well as bowling tightly and taking Hardie’s wicket, Jim Watts changed his bowlers cannily. As well as bringing Sarfraz Nawaz (three for 23) back early, he introduced Richard Williams’ off spin late and decisively, just as he had in the semi-final at Lord’s a few weeks before. A look through the scorecards of era tells us that, much more often than now, captains used only the minimum five bowlers, and to a formula at that. A skipper like Watts who was prepared to put the template aside and rely on his wits, was a huge asset.

Norbert Phillip took 30 off two overs from Jim Griffiths, leaving 11 needed from the last, but Phillip could not get the strike until the fourth ball of the over. Essex finished six short to give Northamptonshire their second Lord’s win following the Gillette Cup in 1976. It was the closest Lord’s final so far.

The week before I had paid my one, and so far only, visit to Headingley, for the second round of the 60-over competition between Yorkshire and Kent. It had been a sobering year for us in the Garden of England with our team spending the summer in the disreputable areas of the Championship and Sunday League tables and the 60-over competition was our last chance of glory.

There was early hope with Geoffrey Boycott in one of his more funereal moods. After 12 overs Yorkshire were only 29 for one. But he put on 202 for the second wicket with Bill Athey, and that was just about that.

Athey was hailed as the rising star of his generation when he made his debut in 1976, but his career stalled as will happen to careers caught in a civil war like the one that preoccupied Yorkshire CCC in these years. Only now did he receive his county cap, which carried more status and financial significance then than now. Most counties indicated uncapped status discretely; Kent players had a small II under the horse on the sweater and cap. Yorkshire went for ritual humiliation. Uncapped players wore navy-blue banding on their sweaters rather than the sky-blue, yellow and navy combination of the capped players. Athey had waited only four years. Arnie Sidebottom, capped on the same day, had made his debut seven years before. Athey stuck the atmosphere in the Ridings for a couple more years then moved to Bristol, where I enjoyed his stylish, organised batting for nine years.

Boycott made 87, Athey 115 and Yorkshire finished on 279 for six, a mountain for a side whose confidence was as low as Kent’s at this time. The report in The Times (by Keith Macklin, better known as a commentator on football on TV and rugby league on the radio) says that the third-wicket stand of 96 between Asif Iqbal and Woolmer had the match on a “knife-edge”, but my memory is that the required rate climb prohibitively throughout the partnership. The last eight wickets fell for 90, leaving Yorkshire 46-run winners. Sidebottom celebrated his cap with four wickets and that fine bowler Chris Old took three.

So to Lord’s on the first Saturday in September for an all-London final between Middlesex and Surrey, the top two in the Championship in 1980. The absence of bucolic partiality was to the liking of Woodcock of The Times, who described the atmosphere as “pleasantly orderly, smacking more of the saloon bar than the skittle alley”.

Three valedictories took place that day. It was the end of Gillette’s sponsorship of the county knockout competition (though my Blean correspondent and myself refer to any domestic one-day competition as ”the Gillette Cup” to this day).

It was John Langridge’s last weekend on the first-class umpires list (he also officiated at the Sunday League game at Canterbury the next day, where I was also present). Langridge should be in any XI of the best players not selected for England. He made 34,380 runs at 37.45, almost all for Sussex, and contended with Hammond as the best slip fielder of the era. Langridge was 70, but returned occasionally for a few seasons to come. Now, umpires have to retire at 65, an unnecessarily ageist rule, brought in, it was said, to usher umpire Bird from the stage without too many curtain calls.  

It was also the occasion of John Arlott’s last commentary. He had famously ended his final test match commentary the previous Tuesday with “and after Trevor Bailey it will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins”, but returned for an encore this day. Arlott’s departure created a tremendous fuss, including a front-page piece in The Times by his friend Alan Gibson, who wrote that Arlott had “a gift of phrase such as no other cricket commentator has possessed”. During one of his spells that day Arlott authenticated this by describing the tall, bald South African fast bowler Vintcent van der Bijl as being “like a young Lord Longford, only not as benevolent”.

The game resembled the earlier 55-over final closely, but without the late negligence that cost Essex that game. Surrey never really got going against an attack that Woodcock rated as superior to England’s: Daniel, van der Bijl, Selvey, Emburey, supported by Hughes (Edmonds did not play here). They only passed 200 (just) thanks to some late aggression from David Smith and Intikhab Alam.

Woodcock noted that Intikhab’s 12 overs were the first leg spin he had seen all summer. As I write, I am still working my way through the 2006/7 Ashes, Shane Warne’s last, magnificent, bow. Leg spin was not dead. The best was yet to come.

Mike Brearley adopted the same cautious approach that had been so disastrous in the World Cup final the previous year, but on a slow pitch with 90 fewer to chase, it was more appropriate here. Brearley finished unbeaten on 96. Middlesex had been at Canterbury for the previous three days and the scorecard of that game tells me that Brearley had made 104 the previous day. I was there and generally have a good memory for events, something on which these pieces are predicated, but I can’t recall anything of that century. I was going to make a crack about Brearley’s academic style of batting, but here was the game’s highest score on a turning pitch against Underwood, who finished with seven wickets, so this was quite an innings, worthy of memory. I’m pretty sure that, unlike Boycott at Folkestone in 1977, Brearley won’t have loitered behind the lines at the non-striker’s end, partly because he is a man of integrity and partly because Phil Edmonds would have run him out had he tried.

Two hundred runs under pressure in two days shows that Brearley was a better batsman than his England record suggests. It prompts me to issue my periodic reminder that Brearley once scored 300 in a day. It was at Peshawar on the North-West Frontier, captaining MCC Under 25s against North Zone. It wasn’t a club attack either; Intikhab Alam bowled that day too. Brearley reached his hundreds in 155, 125 and 50 minutes respectively. To add to the quizzicality of the occasion, his opening partner was none other than Alan Knott, who scored his maiden century. Knott was the second-highest scorer in the Championship match that preceded the final, sweeping Emburey and Edmonds like Franz Beckenbauer.

Back at Lord’s, Roland Butcher provided the game’s most attractive batting to finish the match off with six overs to spare. His 50 included three sixes and five fours. Butcher became one of a series of cricketers around this time to be selected for the winter tour after a good September final performance. He made his test debut in his birthplace of Barbados a few months later.

It wasn’t all bad in the sodden summer of 1980. I was at the Oval for the final day of the fourth test, when Peter Willey and, less probably, Bob Willis batted long enough to save the game. Also at Lord’s for the fourth and best day of the Centenary Test against Australia. We hoped that 1981 would be a better year, but could not have hoped it would be that much better.

1979: Forty years on—first wins for Essex and Somerset

                             

I was pleased that Somerset won the last Lord’s one-day final. It seemed fitting that a county outside the metropolitan elite (in whose number Hampshire, by their own choice, are counted these days) should enjoy county cricket’s last day on the biggest stage of all. There was a certain personal symmetry about it too. I was at Lord’s for Somerset’s first final in 1967, and for their first win, in 1979, the year that we have reached in this series of posts on Lord’s finals about which I can say “I was there”.

Britain had recently emerged from the Winter of Discontent, and Mrs Thatcher was in Downing Street, but the state of the nation is never representative of all its people; my own levels of content, at the end of my first year at Bristol University, were at a record high.

I can’t quite remember why I decided that I would go to both the Lord’s domestic finals that year, whoever was in them. It may have been an afterthought when applying for tickets for the World Cup final. Clearly, the price of tickets was within a student’s budget; Mrs T had not yet taken our grants away.

Essex played Surrey in the 55-over competition in July, while Somerset opposed Northamptonshire in the 60-over final in September. It was a good year to be a disinterested observer in St John’s Wood and a privilege to be present when both Essex and Somerset won their first trophies in more than a century of existence.  Tears in the eyes of grown men…“if only Dad had lived to see this, how happy it would have made him…” etc. And there were centuries by two great batsmen, though the greatness of only one of them was apparent by 1979.

What John Woodcock thought of all this I don’t know; The Times was in its year-long shutdown and missed the 1979 season completely, so there are no extracts from its archive in this piece.

I had watched two games in the 55-over competition before the final. My season began as it did for many of the next 19, in the bracing April breezes of the County Ground in Bristol. Gloucestershire despatched Minor Counties (South) with ease, Procter 11-5-18-2 and 82 not out. Two weekends later I returned to Kent for the visit of Middlesex. John Shepherd took three wickets for one run early on, and the Londoners reached 178 only because Mike Gatting and Phil Edmonds put on 75 for the sixth wicket. Knocking it off would be, we thought, a matter of routine, and I felt superior in already having my final ticket when everybody else would be scrabbling for theirs later. Kent were all out for 73, their lowest List A score (but, as we will see, not for long).

So to the final. I got to Lord’s, as I did for most of these finals, soon after the gates opened at nine. My basic ground admission ticket gave access to the lower tier of around much of the ground.  For all the finals in which Kent were not involved I watched from the stands at the Nursery End at long on for the right-handed batsman. No seats were allocated, so it was first-come-first served, but that worked well as like-minded spectators grouped together. In my area the ratio of people to Playfair annuals to pork pies was as near to 1:1:1 as makes no difference. Those there to drink and chant went to the Tavern Stand (this group was bigger for the July finals, outside the football season). Short people could choose not to sit behind tall people. The insistence on sending us all to particular seats was one of the reasons I stopped going so regularly, particularly after I found, in 1985, that my seat was directly behind the sightscreen.

I still like to get to grounds early, especially on big occasions. I’d go into the museum, walk around the ground, watch the players in the nets, and be back in my seat for the toss, won that day by Surrey’s Roger Knight, who did what most one-day captains did then and put them in, perhaps unwisely given that Sylvester Clarke was missing through injury and Robin Jackman playing despite struggling for fitness.

Opening the batting were Mike Denness and Graham Gooch. It was good to see Denness back at Lord’s, the only Essex player to have played in a previous county final, though Gooch had been there just a month before at the World Cup final (as had I). There he made 32 batting at No 4, but had been left in a hopeless position by Brearley and Boycott’s adoption of appeasement as an approach to chasing 286 (on the day of writing this, New Zealand adopted the same method in the World Cup to chase Australia’s 243, with equally disastrous results). Gooch had also—along with Boycott and Larkins—been a third of a fifth bowler against Richards, Lloyd, Greenidge and the rest, but a month later did not bowl a ball against Butcher, Roope and Lynch.

 

Gooch’s promise was universally acknowledged, but at that point unfulfilled. It was four years after his disastrous double-duck debut at Edgbaston, the last test in England where an uncovered pitch changed the course of the game. He had returned to the England team in 1978, filling a vacancy caused by the absence of the Packer players. In the winter’s series against a second-string Australia he had played in all six tests but reached fifty only in the last of them. Thirteen tests so far, but no centuries. There were those who thought that he was another English batsman—Hampshire and Hayes two recent examples—whose promise was no more than a mirage.

Nobody who saw Gooch bat under the July sun that day took that view. For the first time on a big stage we saw the foreboding backlift, the stop-motion movement, the most reassuring front foot in cricket plonking down to send extra cover into retreat. His 120 was one of the four finest hundreds I saw in Lord’s finals: Clive Lloyd in the first World Cup final, Richards a few weeks before and Aravinda de Silva’s losing effort against Lancashire in 1995 complete the list.

When the names of overseas players who graced county cricket in the seventies and eighties are reeled off, that of Ken McEwan is rarely included, which is an omission. He played for Essex for 12 years, in every one of which he topped a thousand first-class runs, and was as consistent in the one-day game, good enough to bat at any tempo. Here, he outscored Gooch in a third-wicket partnership of 124, his 72 including ten fours.

McEwan always seemed to make runs when I was in the crowd. The day of Princess Diana’s wedding was memorable for me solely for his century at Canterbury. Perhaps the community of cricket bloggers could collect famous days in history that they recall more for cricketing reasons.

Essex reached 290, the second-best domestic final score at that time, beaten only by the 317 that Yorkshire made in 1965, on the day that hard-hitting aliens took over the body of Geoffrey Boycott.

The Essex supporters around me couldn’t have been more nervous had all their mortgages been put on the win. Openers Alan Butcher and Monte Lynch went before fifty was on the board, then Geoff Howarth and Roger Knight put on 91 for the third wicket. But it was just a beat too slow, and the pressure that put on the later batsmen meant that wickets fell regularly, the winning margin of 35 runs making it look easier than it felt, to everybody on the northern banks of the Thames Estuary, at least.

Essex followed up by winning the Championship later in the year, the first of seven titles secured with four games in hand. No county has represented the soul of county cricket better than Essex in the four decades since that first happy day at Lord’s.

A few days before Essex’s victory, Lancashire visited Canterbury for the second round of the 60-over knockout. Kent had beaten Glamorgan at Swansea in the first round, Underwood 12-5-11-1.

Chris Tavaré has been attracting some attention on social media this week having been photographed at the launch of Vic Marks’ book (which is on the list of purchases on our September visit to the UK—we always arrive with light suitcases and leave with heavy ones, all books). It was good that his appearance prompted universally positive comments, admiring of the stoutest defence since Leningrad in the forties. Even more pleasing were the one or two who remembered him as a Sunday dasher, Clark of Kent, the mild-mannered blocker transformed into flayer of one-day attacks. It was this persona that turned up at St Lawrence that day, top scoring with 87 when Kent batted first, and putting on 101 with Asif Iqbal for the third wicket. Some late hitting from Ealham, Shepherd and Cowdrey took Kent to 278, a score that would win many more 60-over games than it lost in that era.

Lancashire’s reply was interrupted by the weather at 35 for one. A surprise here for younger readers: we all went back the next day to finish the game. Cricket was not controlled by the accountants and marketing people to the extent that it is now, so a loss-making second, or third, day to finish the game properly was considered worth the expense.

Day two did not start well for Lancashire, with opener Barry Wood retiring hurt a shoulder injury on 24. Wood was good enough a batsman to play 12 tests, mainly as an opener. He had a fine reputation as a player of pace, but suffered, as so many in that era did, from never being given a real run. The same applied to ODIs, of which he was selected for 13 over a decade. If had started just a few years later he might have played ten times that number as specialist one-day selections became more of a norm, his quality batting supplemented by scheming medium pace.

Here, he returned to the crease with Lancashire in trouble at 124 for five and reached his hundred in under an hour, supported by keeper John Lyon in a stand of 76 for the sixth wicket. They never quite caught up with the required rate though and fell well short of the 22 needed from the last over.

It was Asif Iqbal who swept away the Lancashire top order with a spell of four for five in 17 balls, probably the most decisive spell of his Kent career. Because of a dodgy back he was never a regular member of the attack, and some years hardly bowled at all. The scorecard of this game suggests that he only came on because Chris Cowdrey was getting tonked, but in heavy conditions such as those that day he could get the red ball to swing.

It was off to Taunton for the quarter-final. It was another of several days in 1979 when Kent folk spent the first half of the game thinking that things were going much more swimmingly than they actually were. Dilley removed openers Rose and Slocombe early. Richards (44) and Botham (29) were two of four victims for Bob Woolmer’s deceptive medium pace. Somerset were 45 for four, then 128 for eight, but Graham Burgess led a rally of the tail that produced 62 for the last two wickets.

Burgess’s appearance and demeanour gave the impression of his having left his blacksmith’s forge to play, though in fact he was a ex-Millfield schoolboy. He was the only survivor of the team from the 1967 final, and had held his place as the journeymen were replaced by superstars.  In 1979, he knew that his time was running out and walked out to bat that day with determination borne from the thought that his last chance of a trophy could be gone if he failed.

Even so, a target of 190 did not seem daunting. If the last two pairs could bat with such ease, we reasoned, then the pitch must have detoxed, making a sub-200 target an administrative matter.

What occurred was a cricketing recreation of Wall Street in the late October of ‘29: panic, helplessness and collapsing numbers, the Kent batsmen reduced to penury by Joel Garner. It was the second of three occasions that summer when I watched Garner bowl an irresistible spell that finished off the opposition, the previous occasion being the World Cup final. Chris Tavaré went more square on when he found the pace uncomfortably quick; here his feet pointed straight down the pitch, but he still got one of five ducks in the Kent innings. Kent’s 60 all out remains their lowest List A score to this day.

Watching a World Cup game from Taunton the other day, I realised a sign of the passing years is that what is now referred to as the “old pavilion” wasn’t built when I first went there.

An easy victory over Middlesex in the semi-final took Somerset into the final, where they were favourites against Northamptonshire, just as they had been against Sussex the previous year, only to go down by a comfortable five wickets. Just four years before, Northamptonshire had beaten Lancashire against the odds, so the Somerset fans were every bit as inclined to read the runes as pessimistically as their Essex counterparts had been a few weeks before.

Viv Richards was there to reassure them, in the same way as Gooch had, with a century. It contained many of the same fine shots as his World Cup final hundred, but was of a different tone, as if he had been given custody of a fine but fragile piece of priceless china that he had to deliver safely. Watching Richards bat has been one of the greatest joys of my cricket watching, a combination of elegance, power and pride that was quite wonderful. Brian Rose’s 41 was the next highest score, but most of the rest chipped in for a total of 269.

Garner started as he had at Taunton, removing Larkins lbw in the first over, then trapped Richard Williams hit wicket as the batsman wisely tried to put as much distance between himself and the bowler as possible. It seemed that an early train was again an option, but Geoff Cook and Allan Lamb put on 113 for the second wicket. Wisden says that this took just 13 overs, but this has to be a mistake. Nine an over at any stage was unheard of in those days, and it would etched on the memory and often written about, surely. Lamb was three years off qualifying for England and this was the first time that he showed his class on a big occasion. Cook was to secure a winter in the sun on the back of a Lord’s final performance two years later, but here was run out for 41, the beginning of the end for Northamptonshire. Garner returned not so much to mop up the tail as expunge all traces of its DNA, finishing with six for 29, the best bowling I saw in a final.

Somerset’s first trophy in 104 years was followed by a second fewer than 24 hours later. The team, the whiff of cider in the air all the way up the M1, made their way to Nottingham for the last day of the Sunday League, which they went into placed second. Their modest (but in the circumstances commendable) 185 did not suggest that a double was in prospect, particularly as leaders Kent had three fewer to chase against Middlesex. At 40 without loss in ten overs, to us at Canterbury it looked pretty much in the bag. We were the Habsburgs of our time, thinking ourselves magnificent while bits of our empire were quietly seceding.

All ten wickets fell for 86 runs. News of this inspired Somerset to induce an even more precipitous collapse, with the last eight Nottinghamshire wickets falling for 46. A slightly surprised looking Brian Rose accepted the trophy as if he had been doing it all his life.