The Cricket Magazines: October 1972

I have fallen behind in my surveys of the cricket magazines of half-a-century ago. My summer holiday task is to catch up, starting with the October editions.

The focus of both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly was the fifth test at the Oval that concluded the best Ashes series in England since the Second World War. It was decided on the sixth day, the last test in England to have such a provision until the final of the World Test Championship in 2021.

Centuries by both Chappells gave Australia a first-innings advantage of 115, but debutant Barry Wood’s 90 led a strong response to set a target of 242, a cinch in the era of Bazball but quite a challenge in 1972.

England were handicapped by the depletion of their attack through the second innings: D’Oliveira had a bad back, Illingworth turned his ankle and Snow had the flu, “sick and shaking” as he managed a single over with the second new ball.

At 171 for five, Jack Fingleton, according to Basil Easterbrook, “groaned and said ‘It’s too many for us now’ ”, but Paul Sheahan and Rod Marsh took them home without further loss.

England’s top scorer in the match was Alan Knott, with 92 and 63. The other day one of the Australian TV commentators said that Adam Gilchrist had re-written the book on how wicketkeepers batted in test matches. Gilchrist, brilliant as he was, merely added a chapter to Knott’s draft. This match was one of many on which Knott had a critical influence with the bat, and in a way that ignored cricket’s geometry. He would have broken the bank in an IPL auction.

Both titles agree that Australia deserved to (at least) draw the series. Easterbrook’s summary put it in historical context.

Australia won both their victories after losing the toss. They had the series outstanding bowler in Lillee, the best supporting bowler in Massie and their batsmen produced five centuries, whereas the best England could manage were three innings in the 90s. If Australia, who were beaten in vile weather in Manchester and on an unworthy pitch at Leeds, did not have the luck this time it perhaps went some way to compensate for the period between 1961 and 1968 when three Australian sides in no way superior to England…undeservedly held on to The Ashes.

John Woodcock agreed that Lillee had a decisive influence, which he expressed in the language of the time.

He runs a tediously long way; yet to see him pounding in to bowl, and to put oneself in the batsman’s shoes, is to know one is watching a man’s game.

Not quite how I would put it, but Lillee running in, shirt billowing, with a Dick Dastardly scowl, was one of the great sights of cricket.

Clive Lloyd made one of the finest Lord’s-final centuries in the first World Cup in 1975. Three years earlier he made another as Lancashire won the Gillette Cup for the third successive year (Jack Bond, Lancashire skipper, is pictured with the trophy on the cover of Playfair). It was the centrepiece of the reports by Michael Melford for The Cricketer and Gordon Ross for Playfair. Melford noted the power of Lloyd’s drives:

…most of them, off fast bowling, went at such a pace that the bowler, deep mid-on and deep mid-off scarcely moved before the ball was past them.

For Ross, it was the cross-bat shots:

Three times he cleared the boundary ropes with massive pulls, and it made no difference whatsoever who was bowling; this was utter domination of the attack.

Bryon Butler’s press review in The Cricketer collected more acclaim for the Guyanan, from Arlott, Swanton, Marlar, and from Dennis Compton, who got quite carried away in the Sunday Express:

This was the greatest innings I have ever seen at Lord’s at any level. I have seen and played against Sir Donald Bradman, Walter Hammond, Stan McCabe, Sir Frank Worrell, Clive [sic] Walcott, Everton Weekes and many other great players in full flow: but I have never seen an attack torn to pieces like this.

The October editions cover the first ODIs—or one-day tests as they were referred to—played in England, the first anywhere except for the hastily arranged inaugural at Melbourne the previous year. England won an entertaining series two-one. In the first game, Dennis Amiss became the first century-maker in this form of the international game.

It will surprise many to see that, in the absence of the injured Illingworth, England were captained by Brian Close. A more obvious choice might have been Tony Lewis, already named as captain of MCC’s tour of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known). Illingworth, along with Boycott and Snow, had made himself unavailable for a gruelling schedule that included eight test matches over more than four months.

EW Swanton’s editorial in The Cricketer once again deployed the royal pronoun in critiquing the tour party:

We must admit to disappointment that the promising new material among the 21-25 brigade has been overlooked.

The only player under 25 was Chris Old. The India correspondent of The Cricketer, KN Prabhu, reported on an underwhelmed response to the selection. The editor of a sports magazine demanded that the tour be called off if England were to be represented by a second XI. The Indian Express was barely less damning, saying that the team

…might be well balanced in that the standard of its batsmanships [sic] and bowling are likely to balance each other in mediocrity.

Prabhu himself was not so quick to write off the tourists, noting the success of various members of the party as members of an International XI some years before.

England won the first test in India before losing the next two narrowly, by 28 runs and four wickets. The final two matches in the series were drawn, as were all three in Pakistan, a reminder of how historically difficult it has been to attain a positive result on those pitches. The achievement of the McCullum/Stokes team in winning three-nil in similar conditions is one of the great achievements of the intervening half century.

       

       

The Cricketer & Playfair Cricket Monthly September 1972

 

Excavations in the cupboards of Scorecards Towers have unearthed a second magazine to provide an insight into the cricket of half a century ago: the Playfair Cricket Monthly. The April 1966 edition of this publication was the first cricket magazine that I owned; The Cricketer did not become a regular fixture until five years later.

The Playfair magazine complemented the annual of the same imprimatur. Both were edited by Gordon Ross. The annual remains a must-have for the serious cricket watcher in the UK to this day, but by September 1972 the magazine was in its final months. It was swallowed up by The Cricketer in 1973. Playfair concentrated almost exclusively on the international and first-class game, while its senior rival encompassed cricket at all levels.

The September editions of both focussed on the third and fourth tests of what was becoming one of the finest Ashes series since the Second World War. John Woodcock reported for The Cricketer, while Basil Easterbrook was there for Playfair.

Easterbrook’s name will ring a bell with those who have Wisdens of the 1970s on their shelves, as he has a feature in almost all of them, on subjects ranging from ducks (“the dreaded cypher”) to county cricket’s workhorses, the Mohammad family and Compton’s summer of ’47.[1] He was cricket correspondent for the Kemsley regional newspapers, so his byline rarely appeared in the national press, which was their loss; he writes lightly and perceptively.

Here is an extract from Derek Hodgson’s obituary of Basil Easterbrook in The Independent:

Like most of his generation, he was unenthusiastic about the advance of commercialism but he was once put in charge of the Press Box hospitality at Worcester by a new and happily naive sponsor. The hacks were duly impressed on the first lunchtime when a bottle of Chablis arrived at each seat. Easterbrook beamed.

The next day more wine arrived accompanied by a fly-past from the Red Arrows. Challenged to top this, on the last day, Easterbrook smiled and pointed out of the window to where, under the shadow of the cathedral, the groundsman's hut had gone up in flames.

He was a small, bright, perky man who could be waspish with fools and angered by injustice. He always had a new humorous story. We had not seen him in the box since 1983 but we still miss him. He spent his later days watching Torquay United, not always happily, but he was always keen to tell you of the latest developments with the Gulls.

England and Australia went to Trent Bridge for the third test at one-all. Ray Illingworth astonished the cognoscenti by putting Australia in. This seems nothing nowadays; at the Basin Reserve there would be widespread swooning if the skipper winning the toss did not insert, but this was the era of uncovered pitches, rest days, and unreliable weather forecasts. A captain giving the opposition first use of the pitch on Thursday morning was gambling on there being no rain from Saturday on.

Losing such a wager was to be the downfall of Mike Denness at Edgbaston three years later. Illingworth got away with it here, though the pitch gave little of the expected help to England’s seamers, though there were a succession of dropped catches on the first day. Things got worse in this regard. Woodcock says that England’s fielding in the second innings was “the worst anyone could remember from an England side”.

Keith Stackpole’s century headed Australia’s 315. England replied with only 189, and an unbeaten 170 from Ross Edwards left a target of 451. Brian Luckhurst led the rear guard with 96 over five-and-a-half hours. It was England’s top score in the series, which made it all galling for we Kent people that he was dropped after Headingley. England lost only three wickets on the last day, on a pitch Easterbrook calls “this gentle featherbed”. In these days of Bazball England would have had a go at scoring 340 in the day, but in those more timid times it was out of the question, particularly as a draw meant that Australia would have to win the next two tests to win the series.

It is easy to throw around emotive words like ‘disgrace’ and ‘scandal’ as labels for the pitch on which England won the fourth Test by nine wickets with two days and ninety minutes to spare, but rather more difficult to justify them.

So begins Easterbrook’s report in Playfair. Mention this game to an Australian fifty years on, and those words will be the least of the vocabulary that is offered in response. That the match saw the return of DL Underwood to the England XI fuels the conspiracy theory. He took ten for 82 in the match and, as Woodcock wrote, “Whichever side Underwood had been playing for would almost certainly have won”.

Bryon Butler’s In the Press in The Cricketer quoted two distinguished Aussies who started as their compatriots have gone on. Ray Lindwall in The Sun:

Call me an Aussie squealer if you like [OK, we will­-Ed] but I am angry and disappointed that we should lose the Ashes this way. These spinners’ pitches have cropped up too often in England for me to shake them off and say ‘Hard luck, isn’t it?’

Jack Fingleton in the Sunday Times interviewed the groundsman in the presence of Joe Lister, the Yorkshire secretary.

When I mentioned the abnormal spin, Mr Lister intervened to say “Well wait and we will see how the Englishmen handle this pitch.” I replied “But we have no Underwood or Illingworth.” Mr Lister said he didn’t like the inference[2]. I told him I would reply to him later. It was the pitch I was interested in.

Twelve of the other 21 wickets also fell to spinners. The two reporters have contrasting explanations for the spin-friendly nature of the pitch. Easterbrook blames a thunderstorm three days before the game that flooded the field and hampered pitch preparation. Woodcock says that the groundsman, alarmed by a hand injury inflicted by Willis on Boycott in a Gillette Cup game a couple of weeks before, took too much grass off the pitch.

On the afternoon before the Test it was obvious for all to see that the pitch was to be a burial ground for fast bowlers.

Stackpole’s 52 apart, none of the Australians contributed more than 26 in the first innings, though Easterbrook cites Inverarity and Mallett’s eighth-wicket partnership of 47 in defence of the pitch. I recall watching on TV (we got our first colour TV that year, from Radio Rentals) as Underwood tied them up in an afternoon session in which Australia lost six for 40 (though coverage was interrupted by racing from Goodwood; the deprivations we suffered in the seventies).

That England secured a lead of 117 was largely down to the 104 that Illingworth and Snow put on for the eighth wicket. I have written often enough that Illingworth is as good an example as Brearley of a captain picked for his leadership rather than his runs and wickets, but he was most likely to come up with a gritty fifty when the top order had not delivered. Snow had considerable ability with the bat, when he could be bothered. He finished his career opening the batting for Warwickshire in the Sunday League.

Paul Sheahan’s unbeaten 41 was the best Australia could manage in the second innings, and Luckhurst hit the winning run before the end of Grandstand. Five of the England team turned out for their counties in the Sunday League the following day.

Playfair featured the Captain’s Column. In past years a different captain had contributed each month, but in 1972 it was the sole preserve of Kent’s Mike Denness. How things have changed over half a century.

…two of my own county’s Test cricketers, Alan Knott and Brian Luckhurst, battled through a five-day Test against Australia and were faced with an eight-day break before the next Test.

…as a county captain I have found the greatest difficulty this year I keeping the players at their peak with long breaks between games.

…we have found in Kent that we have had no cricket on two Saturdays. I would have thought that Saturday is the one day we must play cricket.

Both titles reported on the first Benson and Hedges Cup final. John Arlott was there for The Cricketer. It was as unmemorable as a final could be, with Leicestershire taking 47 overs to overtake Yorkshire’s 136, though it was Leicestershire’s first trophy in any competition.

Arlott found one aspect of the day distasteful.

The mass singing which accompanied the prize-giving was a stern indication of the difficulties cricket speech-makers are likely to encounter in the future.

I generally found the B&H final to be more raucous than the 60-over equivalent, presumably because it was outside the football season.  

Here is more on Basil Easterbrook from The Questing Vole (aka Patrick Kidd).

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[1] In researching Easterbrook’s writing I have discovered that my 1971 Wisden is missing pp149-152. Is it too late to return it for a refund?

[2] It must have been the pressure of the moment that caused Mr Lister to confuse “inference” with “implication”.

 

The Cricketer: July 1972

 

The Ashes were the main attraction of 1972 and The Cricketer was fortunate to have John Woodcock as its test match reporter. The July edition carried his account of the first test, played at Old Trafford in early June.

England won a seam-dominated match by 89 runs. John Snow took eight wickets, backed up by Geoff Arnold and Tony Greig with five each. Greig was making his test debut, though this would have come as a surprise to him, given that he had appeared four times for England against the Rest of the World in 1970, contests that were regarded as test matches at that time. He was also ever present in the Rest of the World team that had played in Australia the previous winter, matches that were never categorised by the Australians as tests, though, as discussed here previously, they were manifestly of test quality. Greig also made two half centuries at Manchester.

Anybody who has read much of this blog will know of my admiration for John Woodcock, but he did have a blind spot when it came to the nationality qualifications of England cricketers in general, and of Tony Greig in particular. It will be remembered that he wrote that one of things that explained the Packer schism was that Greig was “not a proper Englishman”. His report here develops this theme.

The ideal England team would be composed of Englishmen, pure and simple. One might have said the same when Ranji, Duleep or Pataudi were playing, or when D’Oliveira was first picked. If I were an Australian I might wonder about the fairness of it all.

But then I might count up the number of Aborigines in the Australian team, find that there were none, and reflect that my team consisted entirely of players who were, in the great scheme of things, recent immigrants themselves.

Woodcock reports that only 36,000 attended the test, which lasted well into the fifth day. That is less than a third of those who went through the gates of Old Trafford for the equivalent fixture in 2019, a comparison that those who argue that test cricket is on permanent decline should note.

Alex Bannister, long-serving Cricket Correspondent of the Daily Mail (and no relation of Jack Bannister, as far as I know) had a series running featuring a different county each month. In July it was Worcestershire. The article ranges between the past and the present in a pleasing way. I learned several things, including that county secretary Mike Vockins was an agricultural biochemist (which might have come in useful when the Severn made one its regular visits to the Worcester outfield), and that the Nawab of Pataudi senior (the same as cited by Woodcock, above) became a Worcestershire player only after having been turned down by Kent. This would have been around the time that Lord Harris insisted that Walter Hammond had to serve a two-year qualification for Gloucestershire because he had been born in Dover while his soldier father was stationed there, so perhaps embracing Pataudi would have been a double standard too far, even for that scion of the aristocracy.

Bannister rated the 25-year-old Glenn Turner highly.

There are two Turners – one intent on crease occupation; the other a magnificent strokemaker. In either mood – and I prefer the latter – he is one of the world’s leading batsmen.

Another New Zealander, John Parker, was on the Worcestershire staff in 1972. Years later, when I was writing for CricInfo, Turner and Parker joined us in the press box at Seddon Park in Hamilton and reminisced about their New Road days. The conversation turned to the use of statistical analysis in modern coaching. One or other of them said something along the lines of:

We had a computer that gave feedback based on the study of the available data. It was called Norman Gifford and it used to stand at short leg giving insightful readouts such as “what the eff are you bowling that effing crap for?”.

I am writing on T20 Blast finals weekend, against which the ECB have scheduled an ODI against India, thus depriving the participating counties of their international players. A similar issue half a century ago saw the boot on the other foot. Surrey and Sussex both refused to release their players to appear for MCC against the Australians in the traditional pre-tests fixture, preferring to retain their services for the Benson and Hedges Cup. I generally avoid a romantic view of cricket in those days, but a time when counties could tell Lord’s to stuff it was a great one in which to be alive.

Denis Compton and John Snow both defended the decision, but the majority of the cricketing establishment was outraged. Crawford White of the Daily Express wrote that “as a member of Surrey for 20 years and more, I think that this is a disgraceful decision”.  MCC Secretary Billy Griffith called it “absolutely deplorable”, while EW Swanton, as Bryon Butler put it in his monthly press review, “drew his sword”.

History of a most regrettable sort has been made…It never occurred to me for a moment that this fixture would not be held sacrosanct…In football, one hears, England suffers from the selfishness of clubs. That is football’s affair. It is cricket’s affair to put country first rather than the short-term financial advantage of a sponsored competition, however good in itself…cricket has been done a grave disservice, which is sure to have strong repercussions.

This is vintage Swanton. “Football” and “sponsored” become terms of abuse. MCC is awarded dominion status. We see in our mind’s eye the oafish member of the lower classes to whom he slips sixpence for furtive news of the association game. And he gets it completely wrong. By the way, that whirring noise is Swanton turning like a rotisserie chicken at the news that the Varsity match has been exiled from Lord’s.

John Arlott profiles Peter Lever. His opening paragraph will move any of us who treasure county cricket.

The heart of English cricket is the county game; and the essence of county cricket is not the Test star who dominates it but the ordinary county cricketer who is there every day and gives it his constant and fullest effort. He does not, like the representative players, miss a dozen county games a year to play for his country. He is a man for all seasons; county cricket is for him an achieved peak and a fulfilment.

But the highlight of the July edition comes in the School Review. It is the historic first appearance in the press of the great CJ Tavaré. Then captain of Severnoaks School, he made 116 including 12 fours and—wait for it—ten sixes.

No doubt this news will provoke ill-judged and distasteful remarks from the class of person who in earlier times would have earned a crust by slipping news of Aston Villa’s away form to Swanton, and who know Tav only as the obdurate fellow who was the tax manual of England’s batting in the early eighties. But it will come as no surprise to those of us who knew the Sunday Tavaré, the man who would dismantle any attack in the country over 40 overs. Three of the Australians at Old Trafford would still be around in 1982/3 to play tests against Tavaré.