The Cricketer, June 1973

 The Cricketer, June 1973

This month’s edition was likely in my bag when I spent three days at St Lawrence in the late-May half-term holiday for a three-day game between Kent and MCC. Matches between these sides have an interesting history. If I had a cricketing time machine, one of the first places I would head would be August 1876, to see WG Grace score 344, to this day the highest individual score made at St Lawrence. What’s more, MCC were following on, and WG had bowled 77 overs in Kent’s innings. These were probably, but not certainly, six-ball overs. Six was the norm, but could be varied by agreement of the captains. Over the three days, 398 overs were bowled, 130 or so a day not being excessive for the time.

By the seventies, MCC usually only played a county in the season opener against the champions, so this fixture is a curiosity. Apparently, it came about because of concern of lack of first-class cricket early in the season. Kent fielded a full-strength side, lacking only the injured Brian Luckhurst. Led by Intikhab Alam, half MCC’s side might have been contenders for the test side given a good season. Frank Hayes scored a century on debut against West Indies a couple of months later, and Jackman, Stead, Edwards and Harris were among the better county players of the time. Younis Ahmed added some class. Bob Carter of Worcestershire was notable for an idiosyncratic running style, with arms flailing, that attracted the scorn of the younger element of the crowd. Kent topped the team up with Dave Nicholls, and Peter Topley, slow left-armer and brother of Don. Modern players would be horrified that pacemen Stead and Jackman considered 20 Championship games as insufficient opportunity to display their craft, and were keen to bowl another 33 and 39 overs respectively, and that their counties were happy for them to do so.

The match was played seriously, but just a degree more carefree than a Championship game. I remember it most for Asif Iqbal’s 72-minute hundred on the last morning, all road-runner feet, and laser driving. Of all Kent’s talented, attractive batters, Asif was the most joyous. He was 80 the other day. Happy birthday. The finish, an eight-run win for Kent with nine balls left, was as close as I had seen. 

The cover star this month is Glenn Turner, touring with the New Zealanders and on his way to a thousand runs in May, the last to do this except Graeme Hick in 1988. The exiling of the County Championship to the extremities of the season makes this one of the few old records that are more likely to be achieved these days. 

EW Swanton, now editorial director, laments the lack of young talent in the English game. 

How many young men of Test potential have come onto the scene in, say, the last five years? The sombre fact is that of those who went with MCC to the East last winter…only Tony Greig and Chris Old might not equally have been representing England in 1968. 

Swanton makes a good point. Of the Kent XI that played MCC, only left-arm quick Richard Elms was under 25 and qualified for England. Most counties were the same. This may have been no more than a glitch in the timeline; just three years later Botham, Gooch, Gatting and Gower had all emerged from an unchanged structure. 

Swanton identifies other reasons for this dearth of precocious talent.

It’s impossible for anyone in regular touch with the county to be impressed by the ability of most of the official coaches. One hopes that the calibre improves as the jobs become better paid.

He regrets that counties favour the skills likely to bring success in the one-day game, but chooses an unfortunate example as illustration.

A team of [Keith] Boyces would not, however, have much chance in a five-day test match.

Within three months Boyce was leading wicket-taker and decisive performer in West Indies’ two-nil test series victory over England. The Great Pontificator’s conclusion will still resonate with county cricket’s many supporters with only minor adaptation.

…the one institution suited to producing the complete and balanced England XI of the future remains the County Championship. The one-day competitions…do not produce players, they only exercise those who have been brought on by the traditional system.

Tony Cozier reports on the final two tests of Australia’s visit to the Caribbean, in which Boyce and his colleagues were less successful than they were to become. The fourth test was lost by ten wickets, despite Clive Lloyd’s hometown 178. The fifth was drawn with Australia a session away from making it three-nil. 

Cozier will have re-used his description of the defeat in Guyana time and again over the following two decades, substituting the names of the home team and its players.

Indisciplined batting against spirited fast bowling by Hammond and Walker backed by aggressive out-cricket resulted in a comfortable Australian victory…

Alan Ross reviews the 1973 Wisden, and reproves editor Norman Preston for including the 1970 series between England and the Rest of the World in the test records after the ICC had declared otherwise. Here, I am on Preston’s side. The cricket in that series was of a quality rarely equalled before or since, and we regarded them as tests at the time. Anyway, why should a governing body determine how data should be sorted? Statisticians should feel free to be creative.

A more recent example is the directive to include all international games in T20 records, which has rendered them meaningless (what is the second highest score in a T20 international?; the Czech Republic’s 278 for four against Turkey in 2019, of course). So the Scorecards database says that Derek Underwood has 304 test wickets, not 297, and will not enter into any correspondence. 

Speaking of Underwood, the News of the Month records that the great man took eight for nine at Hastings against Sussex, who were skittled out for 54. Not mentioned is that these were not Underwood’s best figures at this ground. For those not familiar with the geography of south-east England, Hastings is in Sussex, so it was an away ground on which Underwood would play once a year, if that. In 1964, he took nine for 28, three years later 14 in the match. Fast forward to 1984, when he made his only first-class hundred there, the day after he took six for 12, his best performance in the Sunday League. 

It wasn’t just Hastings; Deadly was partial to Sussex grounds in general. In 1977, when they came up with the cunning plan of moving the game to Hove, he took the only hat-trick of his career (I was there for that one). 

In checking a couple of facts for this piece, I discover that Underwood was the retrospective No 1 ranked test bowler from September 1969 to August 1973. So he must have been selected for the test team in June 1973? He was not, Ray Illingworth’s curious preference for Norman Gifford (none for 142 in the first two tests) triumphed again. 

Gifford was in charge of The Captain’s Column this month. A topic of the time was the requirement to bowl 18.5 overs an hour (or 111 overs in a six-hour day). Gifford asks for the co-operation of spectators behind the bowler’s arm. He would have loved me. On my headstone will be the inscription “He never moved behind the bowler’s arm”.

A Sunday League catastrophe

Kent v Middlesex, 11 June 1972, Folkestone, 40 overs

The 2022 season has been a wretched one for Kent. In each of the county’s first five Championship games, the opposition made more than 500. The Sri Lankan Development XI did the same in an additional first-class fixture. The sequence may be a record. The dismissal of Northamptonshire for a mere 430 in the sixth Championship match was, no doubt, greeted by dancing in the streets of Tunbridge Wells.

If we expected Kent’s status as champions to give us solace in the T20, we were to be disappointed. Despite the recent win at Taunton, they remain ninth of nine in the southern group. Being able to watch the live streams of county cricket here in New Zealand is a wonderful thing, but breakfast watching has been a Groundhog Day of Kentish defeats.

My Blean Correspondent and I have been wondering whether 2022 displaces 1980 as the annus horribilis of our times. In that wet summer, Kent were kept off the bottom of the Championship only by a win over Warwickshire off the penultimate possible ball of Canterbury Week. There were exits at the earliest possible opportunity in both knockout competitions, and Sundays were spent adrift in the bottom half of the league.

Allen Hunt and George Murrell always maintained that the fifties were universally grim. One day, I mentioned that in 1951 Kent had a run of 20 Championship games without a win. George just said “Ah yes” as if remembering a summer spent in a foxhole and preferring not to talk about it.

So it is tempting to take refuge in the past, to return to the seventies when the sun shone every day on a never-ending series of Kentish victories, except when it didn’t.

Exactly half-a-century ago today as I write, Kent played Middlesex in the Sunday League at Folkestone. I loved the Sunday League, but it is in the nature of the shorter forms that many of its matches have not stuck in the mind. I look at scorecards knowing that I must have been there, but struggle to excavate corroboration from the memory.

Not this one. Kent v Middlesex at Folkestone in 1972 is a contest that I have thought about more than any other that I have watched. It was again in my mind just last week as I willed New Zealand to take some wickets even as England were within a couple of shots away from victory at Lord’s. Remember Folkestone ‘72, I thought as I invariably do as cricket matches reach their conclusion with one team well ahead, either from caution or hope, depending on whether it is my team that is winning or losing.

For this was a game in which Kent snatched defeat not just from the jaws of victory, but from its lower intestine, almost fully digested.

It was a top-of-the-table fixture. Kent had won four from five thus far in 1972, Middlesex were unbeaten. The first Ashes test was taking place at Old Trafford so Kent were without Luckhurst and Knott. Middlesex had no international absentees, through Price and Parfitt were both to feature later in the series. The Times sent Peter Marson along. His report supplements my memories and is reproduced below.

Kent won the toss and put Middlesex in. We can’t deduce anything about the pitch from this; it was what usually happened on Sundays in 1972. The visitors struggled from the start. It is unusual to write about a Middlesex one-day match in the seventies and eighties without mentioning a match-winning innings of nudging and nurdling from Clive Radley, but here he was run out for three. With MJ Smith and Parfitt also going for single-figures, Middlesex were 15 for three.

Norman “Smokey” Featherstone and Mike Brearley started a cautious rebuild, but both were out with the total at 40. Brearley was in the second of twelve seasons as Middlesex captain, and had not yet attained the mythical status with which he was later to be invested, but his apprenticeship with the Jedi was well under way and may have been behind the mysterious turn that events were to take.

That Middlesex reached 127 was down to a partnership of 54 in nine overs between former England keeper JT Murray, and Keith Jones, who was from Central Casting’s plentiful stock of bits-and-pieces seaming all-rounders.

Derek Underwood, incomprehensibly omitted from the test team for Norman Gifford, took two for 28, but it was John Shepherd who was the meanest of the Kent attack that day with just 12 runs from his eight overs.

Norman Graham took two for 29, getting Smith and Murray both caught behind, no doubt from balls that did just enough, and bounced a little more than expected off the most inconvenient line and length. As I have written before, Graham probably wouldn’t pass the two-skills athlete test to be a cricketer these days, and the game is poorer for it.

Bernard Julien took three wickets, Parfitt early and Titmus and Price to finish the innings. On the basis that he was West Indian, a left-arm bowler who mixed a little wrist-spin in with the quicker stuff, and had unquestioned talent, Julien was lumbered with the worst of all labels: the new Sobers. Ridiculous as that was, he was potentially a high-quality player who never quite achieved what he promised. It didn’t help that for Kent he, the maker of two test hundreds, was a perennial No 9.

As ever, we should remember that 127 was, in 1972, not quite the cinch that it would be now. But it wasn’t far off. For the greatest part of the chase, Kent made it look easy. Dave Nicholls opened the batting at the ground where, nine years before, he had made 211 against Derbyshire, one of only two double hundreds in the County Championship that year. He was bracketed with Luckhurst and Denness as the future of Kent’s batting in the annual report. But it was eight years until he made his only other first-class hundred. He might have drifted out of the game had it not been for Kent’s lack of a deputy for Alan Knott when the great keeper began his England career in 1967. It was a role that Nicholls filled most capably for a decade. In 1972 he made regular appearances as a batter even when Knott was available. In this game he opened, put on 51 for the first wicket with Graham Johnson and was sixth out, for 54, going for the run that would have levelled the scores. No doubt he returned to the pavilion thinking that a good job had been done.

Denness and Cowdrey were both out for five, and Asif Iqbal was unable to bat at his usual place as he was ill. As so often, it was Alan Ealham who moved things along, with 24 of a fourth-wicket partnership of 33 with Nicholls. Only 19 were needed when Ealham was out, only ten when Shepherd’s was the fifth wicket to fall.

Neither Woolmer’s duck two runs later, nor Nicholls’ departure caused us any worries. People round the ground were packing up their picnic baskets, folding their chairs and making for car park or railway station. Some of them may have gone to their graves ignorant of the catastrophe that unfolded as they left the ground.

Only when Julien edged Selvey behind for the second of five noughts on the scorecard did it sudden occur to us that the victory that had seemed captive since the opening overs was tunnelling beneath our feet and had almost reached the perimeter fence. But still it was only two runs to win, one for the tie.

The next sight offered no reassurance. Peter Marson reported that Asif, who now walked down the pavilion steps, was unwell and running a high temperature. The story that went round at the time was that he had malaria, and had gone into quick decline shortly after the toss. He had left the field not long into the Middlesex innings. Now, this most swift footed of cricketers appeared to be using his bat as a walking stick as he made his way to the middle.

The simple act of scoring a run now seemed akin to splitting the atom or running a four-minute mile. Asif appeared incapable of lifting the bat with sufficient purpose to play a shot, nor of getting down the other end if he had, when normally he would have been there and back in an instant. Twice he watched the ball go by before the desperate attempted slog against Mike Selvey that resulted in the loss of a stump.

It was telling that, so ill as he obviously was, Asif was still considered a better bet to win the game than a perfectly well Norman Graham, in whose hand a bat was as effective as a bow and arrow when charging machine guns. I am not sure if Norman received a ball when he replaced Asif. Marson makes it clear that Underwood was faced the last over, bowled by Sam Black. The “dire alarms” sounded by the first two balls of the over were wild swipes as the collective hysteria that overtook the Kent lower order spread to the usually phlegmatic Underwood.

Frankly, the leg before decision given to the third ball was a relief as much as anything, so unbearable was the tension, so improbable the scoring of even a single run. There was an awful silence as the ground emptied, as spectators tried to work out what they had just seen.

Four wickets fell for no runs when only two were needed for a win. If ever you need to cling onto hope a little longer as your side nears defeat, or if you want to guard against complacency when victory seems certain, say to yourself as I do, “Folkestone ’72”. 

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.

1978: The glory days end not with a bang, but with a whimper

Derbyshire v Kent, 55 overs, Lord’s, 22 July 1978

We all have those times in life when we count down to the last one, knowing it is coming. Days left before school starts again, meetings to sit through before you leave a job, hugs from a child before you go to the airport. Like many readers, I am currently experiencing this with regard to one-day county cricket.

For a few years now most matches covered by Sky TV in the UK have been shown here in New Zealand, and I am working my way through this year’s collection (mostly, I know the result before I see the game, but I don’t find that this diminishes the experience significantly). Apart, I assume, from the final stages, next year’s “development” competition won’t be televised, so, like a bear preparing for winter, I feel the need to gorge while I have the chance.

Excluding overseas players and arranging a clashing ODI against Australia, we will discover, are just the beginning of the ECB’s secret plan to make watching the downgraded 50-over competition as unattractive as possible. Fierce dogs are being secretly trained in the tunnels under Lord’s as we speak, their task to patrol the gates, ready to rip out the throat of anybody carrying the scent of a Playfair annual. Playing music that only the more delinquent of the crowd’s grandchildren is under trial as I write.

Sometimes, you have no idea that it is the last time, and look back with remorse at not making more of it. So it was for Kent supporters as we made our way back to the St John’s Wood tube station on that July evening 41 summers ago. If you’d told us then that we would be the last of our kind to walk away from a Lord’s final with the taste of victory fresh in our mouths, we would have assumed that the nuclear apocalypse was upon us. That Kent would simply not be good enough for the next four decades we would have considered a more fanciful explanation.

Since 1978, only Glamorgan, the only county never to have won a Lord’s final, have not known what it is like to make that same short walk with the spring of victory in their step. Kent’s subsequent run of eight losing Lord’s finals is without equal in sport, unless someone would like to prove otherwise.

Where do we find the writer in 1978? I was on what they now call a gap year, but had passed the previous six months, not crossing the Andes or kayaking the Mekong as the bold young people of today do, but working (applying the term loosely) in an insurance broker’s office in Canterbury. I did have three weeks in Germany, most of which was spent trying to find out the cricket scores.

Exam-free, I saw four of Kent’s games leading to the final, starting on the first day of the season at St Lawrence against Boycott’s Yorkshire. What nobody would have expected when the previous season ended was that Kent would be led by Alan Ealham. Asif Iqbal had been sacked because of his association with World Series Cricket, which also ruled out Bob Woolmer. Graham Johnson had missed most of the 1977 season, so was out of the running. Along with John Shepherd, here was a trio who could and should have captained Kent but did not get the chance. Ealham did a good job, and didn’t get sacked for winning two trophies as Denness had two years before. The downside of Ealham’s appointment was that it meant the end of his career as a boundary fielder, taking impossible catches and breaking the stumps with William Tell throws.

Ealham’s captaincy career could not have started better; he took the match award for a 53 that rescued Kent from a parlous 25 for four after Graham Stevenson ran through the top order. A total of 160 was worth more than it seemed. Boycott (in his last season as captain before the outbreak of the Yorkshire Civil War) and Lumb groped their way like blind men to 35 from 21 overs, which persuaded the rest of the team that run scoring was impossible—114 all out.

Kent’s second home game in the preliminary phase was played at Hesketh Park, Dartford, the first time I went there. Kent’s most prosaic ground was by this time the only one close to the metropolitan area in which a good number of Kent’s members reside. These days there is Beckenham, which is right in London.

Essex were the opposition, a contest now ludicrously labelled the “Battle of the Bridge”. There was no bridge then, and the “Tussle of the Tunnel” didn’t have the same ring to it. Gooch and Denness (warmly welcomed) put on 106 for the first wicket. According to Wisden, McEwan and Pont “thrashed” 60 off nine overs, not a word that would be chosen these days to describe a rate of under seven an over towards the end of the innings. Essex finished on 222.

Graham Johnson anchored the chase, with 75, Asif made 65, then Ealham and Shepherd hit 52 from eight overs (“a savage stand”) to give Kent the win with two overs to spare. Shepherd, who also took three for 24, took the match award.

Nottinghamshire, who beat Kent at Trent Bridge in the zonal round, visited St Lawrence for the quarter-final. Alan Ealham showed again that the captaincy was not a burden. John Woodcock was there for The Times.

It was down to Taunton for the semi-final. Somerset had still not won anything, but with Richards, Garner (though he was absent here) and Botham alongside some above-average county players and the Taunton Macoute behind them, the County Ground was already a forbidding place to visit. I set off from Herne Bay on the 5 17, getting to the ground shortly before play started and long after all the seats had been taken. From a series of temporary perches I saw 41 overs before the rain came, with Kent an uncertain 149 for five, which Alan Gibson correctly judged was better than it seemed. He tells the story of the episodic continuation of the match, which ended in Kent’s favour two days later. Gibson seemed to enjoy Taunton more than any other ground, and stayed in good form through the showers.

Readers too young to remember these times will have realised that one-day cricket was a very different creature then. The 226 Kent made at Dartford was the biggest of the four winning scores in the matches discussed so far. In the games that I am watching on TV at the moment the team batting first invariably passes 300 as a matter of routine. I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Michael Henderson, whose monthly diatribe in The Cricketer was, in the April edition, a lament that sixes have become humdrum. The balance between bat and ball is out of kilter. Pushing the boundaries back to the edge of the field would be a start, and a little leeway to the bowlers outside leg stump would be worth a try too.

Back to 1978, and so to Lord’s.

There were four changes to the Kent team that had lost to Gloucestershire the previous year. Johnson returned for Clinton at the top of the order. Alan Knott took the summer off, passing on the gloves to Paul Downton, who had toured Pakistan and New Zealand with England over the winter. Bernard Julien had gone and Richard Hills was omitted. Chris Tavaré and Chris Cowdrey joined Downton in a Lord’s final debut. Fifth-bowler duties were shared between Asif and Johnson, the latter’s off spin being used more often in one-day cricket than under Ealham’s predecessors, another sign that the new captain had spent those years on the boundary observing and thinking.

It was Derbyshire’s second appearance in a Lord’s final, the first being a loss to Yorkshire over 60 overs nine years earlier. Having been soundly beaten the previous year by a team led by one powerhouse South African all-rounder, we had noted that Derbyshire were led by another—Eddie “Bunter” Barlow, brought in three years before to spark the most unfashionable of counties into life. Barlow was as every bit the all-rounder that Procter was. Not as fast a bowler, but one of the best top order batsmen of the time.

Derbyshire also had Bob Taylor, in Knott’s absence established as the England keeper; Mike Hendrick shortly to return to the test side; Geoff Miller, an England regular that summer; and Peter Kirsten another South African of international quality. Kent had lost to Derbyshire in the Sunday League at Maidstone just two weeks earlier, so there was no complacency as we took our seats in the Warner Stand.

It was a dull game, the most moribund of Kent’s fifteen finals. Derbyshire won the toss and chose to bat. Alan Hill became the first man to bat in a Lord’s final wearing a helmet. John Woodcock was unimpressed. 

Kent bowled tightly, particularly Bob Woolmer who conceded just 15 runs from ten overs, but were allowed to without challenge as Derbyshire froze on the big stage. Just 60 came from the first 30 overs. Hopes of a late-innings acceleration disappeared when Kirsten was out hooking at Asif, who looked an easier bowler than he was. The pitch was not easy—Woodcock has a sighting of the ridge, cricket’s Loch Ness monster—but 147 was well short of a winning score. Derbyshire were all out with just two balls of their 55 overs to spare.

Low scoring matches can be gripping, but that depends on the team batting second losing wickets early. There was a hint of this when Tavaré went for a duck to make it 38 for two, but Woolmer was there to nurture the innings with a third successive final half century. Of all the Packer players, it was Woolmer who missed out most on a substantive test career because of his involvement with WSC. He was comfortable in the conditions in a way that no other batsman managed to be that day, and was the best bowler too.

Woodcock has a few what-ifs, though doesn’t record Bob Taylor dropping Woolmer on 52 (a ball after Barlow dropped him) possibly because he didn’t believe his eyes. On the day, it didn’t seem in doubt, but the road to victory was across a featureless and unmemorable Nullarbor Plain.

No highlights of this final appear on YouTube, possibly mercifully; there was an industrial dispute which meant that the game had been shown on Grandstand without commentary, but Richie-less highlights were considered untenable, so were cancelled. We have a facility on Sky NZ that can mute the commentary from some sources. In Scorecards Towers we call it the KP button, and we wouldn’t be without it.

Kent went on to win the Championship that season, but our salad days were almost at an end and the world was changing. Mrs Thatcher would be in Downing Street within the year, though not in time to take away my student grant as I headed for Bristol University.

Given that Kent reached Lord’s last season, there was a hope that they would they would be the last Lord’s victors, tying up that loose end of defeats. But I watched their first game, against Hampshire, and it was clear that if a pop gun were added to the attack it would treble its potency. That dull match in 1978 was when the glory days ended, and our youth with them, not with a bang but with a whimper.