30 August to 5 September: The Never-ending Test Match: Leicestershire Make Their Move

 

The fourth test match was the longest game of cricket ever played in England, and was still drawn when it finally ended after six days.

When I left the Oval at the end of the second day England were 513 behind Australia with all wickets standing and four days to go, there being a sixth day available as the series could yet be drawn. This situation, and how it was resolved, tells us much about how attitudes to test cricket have changed over the past half century. Now, McCullum and Stokes’ England would have their eyes on a lead acquired at sufficient pace to make a win possible, as they did at Multan in 2024, replying to 556 with 823 to set up the win. In 1975 such an eventuality would have been considered incredible, not worth discussion. Survival was the only aim, which meant that the pace would be measured, particularly on an Oval pitch that offered the bowlers nothing and attacking batters not much more. John Woodcock described it as “being as dry as the Nullarbor Plain, and much the same colour”.

On the third day, England subsided to 169 for eight, which Woodcock wrote was “as poor a display as any in the last year”. Yet over the next three days England ground out 538 in the second innings to save the game. Edrich, made for this situation, opened with 96. Steele the folk hero registered his fourth half-century in six innings and Roope made 77, which turned out to be his highest test score. It is pleasing to record that the draw was finally secured by the Kent pair, Knott and Woolmer’s, sixth-wicket partnership of 151.

It was not pretty. Woolmer’s 149 was the slowest century for England against Australia. Ten successive overs before tea on the fifth day were maidens. John Arlott called it “one of the best defensive performances in the history of test cricket”. It is probable that modern batters would not be capable of mounting such a rearguard, though the existence of DRS might also have been a mitigating factor: “At Lord’s Fagg and Spencer gave everything out. At the Oval Spencer and Bird gave everything in”, according to Woodcock.

Australia were left with 198 to win the game in about 30 overs. Now, they would have had a go. Then, not a chance.

In the County Championship, it was the week in which Leicestershire moved from being outsiders to putative champions. They began at Tunbridge Wells, achieving a first-innings lead of 78 thanks to an unbeaten ninth-wicket partnership of 136 between fast bowlers McVicker and McKenzie. Kevin Jarvis, in his first season, took four for 43 as Leicestershire were dismissed for 123 in the second innings. At 160 for four, Kent looked like being the team to make a late charge for the Championship, but Ray Illingworth’s excess of cunning made him an appropriate leader of Foxes and he induced a collapse of the last six wickets for 23 runs to leave his team winners by 18 runs. Illingworth was the bowler for four of the six, and caught one of the other two. No doubt he took quiet satisfaction that his replacement as England captain was the defeated leader.

Leicestershire then went home to Grace Road to face Middlesex (whose minds may have been on the Gillette Cup final on the day after this fixture). The performance of the match was by my personal skiing instructor Barry Dudleston, who made 107, described by Peter Marson in The Times as “an innings of high quality”. Illingworth again weighed in with second-innings wickets that ensured a modest victory target. The two wins left Leicestershire 17 points clear of Yorkshire with a game to play, though third-placed Hampshire had a slightly better chance of catching them with two games left and a 27 point deficit (there were 10 points for a win and a maximum of four batting and four bowling bonus points).

On Sunday, Leicestershire lost to Hampshire, with Barry Richards rolling out anther century. This left Hampshire four points ahead of Kent (four points for a win), but with a much superior run rate, which meant that there would have to be two mathematically improbable results to deprive them of the trophy.

A curiosity among the cricket scores this week was the Fenner Trophy, played over the then unusual duration of 50 overs per innings. It was a three-day knockout tournament that was part of the Scarborough Festival. Yorkshire and Hampshire defeated Kent and Gloucestershire in the semis, and Hampshire beat the hosts despite (or perhaps because of) a century by Boycott in the final. The teams were close to full strength despite it being played at the end of an intense season, but the inducements, financial and liquid no doubt, were sufficiently enticing. There were five-figure crowds throughout.

 

2 – 8 August 1975 “It's shapely, it’s masculine and it’s seen the last of its cricket for the day”

It is hard to see how Henry Blofeld could justify calling the second test “exciting”. Memorable, certainly, mainly for the benefits for national morale  of David Steele and Tony Greig showing that Lillee and Thomson could be resisted. As John Woodcock wrote “England will be feeling a lot happier. Aren’t we all?” Engrossing, possibly, but it was a low bar for “exciting”. On the Saturday England managed only 225 for the loss of two wickets. Woodcock again: “Six hours is an awfully long time to take making 104 not out on a good pitch and across a fast outfield; but that is Edrich’s way.” It was the way of many in that era.

On the final day Australia required 387 to win with nine wickets standing on a pitch offering little or nothing to the bowlers. The possibility that this might be pursued was barely discussed. It was all about the draw. Fifty years on, England made 367 in 85 overs in the fourth innings of the test match thrillingly completed this week, a rate of scoring that would have seemed fanciful in 1975. It is a great irony that test cricket’s future is under threat like never before when the cricket it produces has never been more entertaining.

Michael Angelow (which sounds like a name that Bertie Wooster would have made up after being arrested for stealing a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race night) woke everybody up on Monday afternoon by becoming cricket’s first and most famous streaker. He had the good sense or luck to do it while John Arlott was at the microphone: “It's shapely, it’s masculine and it’s seen the last of its cricket for the day”. Arlott added to the occasion by describing Angelow as a “freaker”.

At Canterbury, I missed Arlott on the freaker as I was at the ice cream van buying my fourth radioactive ice lolly af the day. It was so glorious a week that Kent’s disastrous performance against Middlesex did not bother us too much, even though it pretty much finished our championship chances.

There were a couple of notable statistical achievements by Middlesex batters. Mike (MJ) Smith made a century before lunch on the first day and Norman Featherstone made two unbeaten centuries in the match. I don’t think that I have ever seen the former feat achieved since, but the latter was bettered by Zaheer Abbas in Canterbury week the following year, with one of his not out hundreds being a double.

Kent did remain on the same points as Essex at the top of the Sunday League after their win over Sussex. Colin Cowdrey’s fine valedictory form continued with 58 not out to take the team home.

My future skiing instructor Barry Dudleston had a very good week. Mike Carey (whose appearance in the press box generally presaged an early dismissal for the Leicestershire opener) said that he was “at his most effervescent” in making 88 against Derbyshire. On Sunday he scored 152 (then the second highest ever in the Sunday League behind Barry Richards’ 155 against Yorkshire in 1970) of his team’s 235 for six, which must be pretty high on the list of proportions of a team’s total, and on that of big individual scores for the losing side as Lancashire won the game with a century from Clive Lloyd.

The heat appears to have encouraged high scoring on Sunday: Somerset made 243 (Viv Richards 119), Essex reached 283 and Worcestershire set a new Sunday League record with 307 for four.

Gloucestershire beat this in the 60-over Gillette Cup quarter-finals with centuries by their two Pakistan internationals Sadiq Mohammad and Zaheer Abbas. Leicestershire’s 282 in reply (another half century for Dudleston) would rarely have been a losing total in this era, but it was that day in 1975.

The big match of the round was at Old Trafford where the two teams at the top of the Championship met. The gates were shut at a capacity of 26,000, but Gerry Harrison in The Times reckoned that there were 30,000 in there “with those rehearsing for the football season still pouring in over the walls”. Incidentally, I am less sure that this is the same Gerry Harrison that was Anglia TV’s football commentator for many years. This one appears to have been based in the north-west.

A high-scoring draw was anticipated, but Hampshire were shot out for 98, four wickets each for Barry Wood and Bob Ratcliffe, and Lancashire reached their target with six wickets and 28 overs to spare.  

New Zealander John Parker made 107 in Worcestershire’s 257, but Middlesex strolled home by eight wickets. Clive Radley scored 105 with MJ Smith and Featherstone both continuing their good form with seventies.

Derbyshire, without a home headquarters at this time, were undergoing a mid-season resurgence sufficient to dispatch neighbours Nottinghamshire easily enough.

Some stories echo through the eras. Gloucestershire, in deep financial duress, were saved by an large input of cash from an external source. In 2025 this will be the ECB handout that will follow the sale of parts of the Hundred teams. Fifty years ago it was the Pheonix Assurance Co buying the County Ground in Bristol. I spent a lot of happy times there in the 19 years I lived in the city. Nobody would claim that it is a pretty ground, but it has soul and history, neither a commodity that can be moved to any new venue to the north of Bristol, as is being mooted.

The Yorkshire fast bowler Tony Nicholson retired this week. He took 879 first-class wickets at 19.76, all the more impressive when you consider that for the first half of his career Fred Trueman would have had choice of ends. Nicholson was particularly fond of bowling at Canterbury where he took 17 wickets across two games in 1967 and 1968. He has to have an early mention in any conversation about the best players of the era not to play test cricket. 

12 - 18 July: Chaos at the Crabble

 

Mike Denness’s England captaincy came to an end on the damp grass of Edgbaston. His fortunes had changed. At first he was a lucky captain, drawing a series in the Caribbean that he deserved to lose, followed by an easy summer against weaker opposition. He became unlucky as soon as the Ashes began in Brisbane, when, without warning, Lillee emerged from a long period of injury and Thomson from obscurity to form one of cricket’s most deadly pace-bowling combinations. Let us remember that later that year Clive Lloyd’s West Indies did even worse in Australia than Denness’s England, losing five-one. His winter nemeses both took five-fors in Birmingham, Lillee in the first innings, Thomson in the second, in the intervals between another piece of Denness bad luck: the rain.

The selectors were quick and merciful. The announcement that Denness was to be replaced by Tony Greig came on what would have been the fifth day of the test match, had it lasted that long. Many names had been mentioned, but Greig was the only candidate who did not fall over any of the hurdles that eliminated the rest.

The only other regular member of the test XI who was a contender was John Edrich, Denness’s deputy in Australia. The Surrey man had the grit and quality as a batter, but his county had a reputation of being disunited under his leadership. Keith Fletcher was developing a good name as Essex captain, but was thought to suffer from traumatised batter syndrome after the experiences of the winter. Of his shaky half century at Edgbaston John  Woodcock said “Fletcher’s second-innings fifty was a mixture of desperation and defiance. He will have to stay, whether he likes it or not”.

Any return to old favourites such as Illingworth or Cowdrey was agreed to be retrograde. Resorting to a county captain outside the team—Richard Gilliatt of Hampshire was mentioned more often than Mike Brearley—was how Denness had got the job. So it was Greig, despite a brashness that was a bit much for some of the establishment figures. Knott and Underwood, wisely, held no ambitions for the captaincy, though Knott stood in for Greig for an ODI in 1976.

John Arlott gave Guardian readers a shrewd and balanced assessment of what the new leader had to offer.

 

 As it happened, the Australians played Sussex at Hove this week. Greig made a strong statement by scoring a century then  blasting Greg Chappell for not declaring on the final afternoon. Things had changed.

I followed the unfolding disaster at Edgbaston on Saturday on the radio at the Crabble Ground in Dover where I was watching the first day of Championship game between Kent and Nottinghamshire, who made 328 for eight in their 100 overs, with Mike “Pasty” (he was from Cornwall) Harris making 116. He was making plenty of runs despite having taken on the keeper’s role. Harris would have been a candidate for our imaginary MCC winter touring squad that never happened. As I post this I hear that Pasty Harris has passed away (my Blean correspondent keeps me informed about the expiration of cricketers). RIP.

The Crabble was a lovely ground, set into the hillside of the North Downs as they prepared to burst out as the White Cliffs of Dover, but was in its penultimate year as a county venue. When I was back in the UK in 2011 I visited the Crabble, in the company of my Blean correspondent. Here is my account.

Fast forward to September 2023. I was spending a few days in Melbourne and take a day trip to Geelong, a pleasant coastal town an hour south of the city. In a bookshop I came across a title that I had not heard of, Brian Levinson's Cricket Grounds Then and Now. Flicking through it, I saw a piece on the Crabble and was surprised to find my name in it, referring to the piece on Scorecards. What’s more, I was in the index, sandwiched by two of the greats, George Hirst and Jack Hobbs.

 

 I was not present for the final two days of the Championship game, a pity as there was fun to be had on both. Canterbury’s St Lawrence Ground was, I’m pretty sure, the only venue on the county circuit that operated two full scoreboards, the white one where the café is now and the black one that still tops the length of the Leslie Ames Stand. Not all the test grounds provided two full boards.

Provisions at the outgrounds were not as efficient. I have forgotten what the arrangements were at the Crabble, or even where the scoreboard was, but it almost certainly involved lots of individual metal sheets hung on hooks with operators who were not as familiar with the process as those at headquarters. On the second day of the Nottinghamshire game there confusion about the visitors’ first-innings score, which became crucial when Kent were in danger of following on. Happily, Alan Gibson was present to record the chaos.

 

Two years later a similar scoreboard fiasco occurred down the road at Folkestone. With 15 left to get in five overs and six wickets in hand, Kent contrived a collapse that left that epitome of No 11 batters Kevin Jarvis on strike with three balls remaining. To quote the Kent Annual “the scoreboard suggested that two were required and Fletcher set the field accordingly, thus when Jarvis scored the winning run off his first ball confusion reigned as the batsmen left the wicket with the fielders and umpires believing the scores were still level”.

On the third day of the Championship match back in 1975, Kent chased down 330 in 72 overs, a good chase now, then an improbable one. From Gibson in The Times:

 

Nottinghamshire lost despite losing only ten wickets to Kent’s 17, but that was in the nature of three-day cricket.

I was at the Crabble for the Sunday League match that also ended in a successful Kent pursuit, an unbroken sixth-wicket stand of 60 between Dave Nicholls and Alan Ealham.

After the Championship game finished at 6 20pm on Tuesday the two teams got in their cars and drove 210 miles to Nottingham where they began a 60-over Gillette Cup game at 11 am on Wednesday. Tell the young people of today that you could get 120 overs into a day’s cricket and they won’t believe you. Kent did well to recover from 47 for five to reach 216, but still lost by 31 runs.

Alan Ealham was twelfth man for that game and fielded for the injured Norman Graham. I doubt that there has ever been a greater disparity in the quality of fielding between the replaced and the replacing. It makes the difference between Gary Pratt and the England bowlers he subbed on for in 2005 look as nothing. Ealham took two catches described by Peter Marson in The Times as “splendid”, a level of fielding proficiency of which the gangly bowler could only dream.

My future skiing instructor Barry Dudleston was in fine form, completing his third century in a month. Barry was 80 this week; going round a golf course in less than his age may be a realistic prospect some time soon. Happy birthday to him.

 

 

 

The Cricket Magazines: March 1973

What a treat to find two articles by Alan Gibson in The Cricketer. The first is a profile of Tony Greig, England’s outstanding player on the tour of South Asia at the time of publication. I maintain that Greig has never been given quite the recognition he deserves for being one of the best of his time, and one of England’s finest all-rounders across the eras.

Gibson hints that Greig was undervalued at this early stage of his international career too. After two years in Sussex Seconds while he qualified as an overseas player, Greig was an immediate sensation, with 156 on Championship debut. It should be remembered that he committed to playing for England before South Africa’s exclusion from international cricket, yet it seemed that English cricket, presented with such a gift, was unwilling to unwrap it, fearful that it might be a bit showy or extravagant.

Greig eventually made his test debut (or so we then thought) in 1970 against the Rest of the World. Gibson reports:

In the second match at Nottingham, which England won (probably the best performance by an England side since the Second World War) he had as much as anyone to do with the victory, taking four wickets in the first innings and three in the second. The batsmen whose wickets he took were Richards (twice), Sobers (twice), Kanhai, Engineer and Barlow. 

Despite topping the bowling averages, and scoring a fifty in the third match, Greig was omitted from the Ashes tour party that winter, and left out throughout the 1971 season, the selectors’ preference being for the more pedestrian Richard Hutton. 

Both players were selected for the Rest of the World squad that toured Australia the following winter.

No doubt both were chosen in the first place because of Australian determination not to pick a Rest of the World side that approximated to the real strength of the Rest of the World: but it did not turn out to be so pointless a series as was intended, and of the two English all-rounders it was Greig who made his mark.

Gibson concludes by reporting the opinion of his colleague at The Times, John Woodcock, to whom he refers by the usual sobriquet.

The Sage of Longparish is not himself a tall man, and has not always been enthusiastic about Greig in the past. What he really feels is that all the best cricketers are five foot three. A judgement from this quarter is therefore convincing.

Gibson’s second piece is titled Cricket in Fiction. It is an amiable ramble that touches upon, among others, Richards, de Selincourt, Dickens, Sayers and, of course, Wodehouse. Also JL Carr, whose recently published A Season in Sinji is mentioned in the opening paragraph, and to which Gibson returns near the end.

I would have enjoyed it if he had left out the cricket.

He forces his analogies, he strains his language, to show that life is just a game of cricket, which is neither more or less true than that life is just a bowl of cherries, some of them going bad, or a sack of potatoes, or – well, whatever analogy happens to come to you. 

Mr Carr is very strong on breasts and lavatories, which I suppose is mandatory in the modern novel. Just as I was beginning to get interested in the bosoms, there was a piece about cricket; and just as I was beginning to get interested in the cricket, back came the bosoms, and the dirt, and the violence. No doubt life is like that : but since we all have to experience it anyway, I doubt if we have any obligation to read about it as well.

Both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly reported on the third and fourth tests between India and England. The hosts took a two-one lead in the third, but only by four wickets. England could not cope with the most renowned of spin trios, Bedi, Chandrasekhar and Prasanna. Fletcher’s unbeaten 97 apart, no England batsman made more than 20 in the first innings, and none more than 21 except Denness’s 76 in the second. These were notable innings by both future England captains, but they went almost unnoticed. Pat Pocock took four wickets as India made hard work of their target of 86. As the Sage writes, “With another 50 runs in the bag [England] would probably have won it”.

One thing that I learned was that Derek Underwood could not play in this game, having awoken with a temperature on the first morning. I had thought that Underwood, round-shouldered smoker that he was, had never missed a test match for fitness reasons, but this was illness, not injury. “If any wicket in India was likely to be suited to Underwood’s many talents it was this one in Madras” said Playfair’s anonymous correspondent, who had probably cobbled the report together from press reports, given that the magazine was now an issue away from oblivion. 

In the fourth test, England achieved a lead of 40, but India’s first innings occupied the whole of the first two days on a slow pitch that offered bowlers little, so a draw was the outcome. The highlight was captain Lewis’s 125, his sole test century. The Sage:

Having said that the time had come to attack the Indian spinners, Lewis, in Kanpur, did something about it. When he came in Bedi had bowled nine overs for eleven runs and England were 48 for two…Lewis at once jumped out to hit him over mid-on for four. He had got 70 against Bedi on a turning pitch in England last season by using his feet, and this is what he did now.

Tony Lewis might have been picked for England at any time in the previous decade. The list of batsmen no better than him who were is long. As Woodcock says, the innings showed what Lewis might have achieved “had he had the advantage of playing on better pitches than those in Glamorgan”. 

Another tour is featured in both magazines, that of Kent, as Sunday League champions, to the West Indies. I have written about this tour before but was unaware that both The Cricketer and Playfair carried extensive reports on it, by Michael Carey and Howard Booth (of the Daily Mirror, if memory serves) respectively.

In my original article I called out Wisden’s description of my former skiing instructor Barry Dudleston’s bowling as “chinamen” as wrong, given that the Playfair annual consistently listed him as “SLA”, but it seems that it was indeed wrist spin that he purveyed on this tour.

According to Booth, Colin Cowdrey “rated him a more effective bowler than Ken Barrington on these pitches”. He got Rohan Kanhai out first ball, although it needed a brilliant catch by Alan Ealham off a full toss.

One promising Antiguan batsman was noticed in both reports. This is Carey’s description:

The locals made an entertaining fight of it, largely due to Vivian Richards, a 23-year-old batsman of sound technique and bold method. Cowdrey felt he would play for the West Indies soon.

In Playfair, Cardus laments “the virtual disappearance of the spin bowler”, which was to overstate the case when most counties still went into matches with two slow-bowling options. He tells a story about SF Barnes (and we must remember that in matters of factual accuracy Cardus was the Fox News of his day) and a match that celebrated his eightieth birthday. Barnes was to bowl the first ball and was asked what he intended. “I’ll bowl the first ball but I don’t know about a full over. I can’t spin now, my fingers are too old. I suppose I’ll have to fall back on seamers—any fool can bowl ‘em”.

“McKenzie’s Over of Agony at Folkestone”

 Kent v Leicestershire, 40 overs, Folkestone, 19 July 1971

In 1971, the Sunday League was in its third season, and well-established. On 18 July there were 18,000 at Headingley for the Roses Match. In The Times, John Woodcock noted that the New Road crowd was the largest since Worcestershire last won the Championship six years earlier. At Glastonbury, there were record receipts for a Somerset home game, for the second week in a row.

I was at the Cheriton Road Ground in Folkestone, which was also packed out. Outside St Lawrence, Folkestone was the best of all the Kent grounds in terms of spectator accommodation. A stand about ten rows deep embraced half of its circumference, not quite the Great Southern Stand at the MCG, but a step up from Maidstone’s planks balanced (or not) on logs.

All of us there that day saw something that none of us have seen since, for which we should all be grateful. Graham McKenzie of Leicestershire and Australia bowled eight no-balls in one over, and kept bowling them even when he cut his run-up down to three paces.

Leicestershire had batted first and made 168 for nine, a better score in 40 overs than it will appear to be to the modern spectator, but a little disappointing given that Barry Dudleston (unaware of the presence of a future remedial skiing student in the crowd) and Mick Norman put on 49 for the first wicket. Inevitably, it was Derek Underwood who reined them in, with four for 26. Two of the four were tailenders, which suggests that Underwood bowled at the death (as we didn’t say then), which was most unusual. Bob Woolmer was as effective, with two for 22. Woolmer was one of the best one-day bowlers around, and it was in that capacity that he was first picked for England the following season.

None of the home crowd would have regarded victory as inevitable. For a start, Graham McKenzie was opening the bowling for the opposition.

McKenzie is not much mentioned when the great Australian fast bowlers are discussed, which is an omission. He opened the bowling with Alan Davidson at the start of his career, and with Dennis Lillee at the end. At that time he had 246 test wickets, two short of Richie Benaud’s then record. He was not to play test cricket again, but he would have had the record had the wickets he took against the World XI in the following Australian season counted.

Glimpses of McKenzie’s run up on You Tube are surprisingly fleeting, but there is enough to be reminded that it was a rolling action, with none of the beauty of Lillee’s approach nor the menace of Thomson’s. I have trying to work out who it reminds me of. Were it not for the threat of a letter from McKenzie’s legal representatives, I might suggest Darren Stevens.

He wasn’t out-and-out fast, but was quick enough. Gideon Haigh writes that “when stirred he possessed a wicked bouncer”. He would extract what help the pitch could give him like a Tudor torturer seeking their preferred version of the truth.

All of which makes what happened that day on the Kent coast one of the strangest things that I have ever seen on a cricket field. Dick Streeton was there for The Times. I have borrowed the headline on his report as my title.

People forget about the 15-yard restriction to the bowler’s run up in the Sunday League, but it existed for most of the duration of the 40-over competition, showing that fixing the rules so that the game fits a TV slot is not a new thing.

The limit caused surprisingly few problems; most bowlers adjusted remarkably well. Mike Procter managed to summarise most of the quirks of his 30-yard charge to the crease; Bob Willis swayed out and in again. JSE Price of Middlesex, who had a run up of a man who was not very good at orienteering, extracted maximum value from the fact that a straight line marked the 15 yards, running parallel to it for some of the way before turning 90 degrees to port.

Many will not understand the talk about the front-foot law, and will not know that no-balls have been defined in any other way than part of the front foot having to be behind the popping crease. There is a clue in that the line on which the stumps are pitched is the bowling crease, for that was the line that the old law demanded that the back foot stay behind. Over the years, some bowlers developed the art of “dragging” the back foot, allowing the ball to be delivered closer to the batsman than the law intended, which is why it changed. The transition from back to front foot was messy. Some countries operated under one law, some under the other. In England in 1963, the front-foot law was used in the Championship while the back-foot was applied in test matches. The change became accepted, though Fred Trueman complained about it to his dying day.

I have been reading about Simone Biles, a great gymnast who had to withdraw from most of her Olympic events because of an attack of the twisties, the equivalent of the golfer’s or slow left-armer’s yips, but more frightening as the sufferer may be upside down in mid-air when they strike. What afflicted McKenzie that day seems to have been something similar; a sudden, unexplained inability to perform an action at which he had previously executed with skill and expertise. As far as I am aware, it was a one off, the demons departing almost as soon as they arrived.

The striking thing about Streeton’s report is that nobody offered McKenzie any support; the sight of Illingworth taking up a position in the covers would simply have indicated to the bowler how desperate things had become.

The only time I have seen anything similar was on the television coverage of an ODI between New Zealand and Australia in Auckland in 2005. Daryl Tuffey began the game with four no-balls. Four wides followed as he struggled to complete the over, but he was never reduced to three paces as McKenzie was.

Kent, mostly Denness, took 31 from the over. It should be remembered that in those days no extra was recorded from a no-ball if runs were accrued in another way; it would have been more under contemporary laws (as many as five of the no balls were not scored from because would not have bothered to take singles as they had the extra already). Victory came with 14 overs to spare for the loss of only Dave Nicholls.

A strange day.

 

 

 

 

Butterflies on wheels: 24 to 30 June 1967

Kent were second in the table by the end of this week after a rain-induced draw against Northamptonshire and a strange game at the Oval that was a two-and-half-day funeral dirge before becoming an Iron Maiden gig on the last afternoon. The Times correspondent, John Silchester, was impatient with Kent’s “care-worn, over responsible” approach on the first day:

On the second day, on which only 173 runs were scored, Silchester was prepared to make the “dully difficult” pitch take its share of responsibility. Like his colleagues around the country, he was impressed by Norman Graham:

Set 250 to win, Surrey batted with an aggression absent in the game thus far, a triumph of “mind over marl” for Silchester. Edrich and Stewart put on 133 for the second wicket, taking Surrey to a position of 111 to win from 95 minutes with nine wickets left. But no other batsman reached double figures as Underwood’s slide-rule accuracy and variations of pace removed both partners and three of the rest as those nine wickets mustered just 38 between them. 

Who was this John Silchester, with his shrewd observation and pleasing phrases? Why had I not heard of him before? It should have been obvious given that Silchester was a Roman settlement just north of Basingstoke, the home town of John Arlott, who took the name as his Times identity, the Observer having exclusive use of his real name. As a disguise it was as effective as a comedy moustache. It was in January 1967 that The Times had started giving its correspondents a byline. For the best part of two centuries before that they had been anonymous. Has there ever been a better collection of cricket writers on one paper at one time than Woodcock, Gibson, Arlott and Thomson? It was in the following year that Arlott became the cricket correspondent of The Guardian, under his own name.

As we approached high summer county cricket was becoming more peripatetic. This week Peterborough, Colchester, Bournemouth, and Lydney were among the Championship venues. Gloucestershire played at Lydney, the other side of the Severn in the Forest of Dean from 1963 to 1969. At least by 1967 the Severn Bridge was in place; before then it would have taken a couple of hours to drive there from Bristol.

Gloucestershire have long been cricketing missionaries, taking their message to new places in the county and beyond. During my 19 years in Bristol I watched them play at home at eight grounds, one more than Kent home venues at which I have got out the binoculars and scotch eggs. Those eight include Moreton-in-Marsh (another long drive from Bristol, especially for the one ball of a 1991 Sunday League match that they got in before the rain came), Swindon (in the shadow of the main stand of Swindon Town FC), the Wagon Works and Archdeacon’s Meadow in Gloucester, and three grounds in Cheltenham. Beside the College, there was the Victoria Ground against the Indians in 1986 and the Dowty Arle Ground for a Benson and Hedges zonal game in 1992, both because of building work at Bristol.

The defeat of Surrey moved Kent to second in the Championship, four points behind Yorkshire, who had a game in hand. Leicestershire slipped to third, drawing against Somerset thanks to a fifth-wicket partnership of 148 between Barry Dudleston and Jack Birkenshaw. Dudleston made the first of his 32 first-class hundreds. Regular readers of My Life in Cricket Scorecards will know that Dudleston was to become my personal ski instructor almost two decades later, so commemorating his maiden century is the least I can do. No cricketer has had his name misspelled more often than Barry and The Times marked the occasion by doing so in two different ways; Duddleston in the headline and first two paras and Duddlestone thereafter. 

England won the second test in four days despite losing two half days to rain. A first innings of 386 was enough for a winning margin of an innings and 124. On paper they don’t look a bad side, with Pataudi, Wadekar, Borde and Hanumant Singh among the batsmen and the quartet of four great spinners. But they were mostly at the start of their careers and inexperienced in English conditions; having no fast bowlers worth the name didn’t help either.

In the wider world the big news story of the week was the trial of Mick Jagger, Keith Richard and others on drugs charges. Jagger was sentenced to three months for the possession of four pep pills (as they were called then) which he had purchased legally in Italy, but which it was technically illegal to bring into Britain. This spurred the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg (father of Jacob Rees-Mogg) to write his most famous leader “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” in which he stridently condemned the sentence.

Fifty years later, today’s Times features an interview with Jagger in which he describes that edition of The Times being delivered to his cell: “The Times was thrown through the slot in my cell door, and thudded and hit the concrete floor of my cell and I thought, ‘What the f*** is that?’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice, they’re delivering me The Times’.” A lovely story, but had Mick scanned the front page more carefully he would have read an account of his release from Brixton prison on bail the previous afternoon.

Wimbledon’s first week was in progress. It was the last amateur championship and the first British outside broadcast in colour. This was independent of the black-and-white coverage and required its own commentary, which was provided, rather bizarrely, by the DJ Keith Fordyce. 

David Dimbleby was a Panorama reporter in 1967, though this didn’t stop him writing to The Times in support of Israel, a freedom of expression that he and other BBC presenters do not have today.