10 - 16 May 1975 The Good and Bad of Geoffrey Boycott

 

Geoffrey Boycott was the focus of much attention this week, as he was so often in these years. Against Worcestershire, he made an unbeaten 152 and thus became only the third Yorkshireman (after Sutcliffe and Hutton) to register a century against the other 16 counties also his fiftieth in the cause of the white rose. Wisden said “Few of these previous efforts can have been technically better”. Nobody else passed fifty, except a bludgeoning Chris Old when the game was dead on the third afternoon.

The excellence of Boycott the batter was universally acknowledged, even by those who thought that he might speed up in his interest of his team from time to time. The following day the praise turned to blame, as it so often did. Boycott refused to respond to Norman Gifford’s declaration 101 in arrears by setting a meaningful target, an approach that John Woodcock did not care for:

 

These were more cautious times; later in the season I was at Canterbury when Richard Gilliatt of Hampshire was booed off the field for failing to set a target in similar circumstances.

Boycott had not yet answered the question of the day: would he play for England this season? As Woodcock records, he had been absent more than present for several years.

 

The great man’s reluctance to don the England cap has sometimes been put down to a reluctance to face the fast bowlers of the time. This is unfair. He had dropped out after the first test against India the previous year when there were runs to be harvested despite his habit of falling to the pedestrian left-arm seam of Erinath Solkar. When he pulled out of the tour to Australia in the winter Lillee was widely considered to be finished because of his back and Thomson was never mentioned. It was because Denness (and before him Tony Lewis in 1972/73) had been preferred to him as captain. Had he grimaced and borne it, Boycott, rather than Greig, would probably have succeeded the Kent man in 1975. Woodcock had a bit of a blind spot re Greig, even pre-Packer, but his appraisal of the Sussex captain’s chances of leading the national team: “His appointment would have to be conditional upon his renouncing altogether the law of the jungle” would have been widely shared in the St John’s Wood area.

The only opener who might claim more renown than Boycott was Barry Richards, probably the best in the world in 1975. His unbeaten 96 took Hampshire to victory and the top of the Championship table. Alan Gibson was at St Helen’s to rhapsodise.

 

I was at Canterbury on Saturday to see Kent lose to Sussex in the 55-over competition, a vengeful John Snow (11-4-11-3) keen to demonstrate to Denness the foolishness of his omission from the winter’s tour. I recall a spectator who was right behind the arm describing on the bus home the late swing of the ball that trapped our beleaguered leader lbw for one. Snow was at the crease to guide Sussex home in the 55^th and final over. Two hundred and fifty-two runs in 106 overs would have the marketing people these days phoning the Samaritans, but the low scoring games are often the most fascinating. “Kent’s golden touch has deserted them” wrote former Kent player Tony Pawson in The Observer. This was to be the case for most of this season, the worst of the seventies for Kent.

Sunday saw fewer overs but more runs, including a record aggregate for the Sunday League with Somerset’s 270 topping visitors Gloucestershire’s 255 at Bristol. Here, it was the other great Richards, (IVA), who set it up with 126 not out (six sixes and 13 fours). Sadiq Mohammad made 131 in reply, but with insufficient support.

Who said “there’s a mistake there, Gloucestershire would be at home in Bristol”? Not so. This was at the Imperial Ground in Knowle, south of the River Avon that marked the historic boundary of Somerset. I watched a Sunday League game there four years later.

That Sunday I was at Folkestone, or at least assume that I was, though I recall nothing of the game, even after reading the report in The Times by Gerald Sinstadt, better known as Granada TV’s football commentator. He highlights two things: the cold, but there have been so many cold days at the cricket that they stick to each other like buns too long in the freezer, one no more memorable than another. Also the running between the wickets of Mike Denness and Brian Luckhurst. When I see murmurations of  starlings performing their swooping impeccably synchronised displays, I think of Denness and Luckhurst stealing singles with wordless understanding.

 

Off-the-field cricket news concerned the standoff between the BBC and the TCCB (forerunners of the ECB) over the TV rights for the four test matches against Australia. The BBC had increased its offer to a “final” £116,000 (the equivalent of about £890,000 now according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator). The ECB’s current arrangement with Sky TV for all cricket is said to be worth £220 million a year. Of course the BBC had an effective monopoly. ITV, now with a daytime schedule, would not contemplate a rival bid.

The Godfather Part II was released that week. “Few movie sequels are as good as the films they follow and even fewer have about them an air of necessity. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is a rare exception” was the verdict of Philip French in The Guardian.

Most chilling headline of the week: “Inflation in Britain running at over 30%”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1975: The Season Begins

 

Saturday 26 April 1975 – Friday 2 May 1975

There was no Cowdrey Stand; the white scoreboard and the lime tree would be a surprise. The incongruous brick dressing rooms between the pavilion and what we called the wooden stand would offend the eye. But take anybody who knows the ground only in the present back fifty years and they would recognise St Lawrence straight away. It is there that you find me, huddling for warmth in the wooden stand, as the 1975 season gets under way.

Anticipation of first day of the season kept us going through winter, which in cricket terms was longer then, beginning in early September and ending only now, in the last week of April. The season opener was not worth the wait: the Minor Counties (South) visited for the first of four zonal games in the 55-over competition. They were one of three teams included to make up a round 20, along with their northern counterparts and a combined Oxbridge side. The only opposition player with significant first-class experience was Keith Jones, who had a few years as a trundling lower-order all-rounder for Middlesex.

Put in by Mike Denness (who got into a putting-in habit that was to lead him into trouble  a couple of months down the line) the  MC South team were about grim survival, as if they were the inhabitants of a besieged town who had eaten the cats and dogs and were rounding up the rodents for stewing. They achieved their goal by being nine down after 55 overs, but for a total barely more than two an over. At first, Kent went about the pursuit with “aggravating patience” (The Observer), 44 ground out of 23 overs.  After tea Graham Johnson took things in hand, and finished with 85 while Brian Luckhurst stayed in low gear with 30 as Kent won by ten wickets with almost 20 overs to spare. Having spent the winter being pummelled by the Australian quicks, Luckhurst might be forgiven for wanting to face as much tepid trundling on a sluggish pitch as possible.  

Though the scoring rate at Canterbury was the most egregiously slow, it was not exceptional. Only Lancashire, against Yorkshire, scored more than 200. None of the 16 teams in action that day reached the stratosphere of four an over.

The innocuous three-day friendly between Oxford University and Sussex was deemed worthy of reports in the broadsheets (as they then were), and by two of the leading writers of the day, both of whom we will hear much more from as the weeks go on. Those familiar with Henry Blofeld only in his my-dear-old-thing mode may be surprised to learn that in the mid-seventies there was no writer who wrote better reports on a day’s cricket if what you were after was an account of what happened combined with perceptive analysis of why. In 1975 Blofeld was No 2 at The Guardian to John Arlott. If you wanted to be entertained, details of the cricket not compulsory, you went to Alan Gibson in The Times, for whom the play was incidental to the journey to the ground, the people he ran into, and any other tangential fun that was to be had. 

The County Championship began on Wednesday. Only two matches resulted in wins. Lancashire polished Warwickshire off in two days, Lancashire quick Peter Lee had the game of his career, taking 12 wickets including the extraordinary second-innings figures of 9.2-6-8-7. Lee was one of those players who, with better luck, would have played a few tests and could have done well.

Hampshire beat Essex. Barry Richards made 72 and 94. John  Woodcock, still the cricket correspondent of The Times described Richards’ batting in the first innings as “exhilaratingly good” and in the second “it was the batting of Richards that dwarfed all else”. Opening the bowling for Hampshire was Andy Roberts, who Woodcock tells us that in the year since Roberts made his debut for Hampshire had taken 207 wickets (though it was the more mundane Mike Taylor who took six in the second innings to seal the win). Gordon Greenidge was Richards’ opening partner. What a time it was for county cricket.

Woodcock notes that the 21-year-old Graham Gooch made 50 of a partnership of 67, but describes him as “heftily built (unless he takes care he will be vast before long)”. Perhaps it was these words that spurred Gooch to become a famously dedicated runner and trainer.

World news was dominated by the fall of Saigon, allowing a united Vietnam to rule itself for the first time in the twentieth century. The western consensus was that this was a domino falling and that the red menace would be as far as Singapore within months. Half a century later, Vietnam is still ruled by the Communist Party but you wouldn’t know it from photos of downtown Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon became), which is as full of the logos of the multinationals as anywhere else outside the communist world. I saw a TV report the other day that said that Vietnam’s young population is largely unaware of the victorious Vietnam War, on which the country does not dwell. Britain might follow this example.

Another contributor to The Times was Kim Il Sung, leader of North Korea. For reasons that remain unclear the comms team of the Democratic People’s Republic considered it worth paying for the Great Leader’s speeches (on Wednesday it was the one on education) to be reproduced in the newspaper of the British establishment, in the hope that its readers would cast aside their bowler hats and umbrellas and devote their lives to the revolution. Now, as regular readers will know, their main outlet for misinformation is the Basin Reserve scoreboard, which has been under their surreptitious control for some years.