The Cricket Magazines: December 1972

 

The first four pages of Playfair are, mystifyingly, devoted to a preview of the domestic season in South Africa, to be contested exclusively by white players, though the political context is referred to only obliquely. More commendably, The Cricketer had a correspondent on non-European cricket in South Africa, A Akhalwaya. He reports on the reaction to the end of Basil D’Oliveira’s test-match career in his homeland, reminding us how much it meant to the non-white population to have one of their own playing at the highest level.

Here in South Africa we found ourselves unabashedly supporting England. Whenever England played no more did we ask: ‘What is the score?’ Instead, it became ‘What did D’Oliveira score?’ or ‘How many wickets did he take?

…One wonders which country the schoolboys will now support.

The Cricketer has a review of the season by Tony Pawson that in structure is strikingly similar to Tony Lewis’s Journal of the Season in November’s issue. Could there have been a miscommunication that led Pawson to think that he was i/c the Journal in 1972? If so, it was a felicitous error, as Pawson was always worth reading. Occasionally, his path crossed with mine, for example in May:

Knott’s bewildering range of quick-footed shots brought him a century in each innings at Maidstone.

I was there for the second of these centuries. It was my first visit to Mote Park, a ground that became a favourite, the English venue that was most like our parkland grass bowls here in New Zealand. Pawson’s own batting for Kent, a generation earlier, was by all accounts similar to Knott’s in its fleetness of foot and scurrying between the wickets. Pawson also contributes portraits of Colin Cowdrey and Donald Carr.

Another day of fond memory is pictured, 10 September when Kent won the Sunday League by beating Worcestershire at St Lawrence. Guardian of the telephone in the Canterbury press box, Dudley Moore (who must have got tired of being asked where Peter Cook was) summed up Kent’s route to the title, culminating in chasing 190, the biggest target they faced all season. A century partnership between Luckhurst and Nicholls took them home.

David Frith made an early impression as Deputy Editor of The Cricketer by conducting an airmail interview with Clarrie Grimmett, the New Zealander who took 216 wickets with his leg spin for Australia. It’s fascinating. Grimmett says that his greatest regret was that he was not selected for the 1938 tour to England.

I had hoped to continue my great association with Bill O’Reilly; this breaking of our partnership was a terrific blow to both of us…The only reason I can think of for my omission is that I was thought to be too old.

As Grimmett was 46 at that time, he probably had a point. Though born in Dunedin, the leg-spinner learned his cricket at the Basin Reserve in Wellington, for whom he made his debut in the Plunket Shield when he was 17, leaving for Australia when he was 22.

Grimmett received an early lesson in the realities of Sheffield Shield cricket from New South Wales skipper Monty Noble, who berated him for getting through his overs too quickly (a six-ball over in a minute-and-a-half!) so not allowing the quickies a rest.

He nominates Stan McCabe as the greatest strokemaker he saw. Grimmett’s choice of the major batsman that he had a strong chance of dismissing is a surprise: Bradman.

          I always felt he was uncomfortable against good-length spin.

On modern cricket, he deplores short-pitched bowling, but blames the batsmen for it.

If they learnt correct footwork instead of ducking (and getting hit in the process) short bowling would die a natural death.

Both publications carry articles concerning Warwickshire’s Championship-winning captain AC Smith (the Edgbaston Smiths AC and MJK were known by their initials). Richard Eaton interviews him in Playfair, while The Cricketer piece carries Smith’s byline. Given his notorious statement to the media years later as CE of the TCCB: “no comment, but don’t quote me”, it is no surprise that Eaton’s is the more illuminating.

Warwickshire’s trip of brilliant West Indians, Gibbs, Kanhai and Kallicharran was supplemented mid-season by Deryck Murray who took AC’s place as wicketkeeper. Naturally, Smith turned to bowling instead.

I am a liquorice allsorts bowler. I think I can bowl cutters when the wicket is soft or broken, but I like to get the ball shone a bit and swing it on a good wicket,

He does not attempt to describe his bowling action, which was as chaotic as any I have seen, and accompanied by a pantomime villain’s grin at the point of release.

Mike Denness, in his Captain’s Column in Playfair, bemoans the travel demands made on county cricketers. One weekend began with a journey…

…from Folkestone on a Friday night to play Somerset at Glastonbury. On the Saturday night we motored up to Derby, returning on Sunday night to Somerset.

On the Tuesday evening we headed north to play Yorkshire at Bradford.

They played cricket on all these days, and the motorway network was nowhere near as developed as it became. It is surprising that there were not more injuries or deaths. As crowded as the fixture  list now remains, it is much more reasonable than it was.

This is the best edition of Playfair that I have come across so far. There is also Cardus on Ranji, Stephen Green on the Treasures of Lord’s and an interesting interview with the Glamorgan player Tony Cordle by Basil Easterbrook. Cordle was then about halfway through a county career that saw him take almost a thousand wickets, often in bowling partnership with Malcolm Nash.

He was one of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean, and suffered many of the indignities of that community when he arrived in London. Relatives whisked him off to Cardiff, where, most fortuitously for Glamorgan, a job interview happened to be held overlooking the Cardiff Arms Park cricket ground. He decided to join the Cardiff club, despite, unusually for a Bajan, never having played in an organised game.

There is an interesting video on YouTube of a recent interview with Cordle by Glamorgan historian Andrew Hignell.

 

The Lord’s Finals: 1973 & 1976 (and a little of 1974)

I went to Lord’s for 24 domestic finals (plus the first three World Cup finals). With the 50-over final moving to Trent Bridge from 2020, there will be no more. Every one of the 24 was played before a full house, even when there were two a year. Were that still the case, the question of moving it would not arise, but over-pricing, the prevalence of international cricket, the devaluing of the county game and the short attention spans of the marketing folk have conspired to devalue what were some of summer’s highest days.

To mark their passing, I hereby announce a series of posts on those 24 finals. This will involve a bit of “curating” (the name young people give to re-sorting and sticking a different label on old stuff). Just as those who played at the MCG in March 1877 were oblivious to taking part in the first test match, so these old posts turn out to be early episodes of this series.

Gillette Cup 1967

Gillette Cup 1971

World Cup 1975

World Cup 1979

World Cup 1983

I’ll mix the cricket reportage with a little of what was happening in the world and as much autobiography as the reader might be able to tolerate.

But anybody anticipating an eyewitness account of the 1974 Gillette Cup final between Kent and Lancashire will be disappointed. I was there on the Saturday, sitting in the sunshine to hear that there would be no play that day, thanks to heavy rain two days before and a sharp shower at 9 am.

People who hanker for the old days of cricket-watching should remember how much of the time we spent watching grass dry. Now, play would probably have started on time.

The game was played on Monday, a school day, hence my absence. Why not Sunday? Because Kent had a Sunday League game scheduled at Worcester. What’s more, the XI that played at New Road was exactly the same as turned out back at Lord’s on the Monday. Rotation then was merely a means of crop management.

I’m sorry to have missed the match—the only one of Kent’s first twelve Lord’s finals from which I was absent—not only because Kent won, but also because it was such a curiosity. Lancashire, having won the toss, lost their tenth wicket to the final ball of the 60th over to be all out for…118. That is to say, a fraction under two an over.

In The Times, John Woodcock described the pitch as “churlish…of uneven bounce and no pace”, but observed that “there was less good batting than one would have thought possible from so many distinguished players”. The Lancashire team contained some of the best one-day batsmen of the era—Lloyd C (& D), Wood, Pilling, Engineer—and those fine tonkers of a cricket ball Hughes and Simmons. Nobody in Kent’s innings made as many as 20, surely a record for a winning team in a final.

Kent’s bowling was apparently splendid: “Rarely did any Kent bowler drop short of a difficult length” reported Wisden. This included James Graham-Brown (his name a pleasing compendium of two other Kent bowlers of the era), who finished with 12–5–15–2. Graham-Brown was a medium-pace bowler with bouncy run up. By a lengthy street, this was the best day of his cricket career. He made only occasional appearances in 1975 and 1976 and then had a couple of years with Derbyshire (as good a euphemism as any for career failure: “Mrs May, we have arranged for you to have a couple of years with Derbyshire”). He was a headteacher for 20 years and now writes plays, including one about Colin Milburn, under the name Dougie Blaxland.

It was Kent’s fielding that won the cup that Monday. There were three run outs, including, crucially, Clive Lloyd, beaten by a 50-yard throw by Alan Ealham after slipping mid-pitch. John Shepherd was responsible for the other two, leading Woodcock to compare him to Learie Constantine.

Kent were coasting at 52 for one, but collapsed to 89 for six before being seen home by Knott and Woolmer (then batting at No 8; within a year he was scoring an Ashes century).

Those not around then would find it hard to credit how difficult it was to find out what was happening in the closing stages for those of us not at Lord’s. BBC schedules were not sufficiently flexible to take account of the delay. Radio coverage was restricted to hourly sports desks, and midweek county games had to give way to the Open University on BBC 2 from about 5 pm, so programmes on Games (sic) Theory and Pure Mathematics filled the screen as Knott and Woolmer eked their way to the target. The tension was in wondering how much tension there was. Nor could time be found to show any highlights, which is presumably so there are none on YouTube.

Gillette Cup final 1974 scorecard

55-over final 1973

Scorecard

No two Lord’s finals were more alike than the 55-over finals of 1973 and 1976. Both were between Kent and Worcestershire. Kent batted first both times, making a good, but not insurmountable score. Worcestershire slipped behind, were given hope by D’Oliveira, but ultimately fell 40 runs or so short. I watched these games from the top deck of the Warner Stand, a largely Kent area on both days.

Kent’s glory years were now well under way, the trophies coming as easily as bonuses to bankers. This was the third of ten in the seventies. Seven of the team were test players, two of them—Knott and Underwood, obviously—in or near the World XI of the time. Woolmer had already played ODIs and was to be a test player two years later. The other three—Johnson, Graham and Ealham—were fine county players, and the former two might have been capped had the selectors actually been as biased towards Kent as supporters of other counties supposed they were.

Worcestershire had three current test players. Norman Gifford, unaccountably (to us in Kent, and many others) selected in preference to Underwood for the first two tests against New Zealand, where he had bowled to Glenn Turner, who was opening the batting here with Ron Headley, who would open for the West Indies in the first test later that week.

The loss of Johnson and Denness with the score on 23 forced Luckhurst and Asif Iqbal onto the defensive, so much so that after 20 overs the total was only 34. But they knew that if no more wickets were lost the runs would come, and so they did, in a partnership of 116.

They were a contrasting pair, the craftsman and the showman. Looking at the recording (posted by Luckhurst’s son), Brian Luckhurst reminds me a bit of Kane Williamson, so correct, and with a practical answer to every bowler’s questions. He was the least stylish of the Kent batsmen, a short backlift turning most shots into punches, but perhaps the most effective. This was a beautifully paced innings, and it turned the game Kent’s way.

Tony Greig said that Asif was the quickest runner between wickets he ever saw. There is plenty of evidence on the recording to support this contention. See how, as Luckhurst is halfway down the pitch completing his third run to pass 50, Asif is already at the other end, scoping a fourth.

Asif’s fleetness did for Luckhurst in the end, beaten by a howitzer of a throw from D’Oliveira from the general direction of Regent’s Park.

These days they call a batsman coming in for the final ten overs or so a “closer”. Kent’s unlikely closer that day was Colin Cowdrey, whose appearance was greeted with a certain amount of derision by Worcestershire folk, who spoke of blocking and maiden overs. What followed was a short masterclass of placement and timing, enough weight taken off the shot to get two even with seven boundary fielders (no fielding restrictions yet, of course). He was puffed by the end mind, particularly when joined by Alan Knott, perhaps the only Kent player who could challenge Asif in a short sprint. Who would blame Cowdrey for turning down a second from the last ball of the innings, given that would have placed him 22 yards further away from the pavilion, to which he was by then so keen to return? Cowdrey refuted another misconception—that he was a liability away from slip—early in the Worcestershire innings when he threw down the stumps from side on.

Kent’s opening bowlers were Norman Graham and Asif Iqbal. Like Jasprit Bumrah’s now, Norman Graham’s run up was no more than an administrative necessity, but batsmen were unused to seeing the ball from the angle that his six foot seven frame delivered it from. The effect was of a bowler faster than he actually was. Asif’s handling of the new ball was a surprise in that he had bowled only three overs in the competition thus far that season, and did not bowl at all in the first nine games of the Sunday League season. But then Bernard Julien headed off to join the West Indies touring team and somebody remembered that Asif had first emerged as in international cricket as an opening bowler. He did the job very well, with a slingly action and busy arms that looked as if they wanted to dispatch the ball long before reaching the bowling crease.

Worcestershire were going along quite well at 57 for one when Ted Hemsley made a mistake that many had made before and many would after: he took a single to the little dumpy guy at mid on. He was a yard short when the ball hit the base of the middle stump, as it tended to when thrown by Alan Ealham.

A couple more wickets fell quickly. Worcestershire were behind the clock and mesmerised by Underwood. It was a surprise to see the captain, Norman Gifford coming in at six, promoting himself above D’Oliveira and Yardley. This may have had something to do with the fashionable theory that Underwood was less effective against left-handers.

D’Oliveira soon joined him and they came close to turning the game, with a partnership of 70 in 12 overs, massive productivity in the year of the three-day week. Gifford slogged effectively, but some of D’Oliveira’s shots were sublime. All the political business that his name evokes can get in the way of remembering what a fine cricketer he was; a man Peter Oborne reckoned would have toured England in 1951, but for apartheid. As we will see, he wasn’t done with Lord’s finals yet.

The rest of the Worcestershire order folded, leaving them 39 runs short with 20 balls spare. Asif had four wickets to add to his half-century and was named man of the match by Sir Leonard Hutton (“I saw Hutton past his prime…”).

The highlights package on YouTube was posted by Tim Luckhurst, Brian’s son. No highlights package is shown in the schedules for that day on BBC Genome, so it would seem to be a piece of individual enterprise for which we nostalgists are grateful.

How shining white their kit is in those pictures; they look like angels descended from heaven, but your childhood heroes always do, I suppose.

YouTube highlights of the 1973 final

55-over final 1976

Scorecard

For those of us of a certain age, the summer of ’76 will never be beaten. Lazy, hazy, crazy days, the sun relentless and dazzling, the West Indies cricket team the same. Viv Richards announced his greatness with two double hundreds. I was at the Oval for some of Mikey Holding’s 14 wickets on a pitch so flat it would be an exaggeration to call it three-dimensional.

Zaheer Abbas with a double hundred and a hundred at Canterbury…a helicopter landing at Mote Park as Kent won the Sunday League…Cowdrey’s last game…and another Lord’s cup final win.

Kent’s XI for the 1976 final had three changes from that of three years before. Cowdrey had retired (but was to reappear once during Canterbury Week); Luckhurst and Graham had already had their seasons ended by injury, and were both to retire that year (prematurely in Luckhurst’s case). Leading the attack was Kevin Jarvis, like Graham a fine county bowler unlucky not to get a few England caps along the way. When the two played together Graham was promoted to the No 10 position, a promotion that the introduction of no player I have seen other Jarvis could have achieved.  

Cowdrey and Luckhurst were replaced by Charles Rowe and Richard Hills. Here was a straw in the wind, though we didn’t recognise it as such at the time: two players of proven international quality succeeded by two decent county pros. Rowe was embarking on the unenviable sequence of three Lord’s finals in successive years in which he would not score a run, bowl a ball or take a catch.

Only five returned from Worcestershire’s 1973 XI: Turner, D’Oliveira, Gifford, Ormrod and Hemsley. There was plenty of talent among the replacements, most of whom would become well-known county names: Phil Neale, Gordon Willcock, Paul Pridgeon and John Inchmore. The least familiar is all-rounder Cedric Boyns, who had made his way from the Drones Club specially.

And there was Imran Khan, now in the final year of a spasmodic six-season career at New Road. Worcestershire folk chanted his name to the tune of the chorus of You’ll Never Walk Alone (“Imran” for “walk on”) as he opened the bowling, but the volume diminished as the Kent openers Johnson and Woolmer saw off the new ball.

In 1973 Woolmer had been a bowling all-rounder. Three years later, he was an England batsman, his 61 here part of the reason he was promoted to open in the fourth test later that week as the selectors hit upon the notion that it would be a good idea to have openers with a combined age lower than 84, as it had been when Close and Edrich opened in the third test, at Old Trafford.

It was always more fun when a county pro who never experienced international glory turned in the key performance at a Lord’s final. Here, it was Graham Johnson’s day, the high day of a 20-year career (though I’ve written before about the scandal that was Geoff Miller playing 34 tests while Johnson played none). With Woolmer, he put on 110, the first century opening partnership in a Lord’s final. “Watching Johnson and Woolmer…no one would know that English cricket is in the doldrums” reported Woodcock.

Kent didn’t build the big total that might have followed this fine start. There were no boundaries between the 36^th to 52^nd overs. Woodcock described Gifford’s field settings as “as much like rounders as cricket” and suggested that there might be an inner ring containing a specified number of fielders, as has become standard. But there was also some good tight bowling, notably by Gifford himself, but also from Boyns, who had to step up to a full 11-over contribution after D’Oliveira limped off having torn his 44-year-old hamstring. That Kent got as many as 236 was largely thanks again to Asif’s scampering in the last ten overs.

Worcestershire started well enough, with Turner and Ormrod putting on 40 in 12 overs, but Shepherd had the New Zealander caught behind. He dismissed Neale soon after and a tourniquet was applied first by Woolmer, whose first seven overs cost only four runs, then Underwood playing the fifth of his ten finals.

The difficulty that Underwood presented can be judged by the fact that three batsmen in a row were caught by Johnson at deep square leg as they desperately sought to escape the Alcatraz that Underwood built on the line of leg stump.

There is a curiosity around the first of these catches, to dismiss Ormrod. Johnson took the catch inside the rope, but clearly continued across it. For a few years in that era, that constituted a fair catch. That clearly had not been the case in 1968, when Roger Davis caught the fifth of Sobers’ six sixes at Swansea, only to fall over the boundary for the catch to be overruled. The variation to the law that did not last long, or the gymnastic displays that are now a regular feature of boundary fielding would not be necessary.

When D’Oliveira limped in, accompanied by Turner as runner, Worcestershire were 90 for four and well behind the clock, as good as done if all they had to offer was an elderly disabled man and his carer. D’Oliveira proceeded to play what I still regard as the finest one-legged innings I have seen, rivalled perhaps by Chris Gayle’s equally futile effort in the World Cup quarter-final of 2015 (when he was not allowed a runner). With mobility unavailable, he relied on eye and power, one that of an eagle, the other what would get a small town through an afternoon.

“With short-arm jabs, D’Oliveira struck four after four and he straight drove Hills to the pavilion seats for six” reports Wisden. He never quite caught Worcestershire up with the required rate—all those fielders on the boundary saw to that—but he certainly had us worried. Only when he was out for 50 in the 47^th over did we relax, after we had stood to see him on his slow way back to the pavilion. There has never been a cricketer who has attracted such universal goodwill as Basil D’Oliveira.

Kevin Jarvis cleaned up the tail, giving him four wickets on his Lord’s final debut. The 43-run victory margin was a touch flattering to Kent. Graham Johnson won the gold award by Sir Garry Sobers.

Except for certain members of the committee, none of the Kent people at Lord’s that day would have believed that Mike Denness was in the final couple of months of his Kent career. Nobody would have thought that when we returned a year later our world would have been turned upside down by Kerry Packer (or rather the establishment’s blimpish reaction to him). In a way, that happy day was the last of our childhood, the only time in our lives that we had a full hand of illusions, none yet shattered.

The golden summer of ’76.

YouTube highlights of the 1976 final

1968

Sharp-eyed Twitter followers will have spotted that a few weeks ago @kentccc1967 became @kentccc1968. This was intended to be the prelude to a brief return to the day-by-day re-creation of cricket and the world fifty years ago, which proved popular among the discerning when applied to the 1967 season last year. The idea was to follow events from the first day of the final Ashes test through to the cancellation of MCC’s tour of South Africa.

It soon became clear that I don’t have the time to achieve even this modest goal. For one thing, work is very busy, for another my Khandallah correspondent and I were married a few weeks ago. She returned from a trip to Auckland recently with a copy of the 1932 Wisden for me, so I won’t do better. 

On the face of it, 1968 should have been a season worth remembering. It was an Ashes year, overseas players were able to play county cricket without enduring a qualification period and bonus points were introduced to encourage brighter cricket. For all this, it was not a summer that shouts out for commemoration.

The Ashes series was a damp and often dull, without quite emulating the torpor of the 1964 series (frighten your children with Tom Cartwright’s first innings figures at Old Trafford: 77–32–118–2).

During the final test against India recently, one of the television commentators revealed that of the previous 31 test matches in England only one had been drawn. Coming into the ’68 series, just over half of the 25 Ashes tests in England since the Second World War had been drawn. England won just four home Ashes tests in that period.

An unfancied Australian team won the first test, at Old Trafford, by 159 runs, England collapsing to Bob Cowper’s soothing trundle in the first innings. Then the rain set in.

After the Lord’s test against India, Mike Atherton wrote a piece in The Times about how ground technology has moved the game along. He imagined how that match would have progressed in an age without top-notch drainage and floodlights. India might well have saved that game, not just because much more time would have been lost, but because they would have had the opportunity to rescue their first innings from a bad start by batting in the friendlier conditions that England experienced.

Let’s reverse the counterfactual. What if the rain-ruined second and third tests of 1968 had had modern ground facilities available? It is probable that England would have won both.

In the second, at Lord’s, Australia needed 273 to avoid an innings defeat (having been bowled out for 78 in the first innings), but, with only two-and-a-half hours played on the last day, survived easily enough.

The first day’s play in the third test at Edgbaston was called off at 10 am. England again gained a considerable first innings lead. A declaration left Australia with 330 to win, an achievable target now, but one that the Ashes-defending Australians would never have attempted in those defensive days. The onset of rain an hour or so into the final day raised hopes that Derek Underwood could be a drying-pitch magician, but it didn’t stop all afternoon.

The match was notable for Colin Cowdrey becoming the first cricketer to play a hundred tests, which he marked with a hundred, all the more meritorious for the fact that he had Boycott as a runner for the latter part of the innings.

The rain mostly stayed away from the fourth test at Headingley, but still there was insufficient time for a positive result. The first three innings each reached just over 300, leaving England 326 at 66 an hour, a fact recorded in Wisden as if it were one of the tasks of Hercules. They gave up soon after tea with four wickets down, the possibility of defeat apparently more shaming than the chance of winning the Ashes was enticing.

In The Times, both John Woodcock and Jack Fingleton identified the superior Australian fielding as the defining difference. Fingleton contrasted the pristine flannels of the home side with those of the grass-stained Australians.

Those who see the selection of Adil Rashid for the test team after he had forsaken domestic red-ball cricket as an unprecedented derogation of county cricket should have a look at the England team at Headingley, in particular at the presence of ER Dexter at No 3. Why had Dexter been brought into the side? What sort of season had he had?

He hadn’t. A few knocks on Sundays for the Cavaliers apart, Dexter’s first innings of the year came against Kent at Hastings on the Saturday before the Leeds test, after he had been given the nod for selection. He took full advantage of the opportunity, knocking up a double century against Kent at Hastings, but what did David Green, Brian Bolus or Alan Jones—to name three players who were having good seasons—think of Dexter’s selection?

As well as Dexter, the selectors brought in another southerner, Keith Fletcher, for his debut. They couldn’t have anatagonised the Yorkshire crowd (who favoured their own Phil Sharpe) more had they gone round Headingley poking each personally with a sharp stick. Fletcher got a first-innings duck, dropped a couple of catches and had a rough reception at Leeds ever after. One senses Dexter making notes for his own spell as selectoral supremo a couple of decades later.

So to the Oval, and a truly memorable test match, the more so because of the rain. Late on the fourth evening Australia were left with 356 to win. Now, that would be thought tough but achievable, but the caution of the era meant that the possibility of an Australian win was barely considered. Fingleton thought Cowdrey too cautious in not declaring.

In the nine overs bowled that Monday evening, Australia lost two wickets. I remember watching on television as a gleeful Underwood left the field having just got Redpath lbw.

Tuesday morning’s television coverage started at noon, half an hour after play began. There was no reason for this other than the cussedness of the scheduler; the hour-long gap between Watch With Mother and the cricket was filled only with the test card. So I’d have heard about Ian Chappell’s leg-before dismissal to Underwood on Test Match Special (Arlott, McGilvray and Hudson commentating).

You can see the Chappell dismissal and that of Doug Walters on this black-and-white footage. That vicious bite and turn from Underwood refutes the notion that Underwood was dangerous only on drying pitches. And what a catch from Alan Knott. If I could choose the last thing that I would see on Earth it would be Knott taking a catch like that off Underwood.

By luncheon (as The Times still called it) Sheahan was also out and Australia were 86 for five. The main question for me was how many of the rest would fall to Underwood.

As they walked off at the interval the rain started to fall. By the time of the scheduled resumption the Oval was a collection of ponds, and a draw looked certain. There is a famous photograph of a forlorn Colin Cowdrey looking across the field like a failed Moses.

With modern drainage the water would drain straight through. It would be out of the question to give fifty or so strangers sharp objects with which to accelerate the drying. It is surprising that there is no recorded objection from the Australians, as it would not have happened if they had been on the verge of victory.

It worked. Play resumed at 4 45 with 75 minutes to go (it was all on the clock, no statutory number of overs to be bowled). For half an hour the pitch was sedated by the rain. Inverarity and Jarman had little difficulty dealing with Underwood or anybody else. Then came the first signs of drying, with the ball starting to kick a little. D’Oliveira induced Jarman to leave a ball that clipped off stump and was immediately replaced at the Pavilion End by Underwood, who made the cricket world aware of what we in Kent already knew: that on a drying pitch he was a sorcerer.

McKenzie and Mallett fell in the first over of the spell, caught by David Brown, insanely close at short leg. John Gleeson survived for a quarter of an hour before leaving a ball that took his off stump. Ten minutes remained when last-man Alan Connolly reached the middle. Throughout the carnage, John Inverarity had remained staunch and defiant. He contrived to face what might have been Underwood’s last over and it seemed that he was within a few defiant lunges forward from saving the game.

But to the third ball Inverarity raised his bat and almost turned his back to the bowler. Charlie Elliott’s finger went up so quickly that it was almost ahead of the appeal, but freeze the video in the right place and you will see that the impact came before the big movement of the leg; it was a good decision. Underwood finished with seven for 50.

It was the tensest finish to a test that I would see on television until Edgbaston 2005. Yet the end is not what the match is primarily remembered for. Much has been written about the Oval ’68 on its fiftieth anniversary, almost all of it about Basil D’Oliveira’s first-innings 158, his initial omission from the MCC team to tour South Africa, his later inclusion as a replacement for Tom Cartwright and the cancellation of the tour.

I have discussed previously the importance of these events of the development of my own political consciousness. Looking at the TV listings, I realise that another strand of my political development was taking place at the same time. BBC 1 had breakfast time coverage of the Democrat Convention in Chicago. I had no interest in American politics but was nine-years-old, so would have watched grass grow for the novelty of having the TV on at that time of the morning. Nor did I know that President Johnson and Mayor Daley had sown up the nomination for Vice President Humphrey. So the theatre of the state-by-state voting (“on behalf of the great state of [insert name here] I am proud….” etc) drew me in. For the first time I understood the thrill of the concept of having the numbers, something that passes the time for me half a century later, on days when there is no cricket to watch.

There is colour footage from the Oval test on YouTube, but according to the television listings in The Times, the fourth test, at Headingley was also in colour, making it the first test match to have live colour coverage, in Britain or anywhere else. Colour TV was restricted to BBC2 at that time, so only the post-tea session would have been seen in its full colour glory. For the rest of the day, the cricket had to share monochrome BBC1 with other sports, or be subject to the random whim of the schedulers.

BBC2 was where the Sunday International Cavaliers games were to be found, so, if The Times listings are accurate (and I am not convinced that they are), the first cricket match anywhere in the world to be covered live in colour was the International Cavaliers v Cambridge University Past & Present. Feel free to take this information and win bets with it.

The other day I caught myself flicking up the collar of my polo shirt as I have for years, so long that I had almost forgotten that the habit started in imitation of Garry Sobers.

Colour cameras had not yet found their way to Wales, so Sobers’ six sixes on 31 August at St Helen’s, Swansea are recorded in grainy black-and-white from over fine leg, Wilfred Wooller combining secretarial and commentary duties. At least they were there. Outside the principality, 1968 seems to have been the year when the BBC gave up covering Championship cricket outside the Roses games, though the ITV regions still took some interest.

As in 1967, Kent finished in the Championship and won one more game than chamopions Yorkshire, but didn’t get the hang of the new bonus points system as well as the northerners did. A good last week at Folkestone reduced the final margin to 14 points but that was closer than it had been for some weeks.

The year before, the Canterbury Week clash between the two had decided the title. This year’s repeat of the same fixture was washed away like so much of the 1968 season, though on the first day Tony Nicholson, who may have asked for the Canterbury pitch to be relaid in his back garden, so partial was he to it, took eight for 22, still the best statistical bowling performance that I have seen in its entirety. The second day was completely rained out, and the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Kent failed to console me. Play resumed only later on Friday, a draw inevitable.

I will recreate a season of the past at some point when I have more time; 1970 or 1978, both Championship years for Kent, would be obvious choices. In the meantime, the domestic season here in New Zealand begins later this week. If I can muster sufficient circulation in my fingers to scribble a few notes, watch this space.