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.

 

28 June – 4 July: Woolmer’s week

Bob Woolmer had been a Kent regular for seven years by 1975. For most of that time he had batted at No 8 and been a useful purveyor of swing at an amiable pace, most notably in the Canterbury Week of 1972 when he took 17 wickets. These days he would probably have shifted to another county with more space at the top of the order. Now he was showing what he could do when batting was his main purpose. His unbeaten 71 (with a break for injury mid-innings) was valuable support for Cowdrey in Kent’s win over the tourists. For MCC against the same opposition he made 56 and 85 with a hat-trick thrown in taken on the day of the funeral of the last man to take a hat-trick against the Australians in England, HS Enthoven for Middlesex in 1934. International selection was just a few weeks away.

The two other Kent players at Lord’s did not do so well. Colin Cowdrey, leading MCC, bagged a pair, ending sentimental speculation that he would play again for England. Graham Johnson made two and one at No 3 and was not to catch the eye of the selectors again.

Graham Gooch’s first innings 75 attracted considerable praise and resulted in his notorious England debut the following week. Both Arlott and Woodcock focus on Gooch’s build, which led to comparison with Colin Milburn. The daily runs from ground to hotel were still a thing of the future apparently.

I was at Maidstone on Sunday to watch Kent beat Lancashire by 24 runs in a (by the standards of the day) high-scoring game. Luckhurst, Johnson and Cowdrey all made fifties, but the one memory I have of the game is of Clive Lloyd smiting a six over Mote Park’s mock-Tudor pavilion, a mighty blow.

Kent also won the Championship game against the same opposition at Tunbridge Wells. John Woodcock was there for The Times. Most readers will know about Knott’s greatness, as will anybody who has made the mistake of engaging me in conversation at the Basin Reserve. Alan Ealham’s fielding prowess will be less well-known. Being somewhat dumpy in stature, nobody would have picked him as the gun fielder. New overseas players were often caught out in this way, the middle stump flying out of its ground while they were still a couple of yards short of completing what they had thought a safe single. What Woodcock has to say about the Kent team and the captaincy of Denness (of which he was not a fan) is interesting.

 

 In the 55-over semi-finals Middlesex beat Warwickshire and Leicestershire defeated Hampshire, against form in both cases.  In the latter case it was despite a century by Gordon Greenidge and a storming Andy Roberts, as described by Gerry Harrison in The Times.

With Roberts roaring in from the car park end…Steele, Balderstone and Davison were not sure whether it was Shrove Tuesday or Sheffield Wednesday.

Harrison was, for many years, Anglia TV’s football commentator. His Yorkshire TV counterpart, Keith Macklin, also reported cricket for The Times in 1975.

Middlesex’s win was largely down to a century by Clive Radley, whose batting style was captured by Alan Gibson:

Radley…was, as usual, a mixture of the classical, the baroque and the Old Kent Road.

Radley’s name often comes up as the scorer of key runs at crucial times, and continued to do so for another decade or more. It seems wrong that his England career was so short.

This was the second week of Wimbledon, which was exciting, firstly for the tennis itself, but also because it meant that Clive James would be reviewing the tournament’s TV coverage in The Observer, an annual treat in this era.

In 2025 the BBC lists 39 commentators for the TV coverage, which continues for 12 hours a day and ranges across all 18 courts. Fifty years ago it was limited to Centre and No 1. Harry Carpenter presented coverage that lasted under six hours plus a highlights package in the evening. The commentary team comprised no more than six led by Dan Maskell and Peter West (Peter Walker filled in at the cricket during the fortnight). On the radio Peter Jones presented three hours of commentary by Max Robertson and Maurice Edelston, with expertise provided by Fred Perry and Bob Howe.

It has always seemed a pity that Clive James was the only Australian with no interest in cricket. I only came across him writing about the game once, when he referred to the Chappel [sic] brothers. Cricket broadcasters may have been relieved.

 

The Cricketer August 1972

The Ashes of 1972 was one of the best: four positive results out of five (there had been just nine in the previous 26 Ashes tests), some fine cricket directed by a couple of great captains, and, best of all, a couple of conspiracy theories that provoke anger and resentment to this day.

Mention Headingley ’72 to an Australian and watch their brow furrow and the phrase “doctored pitch” form on their lips. England fans of that era will reply with a question: from where did a bowler from the dry air of Perth summon a degree of swing of which Sinatra would be proud to take 16 wickets in his debut test?

Bob Massie was the bowler and it earned him a place on the cover of the August edition of The Cricketer. John Woodcock, reporting from Lord’s on the second test, supplied various explanations. The atmosphere was “heavy and humid” for the first three days; Massie “confounding England’s batsmen by bowling round the wicket at them” (the bounder); England replaced an unfit Geoff Arnold with JSE Price, a paceman, instead of Tom Cartwright, or another bowler better suited to the conditions.

But for Woodcock the main reason was a failure of batting.

And at no time did England’s batsmen bat as England batsmen are meant to.

He lists the most recent individual scores of England’s top three, Boycott, Edrich and Luckhurst, all Ashes winners 16 months previously, and finds only one century and three half centuries in 34 visits to the crease.

It was possible to bat on the Lord’s pitch. Greg Chappell did so sublimely, making 131 in what he rated his finest test innings. For Woodcock:

It was a superbly judged piece of batting, and technically of the very highest quality.

Richie Benaud profiled Massie in August’s Cricketer. Benaud is renowned as cricket’s finest commentator, but this piece reminds us that his profession was not leg spin, but journalism. It makes us regret that his writing was mostly limited to the News of the World. It is superb, the best thing in the magazine.

Benaud does not share Woodcock’s critical view of the English batting.

I derived some amusement that day from the people who besieged, perhaps attacked is a better word, me, with advice as to how the England batsmen should have countered Massie’s bowling. Had that advice been conveyed to them and had they acted on it, we would have watched a wonderful spectacle: batsmen allowing the outswinger to pass and hitting the inswinger, or allowing the inswinger to pass and smashing the outswinger over cover point. In addition, they would have had to take block outside the leg stump, and on the leg, middle and off stumps; kept side-on in the stroke and opened their stance à la Barrington when the bowler operated around the wicket.

Massie’s 16 wickets at Lord’s constituted just over half the total of his whole test career. His star shot across the sky but, without the heat and humidity of Lord’s to keep it flying, it fell to Earth once more.

Some parts of the 1972 Cricketer could be inserted into the 2022 magazine with minimal alteration. Here is the opening of Jim Swanton’s editorial, headlined, with a topicality undimmed by the years, The Shape of County Cricket.

To say that everyone in county cricket is exercised about finding the best programme formula for the future may be stating the obvious; but it seems worth stressing, seeing how many people are dissatisfied with the fixture list à la 1972, with the Benson and Hedges Cup now brought in to make a fourth competition, and the average follower much muddled as to who is playing whom in what, and for how many overs. Ideally there should not be four competitions, but – but ideally county cricket should pay for itself.

With Swanton involved, the August edition was indeed august.

I am pleased to report that the great CJ Tavaré continued to score runs with abandon, with an unbeaten 152 for Sevenoaks. Other successful schoolboys who would later make cricket their career were Jeremy Lloyds (eight for 13 for Blundell’s) and Alistair Hignell (a century for Denstone).

Gillette Cup quarter-final Essex v Kent

This edition of the magazine is a touch more weathered than the others that have featured in earlier pieces. I think that is down to it being well-travelled. It would have been in my bag when I went to Leyton for the Gillette Cup quarter-final. There’s a sentence that sounds as if it comes from the Old Testament.

Essex was still an itinerant club in those days, pitching up somewhere for a week, then moving on. The caravan, including the scoreboard on the side of a truck, happened to be at Leyton when Essex were drawn at home against Kent, so that’s where the match was played, in the first week of August. It seems odd that, at the stage of the season when many counties headed for the seaside, Essex took themselves into London. The Hundred has adopted this counter-intuitive scheduling half a century later.

Leyton hasn’t seen any county cricket since 1977, but Google Maps still calls it the County Cricket Ground, and it has featured on cricket Twitter this very week, with the Cricket Writers taking on an ECB XI there. As an unusual 13-year-old who knew a surprising amount of cricket history, I was aware that it was the site of Holmes and Sutcliffe’s partnership of 555 for Yorkshire in 1932, and of the run that was lost, then found again to ensure that they had the record. It was Jim Swanton’s failure to meet his Evening Standard deadline to report the record that lost him the trip to cover what became the Bodyline Tour, thus removing a key peacemaker from the scene. According to Swanton, at least.

The Cricketer and I actually went to Leyton twice, by East Kent coach; it rained on the first day, and Wednesday’s soaking no doubt influenced what occurred on Thursday.

In 110 overs the two teams scored 264 runs between them, a substantially slower scoring rate than most test matches now produce. For the greater part of the game, defeat for Kent appeared inevitable. But just a few weeks before, I had been at Folkestone for the Sunday League game in which Kent’s last four wickets fell for no runs when two were needed for victory, so I knew that hope and despair should be kept close right to the last ball.

That Kent got as many as 137 was largely due to Asif Iqbal, who played the most out-of-character innings of his career, 52 in 39 overs. He was well supported by Woolmer and Shepherd. The margin of victory was the same as the tenth-wicket partnership between Underwood and Graham. The latter made four, in which I suspect that the edge of the bat played a critical role.

In those days, if you had 60 overs to chase a total it was considered proper to use most of them up. People would have fallen over in a faint had Bazball been explained to them.

In this spirit, openers Edmeades and Wallace put on 55 in 25 overs. There was method behind this caution. Derek Underwood, just back from taking ten wickets in the fourth test, came on as first change and the intention was to see him off. This was achieved. He conceded only 12 runs from 11 overs, but did not take a wicket.

It was John Shepherd who prised Essex open. His first five overs were all maidens, during which he took four wickets, all to catches at slip or behind. The last of these was that of Keith Boyce who had come from Barbados with Shepherd seven years before. Les Ames and Trevor Bailey had spotted the pair on a Cavaliers tour. Both became beloved by the supporters of their counties. Boyce, the pacier bowler, had a more successful international career with 21 tests against Shepherd’s five. Their post-cricket lives were contrasting. Boyce died of cirrhosis at 53, while Shepherd is still hitting golf balls 50 yards further down the fairways of north Kent than might be expected of a man in his late seventies.

Five wickets fell for 14 runs, but 69 at two an over with five left was not hopeless. Nowadays, there would be an attempt to hit bowlers off their line on the basis that the fewer balls that were faced the fewer their opportunities were to take wickets. In those more deferential times bowlers could maintain an undisrupted line and length and let the pitch do the rest.

The report in the 1973 Kent Annual says that “Asif was one of several outstanding Kent fieldsmen, urged on and inspired by Denness to rare brilliance”. This was one of the many attractions of being a Kent fan at that time.

From the fall of Boyce on, we felt the game to be in Kent’s hands but the later Essex order were determined, and a last-wicket stand of 19 between East and Lever had us holding our breaths once more.

Ever since those two games, at Folkestone and Leyton, I have regarded low-scoring one-day games, with runs had to mined rather than gathered where they fell, to be the best of the genre.

Canterbury Cricket Week

Regular readers of Scorecards will know that I am not sentimental about three-day cricket. As the years went on it became more-and-more two days of going through the motions with a contrived run chase on the third. But it could be wonderful, and the August 1972 Cricketer would have been with me at St Lawrence for a week of three-day cricket as good as you could wish for. It was the first time since 1938 that Kent won both matches at Canterbury Week. The opponents here were Glamorgan and Sussex.

It was Bob Woolmer’s week. He is remembered as a ground-breaking coach and a classy batter, but for Kent in 1972 his main role was as a medium-pace bowler, a designation that he never carried out more effectively than here, with 19 wickets in the week. Nine of these were bowled or lbw, five caught behind, three in the slips, so he was clearly dropping it on a sixpence. There was some assistance from a drying pitch in the Glamorgan game, always helpful in moving a game on, but both Alan Jones and Mike Denness made 150s, so it was not treacherous.

Both games followed a similar pattern. The visitors batted first, Glamorgan more effectively than Sussex. Kent replied with a score over 300, before dismissing the opposition cheaply, leaving a chase on the final afternoon. As well as the centuries there were fifties from Colin Cowdrey, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal, Brian Luckhurst, Graham Johnson and Malcolm Nash. Underwood took five wickets against the Welsh (most of them were Welsh unlike the ersatz version in the Hundred), and Alan Knott kept wicket sublimely.

What a place, what a time, to learn to love cricket.