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.

 

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

Gillette Cup Final, Kent v Somerset, Lord’s, 2 September 1967

Scorecard

The Second World War was still a point of reference for most things in 1967. I see now that what was a distant event for an eight-year-old was so recent and defining for those that had lived through it that everything that happened would be measured in relation to it. So the scramble for Gillette Cup final tickets in Kent was compared to rationing. Tickets were the oranges of our time, such was the demand generated by Kent’s run in the Cup and the Championship. 

It was fortunate then, that a speculative enquiry at the East Kent Bus Co offices secured the last two seats on the bus to Lord’s and the match tickets that went with them. So with daylight breaking over the pier, my father and I made our way along Herne Bay sea front to the bus stop, he carrying the provisions, me a string bag containing the three books pictured at the top of this page.

The recent debate about the redevelopment of Lord’s has made reference to the “prison wall” at the Regent’s Park end of the ground. This was pretty much my first impression of the ground as the bus deposited us beside it. We found seats on the bottom level of the grandstand, at wide third man when a right-hander was facing bowling from the pavilion end. The pavilion apart, the whole ground has been rebuilt since then, but would still be unmistakably the same place. The Tavern Stand was under construction, though the noise that had spoiled John Woodcock’s day early in the season was silenced for finals day. I don’t recall a space around the boundary; perhaps some temporary seats were installed in front of the building site.

The arrangements were more informal than is the case for big games now. Some spectators sat on the grass behind the boundary. A group of Somerset supporters dressed as stereotypical yokels pushed a haycart around the boundary all day, dispensing cider as they went and waving pitchforks in the air when Somerset took a wicket.   

Seats were unallocated, so a spectator with a ground admission ticket had a wide choice. This was the first of 28 one-day finals that I attended at Lord’s, and this was the case for all those until 1985, when I found that my allocated seat at the Nursery End was perfect other than being directly behind the sightscreen, a discovery that led to my watching a few overs of the afternoon session from the assistant secretary’s office next to the pavilion as I offered him the benefit of my experience on this issue.

Kent’s XI was as it had been for the semi-final, except that Norman Graham was fit and replaced David Sayer. Brian Luckhurst played for the first time since having his hand broken by Fred Trueman at Canterbury a month before. Colin Cowdrey won the toss and chose to bat. 

It would be untrue to claim that I remember the detail of the game, but the ebb and flow of the three sessions remains with me. Easy until lunch; collapse and a good start by Somerset up to tea; a gradual relieving of tension after that. Kent were most comfortable during the opening partnership of 78 between Denness and Luckhurst. Denness played the “one innings of genuine quality”, according to Woodcock. Shepherd was at No 3, and with Luckhurst (who was out of touch but determined) put on 60 for the second wicket. 

The last nine Kent wickets fell for 55, all attempts at late order acceleration to no avail. Dixon and Brown were both promoted, but got one between them. Knott and Ealham’s partnership of 27 for the seventh wicket was vital; as so often, Ealham’s contribution was worth much more in context than the face value—17 in this case—suggested.

Bill Alley did most to slow Kent down, with three for 22 from 12 overs. Alley was 48 years old by 1967. Once said to be the best welterweight in Australia, he brought the fighter’s instinct and temperament to the field. He came to England having missed out on selection for the 1948 Invincibles, playing in the leagues until 1957 when he joined Somerset. He bowled assorted slow-medium that was as close as you could get in 1967 to modern limited-overs death bowling. He later became a fine umpire; nobody got away with anything as he knew every underhand ruse and had been the originator of some of them. 

Graham Burgess bowled six tidy overs for 17. Burgess bookends Kent’s glory years, there at Lord’s as they began and the only member of the Somerset XI still playing when they ended at Taunton in the Gillette Cup quarter-final of 1979, when Kent were routed for 60. Indeed, it was his doughty unbeaten 50 that day that gave Garner and Botham the space in which to wreak havoc.

In 1967 the grammar of one-day cricket was largely unwritten, so we didn’t really know how challenging a target 194 was. Not enough, it seemed as the 50 partnership for the first wicket between Roy Virgin and Peter Robinson was registered. A few balls later Virgin mistimed an on drive off Alan Dixon and the ball went in a high parabola towards mid on. Kent eyes swivelled to see who was there; a gasp followed the collective discovery that it was Norman Graham, who was to high catches what Robert Maxwell was to pensions. No matter. Graham held on. From that point on no Somerset partnership became properly established—only two got into the twenties—and the balance of the game shifted each time a wicket fell.

The Kent bowling was consistently tight. Graham took one for 26 in 12, Shepherd two for 27. Woodcock makes the point that by the 41^st over, Underwood, making the first of ten appearances in Lord’s finals, still had nine to bowl. He finished off the innings with three for 41. 

It was tense rather than exciting. Looking back, I am reminded of the 1983 World Cup final, when it seemed impossible that India’s 183 would be enough to hold off the West Indies, but the wickets kept falling, so it was.

The Playfair Cricket Annual 1968 described the game as the best Gillette final of them all, which is a bit of a stretch; Playfair editor Gordon Ross also handled the PR for the competition. John Woodcock was closer to it with his judgment that it was the closest final, but “from the cricketing point of view, the most ordinary”. The best cricket in a Gillette final had—astonishing as it may now seem—been provided by Geoff Boycott (“forcing shots all round the wicket” said Wisden), who took the Surrey attack apart in 1965 like one of those plants that blooms only every 20 years. 

So the first of 11 titles in 12 seasons went to the hop county (the tradition of garlanding the Lord’s dressing room balcony with hops began that day too).