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.

 

9 to 15 August: Phil Edmonds makes a grand entrance

Australia went to Leeds for the third test with a degree of suspicion. Their last test match there ended in a three-day loss as Derek Underwood took advantage of a fusarium-infused pitch. They beat England there in the World Cup semi-final with six for Gary Gilmour as the ball swung like the Glenn Miller Orchestra, but at 39 for six in reply before Gilmour and Walters  steered them home, it was a nervous victory that will not have left them feeling positive about returning to Headingley. It was also clear that Tony Greig’s England now had Steele in their backbone.

The Northamptonshire batter had become a national hero on the back of 50 and 45 in the draw at Lord’s. He had reinforced the perception of him as a human Maginot Line by taking 102 off the Australians at Northampton earlier in the week. Younger readers will have to read that sentence several times to make sense of it, so improbable does it seem from today’s perspective that there should be such a fixture between test matches, let alone that one of England’s leading players should play in it.

The pessimism brought on by the winter’s drubbing was not entirely expunged as John Woodcock’s preview of the game made clear:  “Unless we get an opportune storm, or it becomes consistently overcast, it is not easy to see how England will bowl Australia out twice”.

Yet by the end of the second day, at the end of this week, England were on top, with Australia on 107 for eight in reply to England’s 288 (Steele top scorer with 73). What’s more it was a spinner who did the damage. Phil Edmonds played in 51 test matches over 12 years, but his performance on his first afternoon as a test bowler remained this best-remembered single performance. He finished the day with figures of 12-4-17-5, including Nos 3 to 6 in the Australian order. At the other end Derek Underwood took one for 12 in 13 overs.

After this series Edmonds was not picked for England again until the tour of Pakistan in 1978. The absence of a tour in 1975-76 meant that there was no momentum carried forward from Edmonds’ success at Headingley. After this series he never again played in the same team as Underwood, presumably because the selectors blanched at two left-arm spinners in the same team. If so, this was unfortunate. They were left-armers who asked the batters with very different questions at considerably different paces. John Woodcock’s report on the second day described Edmonds as having “a hint of arrogance” about him. As the years passed it was the “hint of” that was challenged, rather than the “arrogance”, and it may sometimes have been personality rather than talent that kept him out, to the chagrin of the selectors. But a player who put himself beyond even Mike Brearley’s man-management compass must take some responsibility for his fate.

I followed this test match on the radio. We were on holiday in south Devon, my objections to vacationing in a minor county being overruled. Living as we did in a smallish seaside town, it was my father’s natural preference to spend our annual week away in another smallish seaside town in a different part of the country  (Brixham in this case). It was an enjoyable week of happy memory.

Everybody thought that the test match was in for an exciting finish that was difficult to predict. We were right, in a way of which none of us could have conceived.

On Sunday Alan Gibson was at Leicester. A young player took his eye, though only after shenanigans on the railway of a kind that provided a common opening to his reports, much treasured by Gibson devotees.

 

Gibson over-estimated Gower’s devotion to the law, but not his talent with a cricket bat.

The common memory of Yorkshire in the seventies is of off-field division and on-field mediocrity. It therefore comes as a surprise to find us in the last month of the season with Yorkshire ten points clear at the head of the Championship. This week, Geoffrey Boycott cemented his place at the top of the batting averages with an unbeaten double hundred at Lord’s. His opening partner Richard Lumb (father of Michael) was not far behind him. As pitches developed August turn, Phil Carrick and Geoff Cope were among the wickets; five bowlers averaged under 30 for the season.

Non-Boycott County Championship performance of the week was Fred Swarbrook’s nine for 20 for Derbyshire against Sussex at Hove, the best bowling figures in the UK between 1964 and 1991 (acknowledgement to Derbyshire’s archivist and photographer @dgriffinpix for that, the best county-related X feed).

Not far behind was Basil D’Oliveira with 97 and 81 in a loss for Worcestershire at Surrey. At 43 (officially, but quite possibly a couple of years more) D’Oliveira was still making 1100 runs at 43 and had not lost his knack of breaking partnerships with the ball. It was his penultimate season; in 1976 at Lord’s I saw him hit 50 on one leg after pinging a hamstring to come close to winning the 55-over final against Kent. In his outstanding biography of D’Oliveira, Peter Oborne makes the case that only apartheid stopped him from being selected for South Africa’s 1951 tour of England. D’Oliveira’s story is one of cricket’s most remarkable; with a just government in his country it might have been one of the greatest.

The Guardian had an amusing piece on the evolution of England’s selection panel by Ian Peebles of Middlesex and England, one of the first to go from dressing room to press box ghost-unassisted. His Woolley, Pride of Kent was one of the first cricket books I had.

 

 

 

 

 

26 July – 1 August 1975: The Bank Clerk Who Went to War

 

We come now to the curious case of the test-match career of David Steele, as strange a story as English cricket has seen in my time. As the week in 1975 begins, Steele is a 33-year-old batsman in his thirteenth year for  Northamptonshire, the archetypal county cricketer. This is his benefit year. He is having a good season and has already accumulated more than a thousand runs, with steady rather than big scores. Over the years, he had occasionally been mentioned as an outside possibility for England selection, but not this season, except in a piece by Tony Pawson in which he was named in a short list of batsmen whose time had passed, along with MJ Smith, David Turner of Hampshire and Chris Balderstone (who was picked a year later, with much less success). John Arlott wrote that his being a left-hander would be useful, a fair point undermined only by Steele’s being right-handed. Arlott was probably confusing David Steele with his brother, the left-handed Leicestershire opener John Steele. Some thought that the selectors had done the same.

John Woodcock prepared his readers for Steele’s appearance. “A bespectacled figure, almost more white than grey, he is not at all the image of what you would expect of a troubleshooter.” With the upturned peak on his cap there was a touch of Norman Wisdom about him.

It was this Steele that walked down the pavilion steps on the fall of the first wicket at the first day of the test match (having gone via the basement as he was unfamiliar with the route from the home dressing room). He watched three more depart (umpire Bill Alley had a very twitchy finger that morning) before he was joined by Tony Greig on his first day as England’s captain.

Their partnership was worth a usually unremarkable 96, but after months of being pummelled by Lillee and Thomson the sight of this apparent pensioner hooking them to the Grandstand boundary alongside his leader on the counter attack was stirring. Steele had left the pavilion an ordinary man, but returned a hero, a “symbol of national resistance” as John Arlott called him. By Christmas Steele was BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Clive Taylor of the Sun called him "the bank clerk who went to war".

Steele's fall was as precipitous as his rise. There was no winter tour, so the next tests were against the West Indies in 1976. Steele began with his maiden century in the first test and came third in the averages behind Edrich and Close. But he was not included in the touring party for India that winter, and that was that. He continued to play county cricket until 1984 and has made a fair amount of money telling the story of his short but spectacular England career ever since. He appears not much older than he did that day at Lord’s, though that is largely because he looked about 70 then.

Here is Arlott’s account of the first day.

 

At first, the second day was even better. In reply to England’s 315, Australia subsided to 81 for seven. “Not since the war, I think, had Australia suffered such a collapse on a good pitch against England, in England” reported John  Woodcock. “At lunchtime the atmosphere was like that on VE Day. It was too good to last, of course, but it bucked us all up at the time”.

Ross Edwards with 99 (at which point he became Bob Woolmer’s first test wicket) and a Dennis Lillee’s test-best 73 not out reduced the final deficit to 47.

One thing I noticed on the YouTube highlights confirmed my view that Alan Knott was half a century ahead of his time. Then, the standard guards ranged from leg to middle. Taking an off stump guard was almost unheard of. Ask Arthur Jepson for an off stump guard and he would have come at you with a stump in hand. Yet, as Jeff Thomson runs in, there is Knotty tapping his bat well outside off. Genius.

I saw none of this on television. Canterbury week, starting unusually on a Wednesday, coincided with the test match. Peter Marson, there for The Times, paints an evocative picture that takes me straight back there.

 

The organisations named in the first paragraph all had marquees at the Nackington Road End that shimmered through the week. It was gloriously hot, like the summers of our youth ought to be. Deal Beach Parlours had a new ice lolly that summer. I don’t remember the flavour, which probably had a lengthy chemical formula, but it was a wonderfully lurid turquoise. I had so many that week that the man in the ice cream van had one ready each time I approached, the transaction taking place wordlessly. The gaps in my teeth remind me fondly of the summer of ’75.

I also remember the rough reception that greeted Hampshire skipper Richard Gilliatt as he returned to the dressing rooms having declared Hampshire’s second innings closed a couple of hours later than was necessary to make a game of it. The winning team in this fixture would lead the Championship. Perhaps the knowledge of Kent’s successful pursuit against the Australians a few weeks earlier deterred Gilliatt, who eventually called a halt when he was 97 not out.

 

Gilliatt almost had the last laugh. Kent batted testily and quickly lost seven wickets. Cowdrey batted for 100 minutes to save the game.

Ill temper marked this round of matches. The heat was getting to cricketers everywhere. Leicestershire protested against a late Lancashire declaration by having Roger Tolchard bowl an underarm ball at Clive Lloyd. Ray Illingworth then promoted himself to No 3 to block.

Both these games tell us that three-day cricket relied too much on captains being willing to set targets. The restriction of the first innings to 100 overs did not move the game on sufficiently, but encouraged negative, not wicket-taking, bowling.

Hampshire topped the table, with Boycott and Hendrick leading their respective averages.