The Cricketer, September and October 1973

September’s edition includes accounts of two games at which I was present. The first was the 55-over final between Kent and Worcestershire. 

I have written about this game before, and recommend the YouTube highlights, in which the players glisten  like ghosts in their pristine white. 

I enjoyed watching Leicestershire’s win in the recent 50-over final. Harry Swindells’ century was as good a backs-to-the-wall innings as there has been in a one-day final for fifty years (see below), and the result was too close to call until the final ball. It is good that three provincial counties have won the competition since the final was moved to Trent Bridge, but that is partly because the Undead (as my Blean Correspondent perceptively calls it) has shorn it of its names. Fifty years ago, half of the participants were contemporary internationals, and four—Cowdrey, D’Oliveira, Knott and Underwood—were gods.

By the time of the second game to be featured in The Cricketer, the 60-over quarter-final at Hove, Kent had the Sunday League all but sown up, so we went to Hove expecting something in the nature of a formality, foolishly bandying about the word “treble”. I cannot agree with Gordon Ross’s assessment in his one-day round up that this was a “wonderfully happy day”. In fact, it was one of the more miserable that I have spent at a cricket ground. 

These were the days before the Ms 23 and 25, so our East Kent coach took a circuitous route across the North Downs and the Weald before becoming caught up in the transportation spider’s web that was the town of Lewes in those days. Lewes is now renowned for its excessive commemoration of Guy Fawkes, but that one visit to the town made me understand that time spent there would cultivate a proclivity to arson. Busses were to be trouble all day, as it turned out. 

We arrived shortly before the first ball was bowled, the only space available being an uncomfortably small area of grass with a limited view in the fifth or sixth row on the boundary at the sea end of the ground, on a sweltering day. It was from here that I watched Richard Elms open the bowling for Kent. 

Elms was a left-arm bowler of sharpish pace, and was a reasonable batter, but never attained a regular place in the team, largely because his control was not reliable. He was included here because Norman Graham was ill and Bernard Julien was on tour with the West Indians. It was the biggest game of his career, but he would not recall it fondly. Elms bowled four wides in the first over of the game, at a time when one-day wides were ruled much more leniently than they are now. 

The make-up of the Kent team was odd, and is inclined to generate retrospective sympathy for Elms. Now captains expect to have six or seven bowling options, and to use them (New Zealand in the current World Cup are an exception, and that worries me). But, as was the norm then, Kent used only five bowlers. Graham Johnson delivered more than 400 overs of off spin in the Championship in 1973, but Denness preferred to flog Elms even though it was obvious that his confidence was going out with the tide on Hove seafront. 

Ross’s report highlights John Snow’s pace, but the damage had already been done by the Sussex batters, with Roger Prideaux’s 79 leading the way. Prideaux was one of those players who could look terrific on his day, of which this was one. With a little luck he might have had a test career that stretched beyond three games. Instead, he is mostly remembered as the man who dropped out of the Oval test of 1968 to be replaced by Basil D’Oliveira, thus initiating the series of events that led to the cancellation of MCC’s tour of South Africa.

Sussex’s 263 for six was more than any side had successfully chased in the Gillette Cup, which was in its eleventh season. After Tony Buss had Luckhurst caught at slip, Snow, with an irresistible combination of pace and movement, accounted for Denness and Asif Iqbal, and at 14 for three that was about it. The great fast bowler finished with figures of 7-5-8-2. I wouldn’t swear to it, but the runs may have been two edged fours, so impossible did it appear to score off him. The trundling Buss brothers took five between them, three for Tony and two for Mike.

Sussex got to Lord’s, and as Gordon Ross reports in the October edition, again removed the top three quickly. But Gloucestershire were Proctershire.

[Mike Procter’s] technique is such that he needs precious little time to find his bearings and he launched himself immediately, seizing on two short balls from Michael Buss…and thumping them good and proper for six.

He followed his 94 with two for 27 in 11 overs as Sussex fell 40 short. This was after 101 and three for 31 in the semi-final against Worcestershire. It was like having a tornado on the team.

As I write this, the collar of my sports shirt is turned up, as has been my habit these fifty-plus years, in perpetual salute to Garry Sobers, who is pictured thus attired on the cover of the September edition. Sobers played for West Indies in the three-test series on which John Woodcock reports in these editions, though he had passed the captaincy on to Rohan Kanhai. 

I was present for the first day of the final test. Lord’s had a quality of light all its own on sunny days late in the season, particularly when watching from the grandstand side of the ground as we were that day. The lower sun combined with a bit of extra moisture to give the spectacle the air of a dream sequence, appropriately enough for West Indies, who were 335 for four by the end of the day, “as large a score from the opening day of a Test match in England as there can have been for some long time” according to John Woodcock.

That is from his report in The Times. Strangely, The Cricketer gave him only six paragraphs to sum up this excellent game, half the space allocated to each of the two ODIs that followed the tests, not enough to mention Rohan Kanhai’s 157, one of the finest test innings that I have seen in person. 

By this time, Kanhai had the statesman’s grey hair but still batted like matinee idol. There was plenty of stylish, aggressive support from his Guyanese colleagues Roy Fredericks (51) and Clive Lloyd (63), and at the end of the day from Sobers, who was 31 not out at the close. The great man went on to150 next day, notoriously having caroused through the night in the interim.

One of the things I like about John Woodcock’s writing is that you can always tell when he has really enjoyed himself. He is one of us, somebody who loves being entertained by the best players, regardless of who they play for. In the above extract he conveys something of the joyous atmosphere of a West Indian test match in London. The negligence shown by the cricket authorities in squandering this reservoir of knowledge and enthusiasm is one of the worst things that has happened to English cricket in the last half century. 

It was a match of many landmarks, such as Bob Willis’s debut home test. Woodcock describes the first over of the game as “the fastest over I have seen this season”. This validates the enduring image that I have in my mind of that morning: Willis storming in from the Nursery End through the morning shimmer. 

It was the game of the Saturday bomb scare with most of the crowd on the field and HD Bird initiating his own legend by perching on the covers on Grandstand. Later that afternoon Geoffrey Boycott was caught on the boundary hooking off the last ball of the day, something that many of us remember whenever he fulminates about the recklessness of modern batting. 

This was the last test match to be covered by EM Wellings of the Evening News, and Chris Martin-Jenkins’ first as a Test Match Special commentator.

It was also Ray Illingworth’s last test as England captain. EW Swanton sums up the selectors’ reasoning:

But when some decline in his own form, both as a batsman and bowler, coincided with the second of two shattering Test defeats it was clear that a new leader must be tried.

He reminds us that Illingworth’s selection to replace the injured Colin Cowdrey in 1969 had been a “surprise appointment”. He could have added “inspired”, given that Illingworth was to lead the Ashes-winning side in 1970/71 and hold them at home the following year.

Mike Denness was appointed as his replacement, the announcement tactlessly made while Leicestershire were playing Kent at Folkestone, causing, according to Barry Dudleston of the visitors, Illingworth to exit the dressing room via a window and drainpipe to avoid the waiting press. Appointing a captain from outside the team was not unusual; both Tony Lewis and Illingworth himself had recentlybeen given the job in these circumstances. But the selectors ignored two current county captains—Boycott and Greig—to do so. It was a decision that would lead to Boycott’s boycott. 

It also rekindled one of cricket writing’s great feuds. EW Swanton, in his Off the Cuff column, writes of a generally positive press reaction to Denness’s appointment:

…apart from some odious, sneering comment from a predictable quarter. I imagined that most people would at once identify Michael Parkinson, that caricature of a Yorkshireman who is guaranteed to glorify anything and anyone who comes from his own small corner of the world and to denigrate almost all else. 

He goes on to say that he does not regard Parkinson as a “bona fide cricket writer” before a big finish:

As I say, this sort of piffle no longer attracts intelligent readership. But how the great Yorkshiremen, from Hirst and Verity to Leyland and Rhodes must be turning in their graves at this travesty of the true Yorkshire spirit as it has served the county and England so well and for so long.

Parkinson replied in similar vein in his Sunday Times column.

Robin Marlar contributes an interesting profile of Derek Underwood. Marlar sees Underwood as a seam bowler playing a spinner’s role, and attributes  this down to his father laying a concrete pitch in the garden for the young Underwood to develop his skills upon. Good for seam, not for spin, apparently.

He presents this time, 1973, as a turning point in Underwood’s career. He says that a change in the lbw law, making the bowler pitch in line in all circumstances, had made things more difficult, though this had been reversed in 1972. There were other issues.

Derek Underwood has the action of a medium-pacer. It is a fine action. Rhythmic. Controlled. Plenty of body. It lends itself to accuracy. He also has stamina. He can bowl for hours. But now he knows that this is not enough. To be as great a bowler in cricketing annals and affectations as Wilfred Rhodes or Jim Laker or even Bishan Bedi he has to be able to get wickets all over the world and not primarily in England, the seamer’s paradise. What is he to do? Is he to change his action and become a spinner, pure and simple? Or is he to develop another action and operate in two distinct styles? Who will teach him to spin the ball? 

At this stage Underwood had taken 144 test wickets. He finished with 297, plus 16 more at 27 in World Series Cricket, which probably cost him anything up to a hundred more in his peak years. Overall, in Australia he took 50 wickets at 31, in India 54 at 26, all without making any apparent changes to his action or style. 

The same pattern occurred when uncovered pitches were done away with in 1981. That will sort Underwood out, they said. In the first two seasons under the new rules he took more wickets than anyone other than Malcolm Marshall and Richard Hadlee.

The cover of the October edition has Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge at Southampton. Richards was already acknowledged as a great player. Greenidge was not yet in the West Indies team, but within a few years these two would be opening for a putative World XI. With quicker thinking, England could still have picked him when the photo was taken. Yet at the time the presence of overseas players in the county game was widely decried. It was a golden age for county cricket, though we were slow to recognise it as such. The photo is of its time. Two kids, shirts off, ignorant of skin cancer (but nobody in shorts). The older guy to the right who would have seen Phil Mead play. The younger guy with the bad haircut and shades, who thinks he’s cool though he isn’t. If the photo had been taken at Canterbury that would have been me. Hampshire were county champions in 1973. 

Early adventures in autograph hunting

The two Kent junior membership passes pictured both cost a guinea, or a pound and a shilling, or one pound five pence, for which the keen young cricket fan got entry and a seat in the stand at all Kent’s home games bar tourist and Gillette Cup matches, for which ground admission had to be paid. The 1966 pass was my first.

They could also be used as impromptu autograph books. Below are the back two pages of the 1966 edition. Clockwise from the left are the signatures of Colin Cowdrey, Garry Sobers, Alan Knott and David Nicholls. 

The first two were collected on Monday 11 July, the second day of the match between Kent and the West Indians. I was there on a school day because I was recuperating from the measles, which dates me pretty effectively. It was a cautious first expedition outside home for a few hours in the afternoon. 

It was the match in which Sobers took his career-best figures of nine for 49, in slow left-arm mode. One of these was late on that second day, so I assume that I saw a small part of the great man’s best bowling, but I have no memory of doing so. An amnesiac reaction to Sobers will become a theme of this piece, as you will see.

The West Indian captain’s signature must have been secured after the close of play, given that he would have been on the field throughout the afternoon (there was no racing on the TV—I checked). My memory is that Cowdrey signed earlier, on the spot where the Cowdrey Stand was built two decades later. Cowdrey was England captain at that time, having replaced MJK Smith after the first test before handing over to Brian Close for the fifth.

Of these four names, David Nicholls is the only one that will require introduction to the general reader. Three years previously, as a nineteen-year-old, he had made a double century, a rare thing in the three-day era. But there had not been much since then, and he had become a fringe player. 

I assume that Nicholls also signed earlier in the day. If it was at the close it says much for his well-known affability, as he got his second duck of the game shortly before. The following year, he found the role in which he served the county well for the next decade; that of stand-in keeper when Alan Knott was playing for England, which gave him a place in the team for half the season.

I see from the TV listings that England played Uruguay in the opening game of the World Cup that evening. It was a dull nil-nil draw that could not compare watching the West Indians play cricket.

Knott’s autograph was added a few weeks later, on August Bank Holiday Monday. It was a wet day, as public holidays invariably seemed to be when we were young. Kent were hosting Nottinghamshire at St Lawrence. An on-off, interrupted day ended just before tea, by which time most of the spectators had drifted away. My mother and I went to the back of the pavilion to collect a few autographs as we waited for my father to pick us up. 

Cowdrey came out. Thank you, but I had his autograph (membership card proffered as supporting evidence). Was there anyone else I was waiting for to sign? Alan Knott. Wait there.

Cowdrey returned to the dressing room and a minute later a beaming Alan Knott appeared, as if there was nothing he wanted to do more than leave the warmth of the pavilion to stand in the rain signing a raggedy card. Cowdrey was a flawed individual in some ways (see the D’Oliveira affair), and he lumbered us with the ridiculous Spirit of Cricket in the laws but his kindness that day made a big impression on a seven-year-old. It presented cricket as a game with a heart, as a place of safety where you would be looked after. 

The 1970 signatures were all secured at the Oval on the second day of the fifth and final match in the series between England and the Rest of the World, a replacement for the cancelled tour by white South Africa. In my last piece I bemoaned that the series was retrospectively stripped of test status when the cricket was of a quality rarely equalled and never surpassed in my time. 

Not that it was all brilliant. On the first day, 115 overs had been bowled, almost a session more than the sedentary over rates of the 21st century. But look at the score: 229 for five—a fraction under two runs scored in each of those extra overs. In The Times, John Woodcock blamed the Kent captain: “What had promised to be a classical innings by Cowdrey was beset by apprehension”. 

Things went a little more quickly when we were there on Friday, as they tended to when Alan Knott was making a half-century. But a slow pitch meant that, until tea, great players—Barry Richards, Eddie Barlow, Rohan Kanhai—struggled to be more than mundane. 

Then, something special happened, as Woodcock reports:

Here were the two great left-handers of the age together and at their best, since equalled, but not surpassed, only by Lara and Sangakkara. More than that, it was a partnership between two men who could not have shared the same railway carriage or used the same bathroom in the homeland of one of them. How Vorster must have choked on his breakfast biltong as he read the reports on the South African papers the following morning. 

This should surely make the top ten of my personal cricket-watching list. Trouble is, I can’t remember any of it. I was certainly there, as the autographs in the member’s card testify. It must have been Friday, as that was my mother’s day off from the china-and-glass department. We would not have left before the end. I recall sitting in the Vauxhall Stand, and certain details, such as Don Wilson’s return catch to dismiss Kanhai. But nothing of two great players nearing perfection. 

Though too young to provide analysis or useful insight, I have impressions of everything significant that I had watched up to that point—Cowdrey in the 67 Gillette semi-final; the whole course of the  final that year; Denness’s painful debut innings against New Zealand. Much that was insignificant too, like slow-left-armer Andy Hooper’s first five overs in first-class cricket being maidens in 1966. So why not this? Maybe Kent players not being involved? 

I do remember waiting at the back of the Oval pavilion to collect the autographs shown above. Garry Sobers (my annotation is badly spelt) shows consistency of signature over the years. Deryck Murray uses his initials, as befits a Cambridge man. Dennis Amiss was that year’s victim of Oval-test syndrome, where the selectors based their selection of fringe players for the winter tour just on performance in that match. In the second innings he made 35, but Fletcher scored 63, so got the place on the plane to Australia.

I intercepted EW Swanton as he left the pavilion having delivered his summary of the day’s play on Test Match Special (for those too young to have experienced Swanton’s daily address, it was like the Queen’s Christmas message, but in the summer). Given the fun I have at Swanton’s expense in the monthly cricket magazine pieces, I should report that he was charm itself, saying “happy to oblige a Kent man” with a beaming smile as he returned the card. 

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.