The Cricket Magazines: February 1973

Both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly featured reports on England’s first two test matches in India. Print media were the way in which we learned what had happened in this series. There are short, grainy highlights packages of the second and third tests on YouTube, but I do not recall any of it appearing on television in Britain, even on the news. There was no radio commentary. BBC Radio, without a cricket correspondent following the compulsory retirement of Brian Johnston at 60, did not even send a reporter, relying on Crawford White of the Daily Express to phone in reports to Today on Radio 4 and at the close of play.

The two tests were terrific contests that followed a similar pattern, with low scores on turning pitches—238 was the highest of eight innings—with England chasing targets of around 200 in both. They succeeded in the first test, but failed in the second.

The absence of sound and pictures meant that some fine performances barely registered at the time and have been forgotten about since, most notably Geoff Arnold’s nine wickets in the first test, in which India’s quicker bowlers (if Abid Ali and Erinath Solkar can be so described) delivered only 12 overs. 

At 107 for four chasing 206 and the ball turning like a cornered viper, the match looked to be India’s for the taking, but an unbeaten century partnership by Tony Lewis and Tony Greig took England home. John Woodcock, reporting for The Cricketer, called Greig “the outstanding English cricketer”. Like nobody else until Ben Stokes, the future England captain thrived when the odds were stacked high on the side of quality opposition. 

Lewis was captaining England on test debut, the first to do so since Nigel Howard twenty years before, also on an India tour that the established captain didn’t fancy. None have done so since, for England, at least. Lewis made a duck in the first innings,and came in for the second with the match in the balance, so his unbeaten 70 was quite a performance, unnoticed by most as it was made on Christmas Day, with few papers printing on Boxing Day. England’s victory “was worth all the mistletoe in the world” according to Woodcock, who gives us a sense of how India was consumed by cricket, more specifically test cricket, by describing the aftermath of their win in the second test.

The streets around the hotel where the Indian team was staying had to be closed to traffic; thousands of those inside the ground kissed the turf and performed cartwheels of delight. The result may have been a setback to England, but it was a marvellous thing for cricket in India. Had India lost I would have hated to be Wadekar, so short are people’s memories.

Ajit Wadekar had led India to their first test and series win over England fewer than 18 months before, but his house was attacked when his team lost three-nil in 1974, so Woodcock is not being alarmist. 

Playfair was now on its last legs, three issues away from oblivion, a pity as there is some fine writing in the February edition. Basil Easterbrook’s piece is entitled How a Cricket Writer Can Cope With Wet Days. 

You can of course dash off a feature article, which might fill in half an hour, or compile your expenses account, which will take all morning.

Easterbrook then embarks on an entertaining survey of some of the public houses near cricket grounds in which he has passed wet days. 

Neville Cardus was in the final two years of his life and not terribly well but his piece on Sussex is a late glimpse of a craftsman capable yet of top form atthe tail end of his career, like Cowdrey’s winning century for Kent against the Australians in ‘75. 

In the first paragraph he describes turn-of-the-century Manchester as “a city of begrimed solid dignity” and follows with a word—ratiocinative—that I had to look up, which is always fun. Here it is. 

Both titles carry pieces by former players on the contemporary game, which always have the potential to become a bog of better-in-my-day self-justification. 

In The Cricketer HL “Stork” Hendry, who played 11 tests for Australia in the 1920s, starts with a paragraph that swallow dives into heart of the morass, rescue improbable.

Cricket-lovers are disappointed and disturbed that the great game of cricket, hitherto regarded as a character-builder, is losing some of its attraction to the public.

He dismisses the counter-attractions of other sports as a factor, as they had always been around, but concedes that “the craze of young people to own motor cars has been a contributing factor”.

Hendry’s explanation is “Averages”, his shorthand for batsmen paying too much attention to their own statistics, and not enough to the needs of the team or the crowds. 

Decades ago the goal of the batsman was a century; having attained this they usually proceeded to get out.

The introduction to the piece records that Hendry scored 325 not out against the New Zealanders in 1925-26.

In The Cricketer Charles Barnett, whose Gloucestershire career also began in the twenties, is altogether more understanding of the challenges faced by the modern cricketer, with whom he sympathises for having to adapt between different forms of the game and back again over a single weekend. It does seem astonishing that counties would begin a Championship game on a Saturday, play a separate 40-over match on a Sunday (sometimes in a different county), then resume the three-day game on Monday morning. 

Barnett puts forward a common proposal of the time, that young batsmen of promise should be omitted from one-day teams in their formative years. He even takes the trouble to suggest that counties make arrangements with golf clubs so that these youthful flowers might be fully occupied on their days off, presumably lest their unoccupied minds strayed to unclean thoughts of reverse sweeps.

Barnett is dismissive of the orthodox view that the influx of overseas players to county cricket is a bad thing, 

Their very example is now there for every young player to see and if wise try to copy.

He also has the good idea that run outs from direct hits should be recorded as ‘thrown out”, with the fielder credited.  

England v Australia, Fourth Test, Old Trafford, 23 – 28 July 1964: A Cautionary Tale

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/26/26958.html

To be born at all is to pick a ticket in a lottery. Land in one place and time and history leaves you alone to get on with life and make it what you can; a few years or a few hundred miles different and it intervenes with a black hand. Think of being a boy of 13 as opposed to 17 in much of Europe a hundred years ago and the difference that would have made to your life expectancy.

I had a lucky escape. As I have written before in these columns, my formative cricket year was 1966 when Sobers, Kanhai, Butcher and Hall came to England to intrigue and captivate a receptive young mind. Two years older and I would have been trying to drink in the desert of the 1964 Ashes series, and might well have fled parched from cricket into the arms of that temptress association football.

The ’64 Ashes was the love child of Sir Geoffrey Howe and the speaking clock, plain to look at, wet and desperately dull. Almost 15 hours were lost to rain during the first test, at Trent Bridge. With the scoring rate struggling to keep above two an over during both sides’ first innings, spectators will have welcomed the respite.

The rain and the funereal scoring at Lord’s led to a second draw. At Headingley, 160 from Peter Burge helped Australia to victory and the run rate to a heady two-and-a-half an over. How selection policies have changed over the years. Fred Trueman and Les Flavell were England’s only fast bowlers, so after Flavell was injured, Ted Dexter—brisk but very much a batsman who bowled—and Fred Titmus shared the new ball with Trueman.

And so to Old Trafford, the setting for our cautionary tale. In tune with the attritional attitudes of the day, Australia’s captain Bobby Simpson was solely intent on avoiding defeat, thus retaining the Ashes. On Thursday morning he won the toss, opened the batting and was still there on Saturday morning when a bit of late hitting took the strike rate to a pulse-threatening 2.56 an over, having not been much above two an over for the first two days. Simpson’s 311 remains the second-highest maiden test century after Sobers’ 365 and the second-slowest test triple hundred after Hanif Mohammad’s 337, both in the 1957-58 series in the Caribbean.

For real empathy with the hapless folk who paid money to watch this, look at the bowling figures of Tom Cartwright: 77 overs, 32 maidens, 118 runs, two wickets. Cartwright (then of Warwickshire, later of Somerset and Glamorgan) was a medium-pacer who could bowl with unequalled accuracy and with just enough variation to make batsmen even more risk-averse than usual in those cautious times. In first-class cricket he took 1,536 wickets at under 20 and at only a smidgen over two an over.

As I have written before, my Blean correspondent and myself frittered away our best years picking made-up cricket XIs. Our most debated and proudest effort was the All-Time Boring XI. Cartwright led the attack, which excluded truly fast bowlers, masters of swing and, obviously, spinners as being too intrinsically interesting. Cartwright’s selection was a compliment, a reflection that he did what he set out to do—to wear batsmen down by the relentless tedium of nagging medium-pace accuracy—better than the hundreds of other English county bowlers who have set about the same endeavour over the years.  Other bowlers were Derek Shackleton of Hampshire, cut from the same cloth as Cartwright, and GG (Horse) Arnold. The latter was a controversial choice, as Arnold could be quite interesting as a bowler, but was favoured as being most likely to induce boring batting in the opposition.

Three members of the batting line-up played at Old Trafford fifty years ago. Bill Lawry placed his position in doubt by hitting three sixes, and by being run out, always an interesting way to go. However, 106 at two an over despite the sixes supports his retention.

Geoffrey Boycott, in his debut test series, set the tone of the reply with three fours in three hours. Ken Barrington made 256 from 624 balls, though he did take an hour-and-a-half less than Simpson to reach 200.

Players with reputations as dashers were brought down by the miasma of the pervading torpor. Ted Dexter went no faster than Barrington in scoring 174. Jim Parks spent more than three hours over 60 against a tired attack. In went right down the order. Opening bowlers John Price and Fred Rumsey faced 51 balls between them for four runs.

England’s defence for imposing this inertia upon the paying public would have been that the Australians started it. There is something to this; with no chance of victory why risk defeat, however remote the possibility? Yet for the past 30 years at least, the rearguard action would have been conducted with a bit more style and awareness that people had paid money to watch and should not be sent home contemplating a call to the Samaritans.

The 1985 Ashes was a milestone in this respect. On the face of it, it was an unremarkable 3 – 1 win by a superior England team. But look closer. Two of England’s victories were concluded in the final session of the fifth day. England’s scoring rate for the series was close to four an over, and Australia’s was well clear of three. At 1960s scoring rates there would not have been sufficient time for the games to have finished and the series would have been drawn.

It is much more difficult to draw a test match these days for reasons beyond a more positive attitude. Fields drain quicker, covering is better, artificial light fills in when natural light is inadequate and some lost time is made up.

But let us not be complacent. For much of the current series in England (I write after the third day at Lord’s) progress has been pedestrian, the scoring rates inflated by some tailend bashing. At Trent Bridge, as at Old Trafford half a century ago, spectators turned up for the third and later days pretty sure that they were watching a game that was going to end in nothing but a draw.

This report from the 1965 Wisden—unusually trenchant for the time—captures the futility of the events at Old Trafford fifty years ago this week:

http://www.espncricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/story/152824.html