7 – 13 June 1975 The First Cricket World Cup is Underway

 In the present there is a world cricket final taking place at Lord’s. There was another one, in Dubai (!) a couple of months ago, and another last year, when part of the tournament was played partly in the USA (!!). And so on. It all began fifty years ago this week, when the first Cricket World Cup began. Not that is was called anything so vulgar. Officially, it was the International Championship Cricket Event of 1975, or, in acknowledgement of the sponsors, the Prudential Cup. The word “World” did not appear on anything official.

There were eight competing teams: the six active test-playing sides plus Sri Lanka (Ceylon, recently renamed) and the composite East Africa. England, India, New Zealand and East Africa constituted one group, Australia, Pakistan, West Indies and Sri Lanka the other. Each played their groupmates once, the top two progressing to the semis. It was a 60-over, which made for long days. There were no fielding restrictions. The whole thing was done in 15 days.

Fitting in with the established pattern of domestic cricket in the UK, matches were scheduled for Saturdays and Wednesdays, with two days in reserve to finish in case of weather interruption. Happily, this was unnecessary. From the time that the first ball of the World Cup was bowled, 1975 turned glorious, the sunniest summer of my lifetime to that point.  

The tournament was covered on television by the BBC, who had cameras at two games on each matchday, but insufficient airtime to cover one from first ball to last, let alone a pair. On Saturday, the cricket had to share Grandstand with the racing from Haydock Park, and BBC 2 preferred to give its afternoon to the Tony Hancock film The Punch and Judy Man rather than offer the possibility of live coverage of both games. The four commentators who would normally have worked at one game were spread between two, Jim Laker and Ted Dexter at Lord’s for England against India, and Peter West and Richie Benaud at Headingley for Australia versus Pakistan.

There was no ball-by-ball commentary on radio until the final. There were BBC commentators at all four games, but they had to compete with racing, cycling and tennis on Sport on 2, presented by Alan Parry, and extended until 7pm, which would not have been late enough to guarantee covering the end of every contest. The Radio Times listed John Arlott, Brian Johnston, Don Mosey, Henry Blofeld and Freddie Trueman as commentators, along with visitors Tony Cozier and New Zealand’s Alan Richards, but does not say who was where. On Wednesday there was no commentary at all, merely reports on the hourly sports desks.

The showpiece of the first day, England v India, is remembered fifty years on, but not in a good way. England showed the value of experience in this form of the game by running up 334, 137 by Dennis Amiss leading the way. This was an immense score. For context, the highest in 12 years of England’s domestic 60-over competition thus far was 327, and that by Gloucestershire against minor county Berkshire.

India had one of the Himalayas to climb. They decided before leaving the dressing room that it could not be attempted. Famously, Sunil Gavaskar batted through the 60 overs for 36 not out of India’s 132 for three. BBC huffily switched to Headingley and included none of the Indian innings on the highlights package. Gavaskar is usually blamed, but there was collective responsibility. None of the other batters were much more aggressive and, as John Arlott noted in The Guardian, Farokh Engineer—hard-hitting member of three Lancashire 60-over champion teams—was not promoted up the order. In The Times John Woodcock made the point that the previous year India had been humiliated at Lord’s, bowled out for 42, and that anything was better than that.

Not all India’s supporters agreed and several entered the field of play to inform Gavaskar of this personally. One felt strongly enough to punch two policemen and on Monday was jailed for six months.

We have to remember that the grammar of one-day cricket was still being learned. Almost every week in this series of articles it has been noted, with a degree of astonishment, how low the scoring was in limited-over games of various durations. The next day only nine sixes were hit across seven games in the Sunday League, and only one of the 14 teams passed 200. To a fair extent limited-overs cricket was approached as if it was a first-class innings with a bit of hitting at the end. The Indians, who as yet played no domestic one-day cricket, opened the grammar primer for the first time that Saturday at Lord’s to find out about a language that they had not heard before. They learned quickly. Just eight years later they fluent enough to win the third World Cup.

The game at Edgbaston followed much the same pattern. New Zealand scored 309 for five, of which Glenn Turner made 171 not out, which remained his country’s highest ODI score until Lou Vincent made 172 against Zimbabwe 40 years later. East Africa made four fewer than India did at Lord’s, their aim not to win but to survive 60 overs, which they did, with two wickets to spare. In 2015 I paid good money to watch the UAE do the same thing (over 50 overs) against South Africa, which is why I am in the small minority who do not want World Cups open to a greater number of teams until there are enough who want to win not just be there.

Pakistan lost to Australia by 73 runs, Lillee five for 34, though his mate Thommo had no-ball issues. West Indies blew Sri Lanka away by nine wickets.

On Wednesday, West Indies v Pakistan produced the first classic World Cup contest, a game that remains one of the competition’s greatest. Pakistan, without Imran Khan taking exams in Oxford and captain Asif Iqbal in hospital, made 266. Stand-in skipper Majid Khan led with 60 and a young man we had not heard of called Javed Miandad chipped in 24 at the end.

Sarfraz Nawaz knocked off the top three and wickets continued to fall until West Indies were 168 for eight. Henry Blofeld told Guardian readers what happened thereafter.

The key was that the run rate was kept up even as wickets fell. Deryck Murray’s experience of the limited-overs game helped as did the intelligence and judgement that later made him Trinidad and Tobago’s representative at the UN.

At the Oval Australia made 328, opener Alan Turner leading with 101. When Jeff Thomson took the new ball, for the Sri Lankans it was more like the Colosseum as Wisden 1976 relates with some distaste.

 

As Australian manager Fred Bennett said in response to criticism of Thomson, “What do you expect us to tell the boy to do, bowl underarm?”. Given that Sri Lanka were 150 for two in good time a little hostility seems not unreasonable. It should be remembered that we are two years away from batsmen wearing helmets for the first time.

The two exponents of slow cricket, India and East Africa, met at Headingley where the Boycott fans no doubt cheered the Africans as they took 56 overs to make 120, a total that openers Gavaskar and Engineer put on without loss in a breathless 30 overs.

England dispatched New Zealand easily enough with Keith Fletcher making 131. For New Zealand it was notable for appearance of three Hadlee brothers together in international cricket, batter Barry joining Dayle and Richard, something that also occurred when New Zealand played England in Dunedin a few months before.

So with a round to play, Australia, West Indies and England were through to the semis with New Zealand and India to play for the last place.

The County Championship continued, though with most sides depleted by the loss of World Cup players. Performance of the week was eight for 73 by Yorkshire off spinner Geoff Cope at Bristol, this three years before being troubled by problems of legality with his bowling action that led to a disruptive young section of the Kent crowd referring to him as “Chucker” Cope.

A young Somerset player was being tipped for future international selection, but not the one you think. It was batter Phil Slocombe who was attracting attention with a run of good scores, stylishly made. 1975 was to be his best year. John Woodcock also observed that “Botham is a robust hitter of the ball, a strong young man, in fact”.

Kent lost in the Sunday League for the first time this season, vacating the top of the table not to return until the following year. It was Kent’s worst season of the seventies, with early exits in both knock-out competitions and falling out of contention in the leagues well before the season’s end.

Alan Gibson was in a mood to reminisce, first at Ilford.

 

And at the Oval for the Australia v Sri Lanka game.

 

This week saw the start of a four-week trial of broadcasting radio coverage of question time in the House of Commons. It so happened that this occurred on the very day that I sat the British Constitution O level exam. I collected obscure subjects, but took no science O levels. French Literature followed later in the week.

Colin Cowdrey announced his retirement at the end of the season, but was to have a glorious curtain call in a couple of weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cricketer, June 1973

 The Cricketer, June 1973

This month’s edition was likely in my bag when I spent three days at St Lawrence in the late-May half-term holiday for a three-day game between Kent and MCC. Matches between these sides have an interesting history. If I had a cricketing time machine, one of the first places I would head would be August 1876, to see WG Grace score 344, to this day the highest individual score made at St Lawrence. What’s more, MCC were following on, and WG had bowled 77 overs in Kent’s innings. These were probably, but not certainly, six-ball overs. Six was the norm, but could be varied by agreement of the captains. Over the three days, 398 overs were bowled, 130 or so a day not being excessive for the time.

By the seventies, MCC usually only played a county in the season opener against the champions, so this fixture is a curiosity. Apparently, it came about because of concern of lack of first-class cricket early in the season. Kent fielded a full-strength side, lacking only the injured Brian Luckhurst. Led by Intikhab Alam, half MCC’s side might have been contenders for the test side given a good season. Frank Hayes scored a century on debut against West Indies a couple of months later, and Jackman, Stead, Edwards and Harris were among the better county players of the time. Younis Ahmed added some class. Bob Carter of Worcestershire was notable for an idiosyncratic running style, with arms flailing, that attracted the scorn of the younger element of the crowd. Kent topped the team up with Dave Nicholls, and Peter Topley, slow left-armer and brother of Don. Modern players would be horrified that pacemen Stead and Jackman considered 20 Championship games as insufficient opportunity to display their craft, and were keen to bowl another 33 and 39 overs respectively, and that their counties were happy for them to do so.

The match was played seriously, but just a degree more carefree than a Championship game. I remember it most for Asif Iqbal’s 72-minute hundred on the last morning, all road-runner feet, and laser driving. Of all Kent’s talented, attractive batters, Asif was the most joyous. He was 80 the other day. Happy birthday. The finish, an eight-run win for Kent with nine balls left, was as close as I had seen. 

The cover star this month is Glenn Turner, touring with the New Zealanders and on his way to a thousand runs in May, the last to do this except Graeme Hick in 1988. The exiling of the County Championship to the extremities of the season makes this one of the few old records that are more likely to be achieved these days. 

EW Swanton, now editorial director, laments the lack of young talent in the English game. 

How many young men of Test potential have come onto the scene in, say, the last five years? The sombre fact is that of those who went with MCC to the East last winter…only Tony Greig and Chris Old might not equally have been representing England in 1968. 

Swanton makes a good point. Of the Kent XI that played MCC, only left-arm quick Richard Elms was under 25 and qualified for England. Most counties were the same. This may have been no more than a glitch in the timeline; just three years later Botham, Gooch, Gatting and Gower had all emerged from an unchanged structure. 

Swanton identifies other reasons for this dearth of precocious talent.

It’s impossible for anyone in regular touch with the county to be impressed by the ability of most of the official coaches. One hopes that the calibre improves as the jobs become better paid.

He regrets that counties favour the skills likely to bring success in the one-day game, but chooses an unfortunate example as illustration.

A team of [Keith] Boyces would not, however, have much chance in a five-day test match.

Within three months Boyce was leading wicket-taker and decisive performer in West Indies’ two-nil test series victory over England. The Great Pontificator’s conclusion will still resonate with county cricket’s many supporters with only minor adaptation.

…the one institution suited to producing the complete and balanced England XI of the future remains the County Championship. The one-day competitions…do not produce players, they only exercise those who have been brought on by the traditional system.

Tony Cozier reports on the final two tests of Australia’s visit to the Caribbean, in which Boyce and his colleagues were less successful than they were to become. The fourth test was lost by ten wickets, despite Clive Lloyd’s hometown 178. The fifth was drawn with Australia a session away from making it three-nil. 

Cozier will have re-used his description of the defeat in Guyana time and again over the following two decades, substituting the names of the home team and its players.

Indisciplined batting against spirited fast bowling by Hammond and Walker backed by aggressive out-cricket resulted in a comfortable Australian victory…

Alan Ross reviews the 1973 Wisden, and reproves editor Norman Preston for including the 1970 series between England and the Rest of the World in the test records after the ICC had declared otherwise. Here, I am on Preston’s side. The cricket in that series was of a quality rarely equalled before or since, and we regarded them as tests at the time. Anyway, why should a governing body determine how data should be sorted? Statisticians should feel free to be creative.

A more recent example is the directive to include all international games in T20 records, which has rendered them meaningless (what is the second highest score in a T20 international?; the Czech Republic’s 278 for four against Turkey in 2019, of course). So the Scorecards database says that Derek Underwood has 304 test wickets, not 297, and will not enter into any correspondence. 

Speaking of Underwood, the News of the Month records that the great man took eight for nine at Hastings against Sussex, who were skittled out for 54. Not mentioned is that these were not Underwood’s best figures at this ground. For those not familiar with the geography of south-east England, Hastings is in Sussex, so it was an away ground on which Underwood would play once a year, if that. In 1964, he took nine for 28, three years later 14 in the match. Fast forward to 1984, when he made his only first-class hundred there, the day after he took six for 12, his best performance in the Sunday League. 

It wasn’t just Hastings; Deadly was partial to Sussex grounds in general. In 1977, when they came up with the cunning plan of moving the game to Hove, he took the only hat-trick of his career (I was there for that one). 

In checking a couple of facts for this piece, I discover that Underwood was the retrospective No 1 ranked test bowler from September 1969 to August 1973. So he must have been selected for the test team in June 1973? He was not, Ray Illingworth’s curious preference for Norman Gifford (none for 142 in the first two tests) triumphed again. 

Gifford was in charge of The Captain’s Column this month. A topic of the time was the requirement to bowl 18.5 overs an hour (or 111 overs in a six-hour day). Gifford asks for the co-operation of spectators behind the bowler’s arm. He would have loved me. On my headstone will be the inscription “He never moved behind the bowler’s arm”.

The Cricketer: July 1972

 

The Ashes were the main attraction of 1972 and The Cricketer was fortunate to have John Woodcock as its test match reporter. The July edition carried his account of the first test, played at Old Trafford in early June.

England won a seam-dominated match by 89 runs. John Snow took eight wickets, backed up by Geoff Arnold and Tony Greig with five each. Greig was making his test debut, though this would have come as a surprise to him, given that he had appeared four times for England against the Rest of the World in 1970, contests that were regarded as test matches at that time. He was also ever present in the Rest of the World team that had played in Australia the previous winter, matches that were never categorised by the Australians as tests, though, as discussed here previously, they were manifestly of test quality. Greig also made two half centuries at Manchester.

Anybody who has read much of this blog will know of my admiration for John Woodcock, but he did have a blind spot when it came to the nationality qualifications of England cricketers in general, and of Tony Greig in particular. It will be remembered that he wrote that one of things that explained the Packer schism was that Greig was “not a proper Englishman”. His report here develops this theme.

The ideal England team would be composed of Englishmen, pure and simple. One might have said the same when Ranji, Duleep or Pataudi were playing, or when D’Oliveira was first picked. If I were an Australian I might wonder about the fairness of it all.

But then I might count up the number of Aborigines in the Australian team, find that there were none, and reflect that my team consisted entirely of players who were, in the great scheme of things, recent immigrants themselves.

Woodcock reports that only 36,000 attended the test, which lasted well into the fifth day. That is less than a third of those who went through the gates of Old Trafford for the equivalent fixture in 2019, a comparison that those who argue that test cricket is on permanent decline should note.

Alex Bannister, long-serving Cricket Correspondent of the Daily Mail (and no relation of Jack Bannister, as far as I know) had a series running featuring a different county each month. In July it was Worcestershire. The article ranges between the past and the present in a pleasing way. I learned several things, including that county secretary Mike Vockins was an agricultural biochemist (which might have come in useful when the Severn made one its regular visits to the Worcester outfield), and that the Nawab of Pataudi senior (the same as cited by Woodcock, above) became a Worcestershire player only after having been turned down by Kent. This would have been around the time that Lord Harris insisted that Walter Hammond had to serve a two-year qualification for Gloucestershire because he had been born in Dover while his soldier father was stationed there, so perhaps embracing Pataudi would have been a double standard too far, even for that scion of the aristocracy.

Bannister rated the 25-year-old Glenn Turner highly.

There are two Turners – one intent on crease occupation; the other a magnificent strokemaker. In either mood – and I prefer the latter – he is one of the world’s leading batsmen.

Another New Zealander, John Parker, was on the Worcestershire staff in 1972. Years later, when I was writing for CricInfo, Turner and Parker joined us in the press box at Seddon Park in Hamilton and reminisced about their New Road days. The conversation turned to the use of statistical analysis in modern coaching. One or other of them said something along the lines of:

We had a computer that gave feedback based on the study of the available data. It was called Norman Gifford and it used to stand at short leg giving insightful readouts such as “what the eff are you bowling that effing crap for?”.

I am writing on T20 Blast finals weekend, against which the ECB have scheduled an ODI against India, thus depriving the participating counties of their international players. A similar issue half a century ago saw the boot on the other foot. Surrey and Sussex both refused to release their players to appear for MCC against the Australians in the traditional pre-tests fixture, preferring to retain their services for the Benson and Hedges Cup. I generally avoid a romantic view of cricket in those days, but a time when counties could tell Lord’s to stuff it was a great one in which to be alive.

Denis Compton and John Snow both defended the decision, but the majority of the cricketing establishment was outraged. Crawford White of the Daily Express wrote that “as a member of Surrey for 20 years and more, I think that this is a disgraceful decision”.  MCC Secretary Billy Griffith called it “absolutely deplorable”, while EW Swanton, as Bryon Butler put it in his monthly press review, “drew his sword”.

History of a most regrettable sort has been made…It never occurred to me for a moment that this fixture would not be held sacrosanct…In football, one hears, England suffers from the selfishness of clubs. That is football’s affair. It is cricket’s affair to put country first rather than the short-term financial advantage of a sponsored competition, however good in itself…cricket has been done a grave disservice, which is sure to have strong repercussions.

This is vintage Swanton. “Football” and “sponsored” become terms of abuse. MCC is awarded dominion status. We see in our mind’s eye the oafish member of the lower classes to whom he slips sixpence for furtive news of the association game. And he gets it completely wrong. By the way, that whirring noise is Swanton turning like a rotisserie chicken at the news that the Varsity match has been exiled from Lord’s.

John Arlott profiles Peter Lever. His opening paragraph will move any of us who treasure county cricket.

The heart of English cricket is the county game; and the essence of county cricket is not the Test star who dominates it but the ordinary county cricketer who is there every day and gives it his constant and fullest effort. He does not, like the representative players, miss a dozen county games a year to play for his country. He is a man for all seasons; county cricket is for him an achieved peak and a fulfilment.

But the highlight of the July edition comes in the School Review. It is the historic first appearance in the press of the great CJ Tavaré. Then captain of Severnoaks School, he made 116 including 12 fours and—wait for it—ten sixes.

No doubt this news will provoke ill-judged and distasteful remarks from the class of person who in earlier times would have earned a crust by slipping news of Aston Villa’s away form to Swanton, and who know Tav only as the obdurate fellow who was the tax manual of England’s batting in the early eighties. But it will come as no surprise to those of us who knew the Sunday Tavaré, the man who would dismantle any attack in the country over 40 overs. Three of the Australians at Old Trafford would still be around in 1982/3 to play tests against Tavaré.

 

 

 

Kent trip up at Grace Road: 27 May - 2 June 1967

Leicestershire v Kent 31 May - 2 June 1967

There is no sentence that can tell us more definitively how different things were in 1967 than that which follows. For several hours on Saturday 27 May and again on Bank Holiday Monday 29 May, the only thing on television in much of the Britain was County Championship cricket. BBC 1 had Middlesex versus Sussex from Lord’s. Most ITV regions showed the Roses Match from Old Trafford, while BBC Wales covered Glamorgan against Hampshire. BBC 2 did not open up until the evening, so it was county cricket or nothing.

In the event, on Saturday it was nothing, as the early summer deluge continued. No county cricket was played anywhere on Saturday. Most matches got going on Bank Holiday Monday, but the rain returned everywhere but Trent Bridge on Tuesday. Kent’s fixture at Edgbaston was washed away completely.

In the absence of any cricket to write about, John Woodcock devoted his Monday piece in The Times to an interview with Frank Woolley, holder for ever more of Kent’s first-class run scoring (47,868), appearance (764) and catching (773) records. Not forgetting 1,680 wickets, bettered only by Freeman, Blythe, Underwood and Wright. There were plenty of people around the Kent grounds in 1967 who had seen Woolley play, and he was always their favourite, not for the weight of the statistics, but because of the style in which he made his runs. Woolley was left-handed, and those who were still going strong when David Gower appeared said that he was the nearest they had seen. Woolley lived in Canada by this time, but returned reasonably often. I remember him sitting in the President’s tent one Canterbury Week in the late sixties, and there is a famous photo of Woolley, Ames and Cowdrey together in 1973, Kent’s three makers of a hundred hundreds.

 

Egged on by Woodcock, Woolley criticised the growing commercialisation of cricket, this at a time when advertising hoardings around the boundary were still a decade away on the Kent grounds. What would he have thought of logo-laden shirts and outfields?

There was more substance in his complaint about the slow scoring of the modern game, of which there was much evidence this week, notably at Grace Road where on the first day against Kent, Leicestershire squeezed 155 runs from the first 90 overs. Peter West’s report notes the arrival of drinks as the highlight of the first session (West’s piece is a rarity in that it records a dropped catch by Alan Knott).

This exercise in reliving 1967 is unapologetically nostalgic, but that is not the same as saying that cricket was better then. A torpor could quite easily possess proceedings then in a way rarely seen now. When was the last time you heard a slow hand clap? It was common enough then. A day’s County Championship these days is likely to be more reliably entertaining than it was fifty years ago (though uncovered pitches would be fun).

Kent lost the game because Leicestershire outdid them in the very qualities that had served them so well so far in 1967. Their pace attack of John Cotton (19 overs off the reel) and Terry Spencer was more dangerous than Graham and Sayer, and Jack Birkenshaw followed a hat-trick at Worcester by being Underwood’s equal.

Leicestershire’s other advantage was Tony Lock’s captaincy. Lock was lured back to English cricket from Perth by the offer of the captaincy at Grace Road. By 1967, his third season, he had brought about something of a renaissance (or perhaps simply naissance). Ray Illingworth completed the job, with five trophies in five years in the seventies. Meanwhile, Lock repeated the trick in the southern hemisphere, leading Western Australia to their first Sheffield Shield in twenty years. In 1967 he was still good enough for Peter West to describe him as the finest slow left-armer in the country, and was to be called up to join the MCC party in the Caribbean in the winter.

Earlier in the week, Leicestershire visited Worcester where 22 wickets fell on the Bank Holiday Monday. Off spinner Birkenshaw took his hat-trick as Worcestershire were dismissed for 91. Len Coldwell and Jack Flavell then bowled 35 overs between them (though not unchanged this time), taking nine wickets as Leicestershire gained a lead of 20, which Worcestershire overcame by the end of the day, though with the loss of two further wickets only for the rain to return on the third day.

I tweeted the result of the second XI match between Kent and Worcestershire at St Lawrence. It is not the intention to make this a regular feature unless something noteworthy occurred, but I was there for the first afternoon and remember two things about it. First, I collected the autographs of some Worcestershire players, including Joe Lister and Jim Standen. Lister was Worcestershire secretary. That one man could run the club and still find time to captain the second XI goes some way to refuting Woolley’s view of a game being overtaken by commercial interests. Lister went on to be secretary of Yorkshire during Boycott Civil War. Standen was the most distinguished of the dwindling band of footballer-cricketers, having kept goal at Wembley in winning West Ham teams in the FA Cup in 1964 and the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1965. Another, Ted Hemsley—at that time Shrewsbury Town’s left back—was also in the Worcestershire team.

The other thing I recall was that I retrieved a ball that had been hit for four and returned it to the fielder, John Dye, something that, as a dweller of the upper decks of stands where possible, I have never done since, though I did once dive out of the way at Maidstone from a six that a braver man would have tried to catch. Glenn Turner made the highest score of the match, and I probably saw him do it, the first time I watched one of New Zealand’s finest.

The scorecard of that game reveals that batsman and former vice-captain Bob Wilson was in the Kent side, dropped from the first team for the first time in more than a decade. From then on he was a mere stopgap, and retired at the end of the season. I recall at Dover in late August somebody asking him if he was playing in the Gillette Cup Final a few days later, a question that even a child could spot as insensitive given that everyone knew that the answer was no.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released that week, and received an intelligent review in The Times.

The Summer of Love was not a universal phenomenon. The war in Vietnam raged on, the Middle East was about to explode and now Nigeria found itself on the brink of a civil war. The coastal province of Biafra seceded from the rest of the country this week, a decision that resulted in the Blue Peter Christmas appeal of 1968 being devoted to easing its children's starvation.