28 June – 4 July: Woolmer’s week

Bob Woolmer had been a Kent regular for seven years by 1975. For most of that time he had batted at No 8 and been a useful purveyor of swing at an amiable pace, most notably in the Canterbury Week of 1972 when he took 17 wickets. These days he would probably have shifted to another county with more space at the top of the order. Now he was showing what he could do when batting was his main purpose. His unbeaten 71 (with a break for injury mid-innings) was valuable support for Cowdrey in Kent’s win over the tourists. For MCC against the same opposition he made 56 and 85 with a hat-trick thrown in taken on the day of the funeral of the last man to take a hat-trick against the Australians in England, HS Enthoven for Middlesex in 1934. International selection was just a few weeks away.

The two other Kent players at Lord’s did not do so well. Colin Cowdrey, leading MCC, bagged a pair, ending sentimental speculation that he would play again for England. Graham Johnson made two and one at No 3 and was not to catch the eye of the selectors again.

Graham Gooch’s first innings 75 attracted considerable praise and resulted in his notorious England debut the following week. Both Arlott and Woodcock focus on Gooch’s build, which led to comparison with Colin Milburn. The daily runs from ground to hotel were still a thing of the future apparently.

I was at Maidstone on Sunday to watch Kent beat Lancashire by 24 runs in a (by the standards of the day) high-scoring game. Luckhurst, Johnson and Cowdrey all made fifties, but the one memory I have of the game is of Clive Lloyd smiting a six over Mote Park’s mock-Tudor pavilion, a mighty blow.

Kent also won the Championship game against the same opposition at Tunbridge Wells. John Woodcock was there for The Times. Most readers will know about Knott’s greatness, as will anybody who has made the mistake of engaging me in conversation at the Basin Reserve. Alan Ealham’s fielding prowess will be less well-known. Being somewhat dumpy in stature, nobody would have picked him as the gun fielder. New overseas players were often caught out in this way, the middle stump flying out of its ground while they were still a couple of yards short of completing what they had thought a safe single. What Woodcock has to say about the Kent team and the captaincy of Denness (of which he was not a fan) is interesting.

 

 In the 55-over semi-finals Middlesex beat Warwickshire and Leicestershire defeated Hampshire, against form in both cases.  In the latter case it was despite a century by Gordon Greenidge and a storming Andy Roberts, as described by Gerry Harrison in The Times.

With Roberts roaring in from the car park end…Steele, Balderstone and Davison were not sure whether it was Shrove Tuesday or Sheffield Wednesday.

Harrison was, for many years, Anglia TV’s football commentator. His Yorkshire TV counterpart, Keith Macklin, also reported cricket for The Times in 1975.

Middlesex’s win was largely down to a century by Clive Radley, whose batting style was captured by Alan Gibson:

Radley…was, as usual, a mixture of the classical, the baroque and the Old Kent Road.

Radley’s name often comes up as the scorer of key runs at crucial times, and continued to do so for another decade or more. It seems wrong that his England career was so short.

This was the second week of Wimbledon, which was exciting, firstly for the tennis itself, but also because it meant that Clive James would be reviewing the tournament’s TV coverage in The Observer, an annual treat in this era.

In 2025 the BBC lists 39 commentators for the TV coverage, which continues for 12 hours a day and ranges across all 18 courts. Fifty years ago it was limited to Centre and No 1. Harry Carpenter presented coverage that lasted under six hours plus a highlights package in the evening. The commentary team comprised no more than six led by Dan Maskell and Peter West (Peter Walker filled in at the cricket during the fortnight). On the radio Peter Jones presented three hours of commentary by Max Robertson and Maurice Edelston, with expertise provided by Fred Perry and Bob Howe.

It has always seemed a pity that Clive James was the only Australian with no interest in cricket. I only came across him writing about the game once, when he referred to the Chappel [sic] brothers. Cricket broadcasters may have been relieved.

 

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.

 

1982: A War, a Minister and a wait for Chris Tavaré to get off the mark

Continuing the (very) occasional series remembering Lord’s finals at which I was present.

It was a funny year. On 2 April I was revived from the anaesthetic after a lengthy operation in Frenchay Hospital in Bristol to be told that the country was at war with Argentina. For almost a day I believed this to be a delusion brought about by the power of the drugs, but no. The following few months were like living in a lost work by Gilbert and Sullivan. I have recently finished Dominic Sandbrook’s Who Dares Wins, an 800-page reliving of the three years between Mrs Thatcher’s victories at the polls and in the South Atlantic. Just as with Seasons in the Sun, Sandbrook’s history of the previous five years, the unrelenting picture of misery and economic buffoonery that he presents is in contrast with what the young people these days would call my lived experience.  On the whole, these were very good years for me, not least because they were cricket seasons (sometimes) in the sun. 

My spectating summer was delayed by a day due to an encounter with one of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers, William Waldegrave. As MP for Bristol West, he agreed to spend an hour of so of Saturday afternoon talking to a group of school students as part of an introduction to politics course that I ran as part of my postgraduate teacher training. Waldegrave was friendly and engaging, though I became alarmed when he opened his ministerial case and spread a pile of papers, each of which was stamped “Falklands: confidential”, across the floor of our student flat. When I expressed concern he said “Don’t worry, they wouldn’t tell me anything significant. These are all three weeks out-of-date and copied straight out of the Daily Telegraph”. I developed a level of respect for William Waldegrave that day (though not enough to ever vote for him). I enjoyed his memoirs A Different Kind of Weather, particularly the opening paragraph of the chapter on the poll tax, surely the most self-depreciating of any in the genre—

Local government finance is, famously, the most boring and complicated subject in all of public life. The threat of a chapter on it is a serious threat indeed. But my triumph was this, it must be remembered: I made this most tedious of subjects so interesting that it became the cause of widespread riots up and down the land and, one cause of the defeat of a great Prime Minister. This is how I did it.

The following day I went to the County Ground in Bristol for the first time that season, for the best innings I ever saw in the Sunday League. Middlesex were 51 for six when Phil Edmonds joined Clive Radley. They put on 90 as Radley pushed, glanced, nudged, nurdled and contemplated Middlesex to 184 and himself to a century. The home side fell 20 short. Radley was a masterly one-day batsmen, capable of conjuring runs out of nothing, as if he had snuck into the scoreboard and added 50 to the total while nobody was looking. When we get to 1986 in this series on one-day finals (if any of us live that long) we will discover how he denied Kent a trophy.   

It was odd watching John Shepherd, on Sunday debut for Gloucestershire, playing for someone other than Kent. 

With the world of work hurtling towards me like the asteroid that accounted for the dinosaurs, I made full use of my student railcard. Over the Spring Bank Holiday weekend it was Taunton on Saturday and Monday, with a Sunday game at Worcester (yes, Kent were sent on a five-hour round trip up the M5 on one of the busiest weekends of the year in the middle of a Championship game).

In Somerset, there were two centuries that were, to say the least, contrasting. I need say only that they were made by Viv Richards and Chris Tavaré for the reader to infer the nature of the difference. I have written often enough in these columns about the two Tavarés, the carefree strokemaker of Kent, and the survivalist who played for England. Here, the latter bled into the former. He was opening the batting for the national team the following week, so was getting into the mood, though he did hit Vic Marks into the Tone late in the innings. A couple of months later I saw Tavaré take 67 minutes to get off the mark in the Lord’s test against Pakistan (and enjoyed every one of them).

I went to all three days of Kent’s Championship match at Lord’s. Alan Ross was there for The Times, but it was not an occasion for poetry. His report on the second day began “As entertainment, yesterday’s play was pretty much a dead duck”.

Kent squandered a lot of talent in the eighties, none more than Laurie Potter’s. In this game he made a century in the first innings and fifty in the second, the latter described by Ross as “another brawny effort”. Ross described Potter, who had spent the bulk of his childhood in Australia (he captained both Australia and England under-19s), as “Swarthy and with a moustache in the old fashioned manner—one of Ned Kelly’s gang”. Nothing seemed more certain than that Potter would score many more centuries, for Kent and England, and that he would captain both. But there were only seven more first-class hundreds and he spent most of his career as a spin-bowling all-rounder for Leicestershire. 

The Championship match was interrupted by a Sunday League game, quite the most unusual I ever saw. Kent batted first, disastrously it seemed. The first boundary did not come until the 35th over. Graham Johnson top scored with 29 in 28 overs. Only a bit of eyes-shut hitting from Graham Dilley and a ninth-wicket partnership of 22 with Chris Penn took the total to 119 all out in the 39th over.

Yet the Middlesex innings quickly became one of the most gripping that I have seen, with Brearley, Radley and Barlow all gone: seven for three. From that point on, every run was acquired with the difficulty of extracting diamonds from the deepest mine. The Kent bowlers gave nothing; both Ellison and Underwood conceded only 14 from their eight overs. Colin Cook and John Emburey put on 49 for the fifth wicket, but so slowly that they fell well behind the required rate of just three an over. 

Eleven were needed from the last over, bowled by Dilley. Paul Downton brought the urgency and deftness of placement that had been missing so far, and got two from each of the first four deliveries. Up in the Warner Stand, I remember that the tension, which had been ratcheting up for two hours, became unbearable. Three were needed from two balls (points shared for a tie). Downton was run out with no addition from the fifth, so Cook faced the last.  Peter Marson described for The Times what ensued.

Cook drove towards cover and he and Cowans set off like Greyhounds [sic].  Alas, they managed only one run, for as Cook turned he was well-beaten by Ellison’s throw.

So, a most unlikely one-run victory for Kent. I am told by Wisden that these two games were the last that Asif Iqbal played for Kent. He was captain, but stood down to allow Eldine Baptiste to take the overseas place, and to place Tavaré and Chris Cowdrey in an uncomfortable head-to-head leadership trial. Asif never got the send off he deserved, which should have been a full St Lawrence standing to cheer him all the way out and back. If one mental image sums up my early years of cricket it is Asif dancing down the pitch, then sprinting a quick second at a pace that had his teammates gasping. 

It was the last year I was able to attend every day of Maidstone week. Malcolm Marshall took ten in the game to give Hampshire a win by 45 runs in the last hour. Bob Woolmer got one from Marshall in the face. The crack of leather on cheekbone was heard right around the boundary. In the other game, it was Potter’s unbeaten 90 that saved Kent from defeat by Surrey after being behind by 123 on first innings, this a few weeks before that maiden hundred at Lord’s. In the Sunday game, Gehan Mendis made a century and Paul Parker square cut a six into the press box as Sussex won easily. 

Graham Gooch dominated Canterbury week. He made 303 in three innings. A six he hit in the Sunday game was one of the biggest I have seen at St Lawrence. A casual flick off the pads sent the ball over the terrace, bouncing off cars and almost making it to the Old Dover Road. 

The discerning reader will have noticed, in this piece about the one-day finals of 1982 there has been no mention of one-day finals. This is because both games were very dull, two of the three worst of the 26 Lord’s finals I saw. The only match I watched in either of the two knock-out competitions was the 55-over quarter-final in which Kent were, as had become traditional, beaten by Somerset. 

The Kent scorecard is as strange as you will see. A total of 203 contained only two scores (plus extras) bigger than single figures. It was Neil Taylor’s first season as a first-team regular, a position he was to hold for more than a decade. No Kent player was more underrated. He stands twelfth on Kent’s first-class runscorer list, at a similar average to the two just above him, Mark Benson and Brian Luckhurst (as ever, we note that Luckhurst played in the era of uncovered pitches, which will have depressed his figures). Taylor was Luckhurst’s natural successor, less showy than some lower in the order, but more dependable. In an era when selection for the national side appeared to be a trial for the later appearance of the National Lottery, Taylor was unlucky not to pick up a few caps. Some players no better than him did so.

This day, he was unperturbed as Kent’s top order, as Alan Ross told readers of The Times, “seemed bent on self-destruction”. The poet was impressed by the young opener一

Taylor has negligible backlift, but his judgment of length and timing are such that the ball, played very late, fair hums to the boundary. 

The fifth-wicket partnership of 119 with Chris Cowdrey looked likely to take Kent to a fair total, but Garner and Botham blew away the tail, the last six wickets falling for 34. Taylor finished on 121, the same score that he had made against Sussex in the final group game, again undeterred by the sound of wickets crashing around him. Underwood’s three not out dragged Kent to 203, which was almost, but not quite, enough. 

With Richards going early, leg-before to Kevin Jarvis, Rose and Roebuck used the contingency given them by a comparatively low target to exercise caution. They played Underwood out; the Legend went for only 21 from 11 overs, but took no wickets. Botham’s measured innings brought about the required acceleration. Ross reports that he was “hitting boundaries left-handed”, which was his way of describing the reverse sweep. I thought that these were off Underwood, but this could not have been so; it must have been from Graham Johnson, who bowled three expensive overs. 

We can put it off no longer. Somerset reached Lord’s for the fourth time in five years, where they faced Nottinghamshire, at their first Lord’s final. Put in by Brian Rose, they were like tourists in a new city holding the map upside down. Again, the memory misleads. It tells me that, as a means of distracting ourselves from the torpor before us, spontaneous games of I-Spy began, that classes in languages, nuclear physics and rustic crafts broke out and that busloads of counsellors were sent in by the Samaritans, just in time. This may not be the literal truth, but it conveys the general tenor of the occasion. 

Of course, what I was hoping for was another Viv Richards Lord’s century, but a target of 131 provided no scope for that to happen. The great man did make it to fifty, with what Wisden called “a carefree cameo”, and had the decency to finish the game just after five, so we could be at the pubs when they opened.

The September final was from the same template. This time it was Warwickshire trying and failing to get on the right bus after being put in. That the highlight of the innings was a batting partnership that involved RGD Willis tells you most of what you need to know. He and Asif Din put on 22 for the last wicket to take Warwickshire to 158, after Din and Gladstone Small contributed an admirable but unenervating 62 for the ninth, at a rate that would have triggered a slow handclap at a funeral.

Alan Butcher led Surrey home with an unbeaten 86. It was good that Butcher had his day of triumph; three years earlier he had been the subject of the cruel and unusual punishment of having his potential as a test cricketer judged on the basis of one appearance in the final test of the summer. He made 14 and 20 and was never picked again. The man-of-the-match award went to left-arm seamer David “Teddy” Thomas for his three wickets. It was Surrey’s fourth Lord’s final appearance in as many years, but their first win; it would require a very hard heart indeed not to feel some pleasure for them. 

1979: Forty years on—first wins for Essex and Somerset

                             

I was pleased that Somerset won the last Lord’s one-day final. It seemed fitting that a county outside the metropolitan elite (in whose number Hampshire, by their own choice, are counted these days) should enjoy county cricket’s last day on the biggest stage of all. There was a certain personal symmetry about it too. I was at Lord’s for Somerset’s first final in 1967, and for their first win, in 1979, the year that we have reached in this series of posts on Lord’s finals about which I can say “I was there”.

Britain had recently emerged from the Winter of Discontent, and Mrs Thatcher was in Downing Street, but the state of the nation is never representative of all its people; my own levels of content, at the end of my first year at Bristol University, were at a record high.

I can’t quite remember why I decided that I would go to both the Lord’s domestic finals that year, whoever was in them. It may have been an afterthought when applying for tickets for the World Cup final. Clearly, the price of tickets was within a student’s budget; Mrs T had not yet taken our grants away.

Essex played Surrey in the 55-over competition in July, while Somerset opposed Northamptonshire in the 60-over final in September. It was a good year to be a disinterested observer in St John’s Wood and a privilege to be present when both Essex and Somerset won their first trophies in more than a century of existence.  Tears in the eyes of grown men…“if only Dad had lived to see this, how happy it would have made him…” etc. And there were centuries by two great batsmen, though the greatness of only one of them was apparent by 1979.

What John Woodcock thought of all this I don’t know; The Times was in its year-long shutdown and missed the 1979 season completely, so there are no extracts from its archive in this piece.

I had watched two games in the 55-over competition before the final. My season began as it did for many of the next 19, in the bracing April breezes of the County Ground in Bristol. Gloucestershire despatched Minor Counties (South) with ease, Procter 11-5-18-2 and 82 not out. Two weekends later I returned to Kent for the visit of Middlesex. John Shepherd took three wickets for one run early on, and the Londoners reached 178 only because Mike Gatting and Phil Edmonds put on 75 for the sixth wicket. Knocking it off would be, we thought, a matter of routine, and I felt superior in already having my final ticket when everybody else would be scrabbling for theirs later. Kent were all out for 73, their lowest List A score (but, as we will see, not for long).

So to the final. I got to Lord’s, as I did for most of these finals, soon after the gates opened at nine. My basic ground admission ticket gave access to the lower tier of around much of the ground.  For all the finals in which Kent were not involved I watched from the stands at the Nursery End at long on for the right-handed batsman. No seats were allocated, so it was first-come-first served, but that worked well as like-minded spectators grouped together. In my area the ratio of people to Playfair annuals to pork pies was as near to 1:1:1 as makes no difference. Those there to drink and chant went to the Tavern Stand (this group was bigger for the July finals, outside the football season). Short people could choose not to sit behind tall people. The insistence on sending us all to particular seats was one of the reasons I stopped going so regularly, particularly after I found, in 1985, that my seat was directly behind the sightscreen.

I still like to get to grounds early, especially on big occasions. I’d go into the museum, walk around the ground, watch the players in the nets, and be back in my seat for the toss, won that day by Surrey’s Roger Knight, who did what most one-day captains did then and put them in, perhaps unwisely given that Sylvester Clarke was missing through injury and Robin Jackman playing despite struggling for fitness.

Opening the batting were Mike Denness and Graham Gooch. It was good to see Denness back at Lord’s, the only Essex player to have played in a previous county final, though Gooch had been there just a month before at the World Cup final (as had I). There he made 32 batting at No 4, but had been left in a hopeless position by Brearley and Boycott’s adoption of appeasement as an approach to chasing 286 (on the day of writing this, New Zealand adopted the same method in the World Cup to chase Australia’s 243, with equally disastrous results). Gooch had also—along with Boycott and Larkins—been a third of a fifth bowler against Richards, Lloyd, Greenidge and the rest, but a month later did not bowl a ball against Butcher, Roope and Lynch.

 

Gooch’s promise was universally acknowledged, but at that point unfulfilled. It was four years after his disastrous double-duck debut at Edgbaston, the last test in England where an uncovered pitch changed the course of the game. He had returned to the England team in 1978, filling a vacancy caused by the absence of the Packer players. In the winter’s series against a second-string Australia he had played in all six tests but reached fifty only in the last of them. Thirteen tests so far, but no centuries. There were those who thought that he was another English batsman—Hampshire and Hayes two recent examples—whose promise was no more than a mirage.

Nobody who saw Gooch bat under the July sun that day took that view. For the first time on a big stage we saw the foreboding backlift, the stop-motion movement, the most reassuring front foot in cricket plonking down to send extra cover into retreat. His 120 was one of the four finest hundreds I saw in Lord’s finals: Clive Lloyd in the first World Cup final, Richards a few weeks before and Aravinda de Silva’s losing effort against Lancashire in 1995 complete the list.

When the names of overseas players who graced county cricket in the seventies and eighties are reeled off, that of Ken McEwan is rarely included, which is an omission. He played for Essex for 12 years, in every one of which he topped a thousand first-class runs, and was as consistent in the one-day game, good enough to bat at any tempo. Here, he outscored Gooch in a third-wicket partnership of 124, his 72 including ten fours.

McEwan always seemed to make runs when I was in the crowd. The day of Princess Diana’s wedding was memorable for me solely for his century at Canterbury. Perhaps the community of cricket bloggers could collect famous days in history that they recall more for cricketing reasons.

Essex reached 290, the second-best domestic final score at that time, beaten only by the 317 that Yorkshire made in 1965, on the day that hard-hitting aliens took over the body of Geoffrey Boycott.

The Essex supporters around me couldn’t have been more nervous had all their mortgages been put on the win. Openers Alan Butcher and Monte Lynch went before fifty was on the board, then Geoff Howarth and Roger Knight put on 91 for the third wicket. But it was just a beat too slow, and the pressure that put on the later batsmen meant that wickets fell regularly, the winning margin of 35 runs making it look easier than it felt, to everybody on the northern banks of the Thames Estuary, at least.

Essex followed up by winning the Championship later in the year, the first of seven titles secured with four games in hand. No county has represented the soul of county cricket better than Essex in the four decades since that first happy day at Lord’s.

A few days before Essex’s victory, Lancashire visited Canterbury for the second round of the 60-over knockout. Kent had beaten Glamorgan at Swansea in the first round, Underwood 12-5-11-1.

Chris Tavaré has been attracting some attention on social media this week having been photographed at the launch of Vic Marks’ book (which is on the list of purchases on our September visit to the UK—we always arrive with light suitcases and leave with heavy ones, all books). It was good that his appearance prompted universally positive comments, admiring of the stoutest defence since Leningrad in the forties. Even more pleasing were the one or two who remembered him as a Sunday dasher, Clark of Kent, the mild-mannered blocker transformed into flayer of one-day attacks. It was this persona that turned up at St Lawrence that day, top scoring with 87 when Kent batted first, and putting on 101 with Asif Iqbal for the third wicket. Some late hitting from Ealham, Shepherd and Cowdrey took Kent to 278, a score that would win many more 60-over games than it lost in that era.

Lancashire’s reply was interrupted by the weather at 35 for one. A surprise here for younger readers: we all went back the next day to finish the game. Cricket was not controlled by the accountants and marketing people to the extent that it is now, so a loss-making second, or third, day to finish the game properly was considered worth the expense.

Day two did not start well for Lancashire, with opener Barry Wood retiring hurt a shoulder injury on 24. Wood was good enough a batsman to play 12 tests, mainly as an opener. He had a fine reputation as a player of pace, but suffered, as so many in that era did, from never being given a real run. The same applied to ODIs, of which he was selected for 13 over a decade. If had started just a few years later he might have played ten times that number as specialist one-day selections became more of a norm, his quality batting supplemented by scheming medium pace.

Here, he returned to the crease with Lancashire in trouble at 124 for five and reached his hundred in under an hour, supported by keeper John Lyon in a stand of 76 for the sixth wicket. They never quite caught up with the required rate though and fell well short of the 22 needed from the last over.

It was Asif Iqbal who swept away the Lancashire top order with a spell of four for five in 17 balls, probably the most decisive spell of his Kent career. Because of a dodgy back he was never a regular member of the attack, and some years hardly bowled at all. The scorecard of this game suggests that he only came on because Chris Cowdrey was getting tonked, but in heavy conditions such as those that day he could get the red ball to swing.

It was off to Taunton for the quarter-final. It was another of several days in 1979 when Kent folk spent the first half of the game thinking that things were going much more swimmingly than they actually were. Dilley removed openers Rose and Slocombe early. Richards (44) and Botham (29) were two of four victims for Bob Woolmer’s deceptive medium pace. Somerset were 45 for four, then 128 for eight, but Graham Burgess led a rally of the tail that produced 62 for the last two wickets.

Burgess’s appearance and demeanour gave the impression of his having left his blacksmith’s forge to play, though in fact he was a ex-Millfield schoolboy. He was the only survivor of the team from the 1967 final, and had held his place as the journeymen were replaced by superstars.  In 1979, he knew that his time was running out and walked out to bat that day with determination borne from the thought that his last chance of a trophy could be gone if he failed.

Even so, a target of 190 did not seem daunting. If the last two pairs could bat with such ease, we reasoned, then the pitch must have detoxed, making a sub-200 target an administrative matter.

What occurred was a cricketing recreation of Wall Street in the late October of ‘29: panic, helplessness and collapsing numbers, the Kent batsmen reduced to penury by Joel Garner. It was the second of three occasions that summer when I watched Garner bowl an irresistible spell that finished off the opposition, the previous occasion being the World Cup final. Chris Tavaré went more square on when he found the pace uncomfortably quick; here his feet pointed straight down the pitch, but he still got one of five ducks in the Kent innings. Kent’s 60 all out remains their lowest List A score to this day.

Watching a World Cup game from Taunton the other day, I realised a sign of the passing years is that what is now referred to as the “old pavilion” wasn’t built when I first went there.

An easy victory over Middlesex in the semi-final took Somerset into the final, where they were favourites against Northamptonshire, just as they had been against Sussex the previous year, only to go down by a comfortable five wickets. Just four years before, Northamptonshire had beaten Lancashire against the odds, so the Somerset fans were every bit as inclined to read the runes as pessimistically as their Essex counterparts had been a few weeks before.

Viv Richards was there to reassure them, in the same way as Gooch had, with a century. It contained many of the same fine shots as his World Cup final hundred, but was of a different tone, as if he had been given custody of a fine but fragile piece of priceless china that he had to deliver safely. Watching Richards bat has been one of the greatest joys of my cricket watching, a combination of elegance, power and pride that was quite wonderful. Brian Rose’s 41 was the next highest score, but most of the rest chipped in for a total of 269.

Garner started as he had at Taunton, removing Larkins lbw in the first over, then trapped Richard Williams hit wicket as the batsman wisely tried to put as much distance between himself and the bowler as possible. It seemed that an early train was again an option, but Geoff Cook and Allan Lamb put on 113 for the second wicket. Wisden says that this took just 13 overs, but this has to be a mistake. Nine an over at any stage was unheard of in those days, and it would etched on the memory and often written about, surely. Lamb was three years off qualifying for England and this was the first time that he showed his class on a big occasion. Cook was to secure a winter in the sun on the back of a Lord’s final performance two years later, but here was run out for 41, the beginning of the end for Northamptonshire. Garner returned not so much to mop up the tail as expunge all traces of its DNA, finishing with six for 29, the best bowling I saw in a final.

Somerset’s first trophy in 104 years was followed by a second fewer than 24 hours later. The team, the whiff of cider in the air all the way up the M1, made their way to Nottingham for the last day of the Sunday League, which they went into placed second. Their modest (but in the circumstances commendable) 185 did not suggest that a double was in prospect, particularly as leaders Kent had three fewer to chase against Middlesex. At 40 without loss in ten overs, to us at Canterbury it looked pretty much in the bag. We were the Habsburgs of our time, thinking ourselves magnificent while bits of our empire were quietly seceding.

All ten wickets fell for 86 runs. News of this inspired Somerset to induce an even more precipitous collapse, with the last eight Nottinghamshire wickets falling for 46. A slightly surprised looking Brian Rose accepted the trophy as if he had been doing it all his life.