1978: The glory days end not with a bang, but with a whimper

Derbyshire v Kent, 55 overs, Lord’s, 22 July 1978

We all have those times in life when we count down to the last one, knowing it is coming. Days left before school starts again, meetings to sit through before you leave a job, hugs from a child before you go to the airport. Like many readers, I am currently experiencing this with regard to one-day county cricket.

For a few years now most matches covered by Sky TV in the UK have been shown here in New Zealand, and I am working my way through this year’s collection (mostly, I know the result before I see the game, but I don’t find that this diminishes the experience significantly). Apart, I assume, from the final stages, next year’s “development” competition won’t be televised, so, like a bear preparing for winter, I feel the need to gorge while I have the chance.

Excluding overseas players and arranging a clashing ODI against Australia, we will discover, are just the beginning of the ECB’s secret plan to make watching the downgraded 50-over competition as unattractive as possible. Fierce dogs are being secretly trained in the tunnels under Lord’s as we speak, their task to patrol the gates, ready to rip out the throat of anybody carrying the scent of a Playfair annual. Playing music that only the more delinquent of the crowd’s grandchildren is under trial as I write.

Sometimes, you have no idea that it is the last time, and look back with remorse at not making more of it. So it was for Kent supporters as we made our way back to the St John’s Wood tube station on that July evening 41 summers ago. If you’d told us then that we would be the last of our kind to walk away from a Lord’s final with the taste of victory fresh in our mouths, we would have assumed that the nuclear apocalypse was upon us. That Kent would simply not be good enough for the next four decades we would have considered a more fanciful explanation.

Since 1978, only Glamorgan, the only county never to have won a Lord’s final, have not known what it is like to make that same short walk with the spring of victory in their step. Kent’s subsequent run of eight losing Lord’s finals is without equal in sport, unless someone would like to prove otherwise.

Where do we find the writer in 1978? I was on what they now call a gap year, but had passed the previous six months, not crossing the Andes or kayaking the Mekong as the bold young people of today do, but working (applying the term loosely) in an insurance broker’s office in Canterbury. I did have three weeks in Germany, most of which was spent trying to find out the cricket scores.

Exam-free, I saw four of Kent’s games leading to the final, starting on the first day of the season at St Lawrence against Boycott’s Yorkshire. What nobody would have expected when the previous season ended was that Kent would be led by Alan Ealham. Asif Iqbal had been sacked because of his association with World Series Cricket, which also ruled out Bob Woolmer. Graham Johnson had missed most of the 1977 season, so was out of the running. Along with John Shepherd, here was a trio who could and should have captained Kent but did not get the chance. Ealham did a good job, and didn’t get sacked for winning two trophies as Denness had two years before. The downside of Ealham’s appointment was that it meant the end of his career as a boundary fielder, taking impossible catches and breaking the stumps with William Tell throws.

Ealham’s captaincy career could not have started better; he took the match award for a 53 that rescued Kent from a parlous 25 for four after Graham Stevenson ran through the top order. A total of 160 was worth more than it seemed. Boycott (in his last season as captain before the outbreak of the Yorkshire Civil War) and Lumb groped their way like blind men to 35 from 21 overs, which persuaded the rest of the team that run scoring was impossible—114 all out.

Kent’s second home game in the preliminary phase was played at Hesketh Park, Dartford, the first time I went there. Kent’s most prosaic ground was by this time the only one close to the metropolitan area in which a good number of Kent’s members reside. These days there is Beckenham, which is right in London.

Essex were the opposition, a contest now ludicrously labelled the “Battle of the Bridge”. There was no bridge then, and the “Tussle of the Tunnel” didn’t have the same ring to it. Gooch and Denness (warmly welcomed) put on 106 for the first wicket. According to Wisden, McEwan and Pont “thrashed” 60 off nine overs, not a word that would be chosen these days to describe a rate of under seven an over towards the end of the innings. Essex finished on 222.

Graham Johnson anchored the chase, with 75, Asif made 65, then Ealham and Shepherd hit 52 from eight overs (“a savage stand”) to give Kent the win with two overs to spare. Shepherd, who also took three for 24, took the match award.

Nottinghamshire, who beat Kent at Trent Bridge in the zonal round, visited St Lawrence for the quarter-final. Alan Ealham showed again that the captaincy was not a burden. John Woodcock was there for The Times.

It was down to Taunton for the semi-final. Somerset had still not won anything, but with Richards, Garner (though he was absent here) and Botham alongside some above-average county players and the Taunton Macoute behind them, the County Ground was already a forbidding place to visit. I set off from Herne Bay on the 5 17, getting to the ground shortly before play started and long after all the seats had been taken. From a series of temporary perches I saw 41 overs before the rain came, with Kent an uncertain 149 for five, which Alan Gibson correctly judged was better than it seemed. He tells the story of the episodic continuation of the match, which ended in Kent’s favour two days later. Gibson seemed to enjoy Taunton more than any other ground, and stayed in good form through the showers.

Readers too young to remember these times will have realised that one-day cricket was a very different creature then. The 226 Kent made at Dartford was the biggest of the four winning scores in the matches discussed so far. In the games that I am watching on TV at the moment the team batting first invariably passes 300 as a matter of routine. I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Michael Henderson, whose monthly diatribe in The Cricketer was, in the April edition, a lament that sixes have become humdrum. The balance between bat and ball is out of kilter. Pushing the boundaries back to the edge of the field would be a start, and a little leeway to the bowlers outside leg stump would be worth a try too.

Back to 1978, and so to Lord’s.

There were four changes to the Kent team that had lost to Gloucestershire the previous year. Johnson returned for Clinton at the top of the order. Alan Knott took the summer off, passing on the gloves to Paul Downton, who had toured Pakistan and New Zealand with England over the winter. Bernard Julien had gone and Richard Hills was omitted. Chris Tavaré and Chris Cowdrey joined Downton in a Lord’s final debut. Fifth-bowler duties were shared between Asif and Johnson, the latter’s off spin being used more often in one-day cricket than under Ealham’s predecessors, another sign that the new captain had spent those years on the boundary observing and thinking.

It was Derbyshire’s second appearance in a Lord’s final, the first being a loss to Yorkshire over 60 overs nine years earlier. Having been soundly beaten the previous year by a team led by one powerhouse South African all-rounder, we had noted that Derbyshire were led by another—Eddie “Bunter” Barlow, brought in three years before to spark the most unfashionable of counties into life. Barlow was as every bit the all-rounder that Procter was. Not as fast a bowler, but one of the best top order batsmen of the time.

Derbyshire also had Bob Taylor, in Knott’s absence established as the England keeper; Mike Hendrick shortly to return to the test side; Geoff Miller, an England regular that summer; and Peter Kirsten another South African of international quality. Kent had lost to Derbyshire in the Sunday League at Maidstone just two weeks earlier, so there was no complacency as we took our seats in the Warner Stand.

It was a dull game, the most moribund of Kent’s fifteen finals. Derbyshire won the toss and chose to bat. Alan Hill became the first man to bat in a Lord’s final wearing a helmet. John Woodcock was unimpressed. 

Kent bowled tightly, particularly Bob Woolmer who conceded just 15 runs from ten overs, but were allowed to without challenge as Derbyshire froze on the big stage. Just 60 came from the first 30 overs. Hopes of a late-innings acceleration disappeared when Kirsten was out hooking at Asif, who looked an easier bowler than he was. The pitch was not easy—Woodcock has a sighting of the ridge, cricket’s Loch Ness monster—but 147 was well short of a winning score. Derbyshire were all out with just two balls of their 55 overs to spare.

Low scoring matches can be gripping, but that depends on the team batting second losing wickets early. There was a hint of this when Tavaré went for a duck to make it 38 for two, but Woolmer was there to nurture the innings with a third successive final half century. Of all the Packer players, it was Woolmer who missed out most on a substantive test career because of his involvement with WSC. He was comfortable in the conditions in a way that no other batsman managed to be that day, and was the best bowler too.

Woodcock has a few what-ifs, though doesn’t record Bob Taylor dropping Woolmer on 52 (a ball after Barlow dropped him) possibly because he didn’t believe his eyes. On the day, it didn’t seem in doubt, but the road to victory was across a featureless and unmemorable Nullarbor Plain.

No highlights of this final appear on YouTube, possibly mercifully; there was an industrial dispute which meant that the game had been shown on Grandstand without commentary, but Richie-less highlights were considered untenable, so were cancelled. We have a facility on Sky NZ that can mute the commentary from some sources. In Scorecards Towers we call it the KP button, and we wouldn’t be without it.

Kent went on to win the Championship that season, but our salad days were almost at an end and the world was changing. Mrs Thatcher would be in Downing Street within the year, though not in time to take away my student grant as I headed for Bristol University.

Given that Kent reached Lord’s last season, there was a hope that they would they would be the last Lord’s victors, tying up that loose end of defeats. But I watched their first game, against Hampshire, and it was clear that if a pop gun were added to the attack it would treble its potency. That dull match in 1978 was when the glory days ended, and our youth with them, not with a bang but with a whimper.

 

The Lord’s Finals: 1973 & 1976 (and a little of 1974)

I went to Lord’s for 24 domestic finals (plus the first three World Cup finals). With the 50-over final moving to Trent Bridge from 2020, there will be no more. Every one of the 24 was played before a full house, even when there were two a year. Were that still the case, the question of moving it would not arise, but over-pricing, the prevalence of international cricket, the devaluing of the county game and the short attention spans of the marketing folk have conspired to devalue what were some of summer’s highest days.

To mark their passing, I hereby announce a series of posts on those 24 finals. This will involve a bit of “curating” (the name young people give to re-sorting and sticking a different label on old stuff). Just as those who played at the MCG in March 1877 were oblivious to taking part in the first test match, so these old posts turn out to be early episodes of this series.

Gillette Cup 1967

Gillette Cup 1971

World Cup 1975

World Cup 1979

World Cup 1983

I’ll mix the cricket reportage with a little of what was happening in the world and as much autobiography as the reader might be able to tolerate.

But anybody anticipating an eyewitness account of the 1974 Gillette Cup final between Kent and Lancashire will be disappointed. I was there on the Saturday, sitting in the sunshine to hear that there would be no play that day, thanks to heavy rain two days before and a sharp shower at 9 am.

People who hanker for the old days of cricket-watching should remember how much of the time we spent watching grass dry. Now, play would probably have started on time.

The game was played on Monday, a school day, hence my absence. Why not Sunday? Because Kent had a Sunday League game scheduled at Worcester. What’s more, the XI that played at New Road was exactly the same as turned out back at Lord’s on the Monday. Rotation then was merely a means of crop management.

I’m sorry to have missed the match—the only one of Kent’s first twelve Lord’s finals from which I was absent—not only because Kent won, but also because it was such a curiosity. Lancashire, having won the toss, lost their tenth wicket to the final ball of the 60th over to be all out for…118. That is to say, a fraction under two an over.

In The Times, John Woodcock described the pitch as “churlish…of uneven bounce and no pace”, but observed that “there was less good batting than one would have thought possible from so many distinguished players”. The Lancashire team contained some of the best one-day batsmen of the era—Lloyd C (& D), Wood, Pilling, Engineer—and those fine tonkers of a cricket ball Hughes and Simmons. Nobody in Kent’s innings made as many as 20, surely a record for a winning team in a final.

Kent’s bowling was apparently splendid: “Rarely did any Kent bowler drop short of a difficult length” reported Wisden. This included James Graham-Brown (his name a pleasing compendium of two other Kent bowlers of the era), who finished with 12–5–15–2. Graham-Brown was a medium-pace bowler with bouncy run up. By a lengthy street, this was the best day of his cricket career. He made only occasional appearances in 1975 and 1976 and then had a couple of years with Derbyshire (as good a euphemism as any for career failure: “Mrs May, we have arranged for you to have a couple of years with Derbyshire”). He was a headteacher for 20 years and now writes plays, including one about Colin Milburn, under the name Dougie Blaxland.

It was Kent’s fielding that won the cup that Monday. There were three run outs, including, crucially, Clive Lloyd, beaten by a 50-yard throw by Alan Ealham after slipping mid-pitch. John Shepherd was responsible for the other two, leading Woodcock to compare him to Learie Constantine.

Kent were coasting at 52 for one, but collapsed to 89 for six before being seen home by Knott and Woolmer (then batting at No 8; within a year he was scoring an Ashes century).

Those not around then would find it hard to credit how difficult it was to find out what was happening in the closing stages for those of us not at Lord’s. BBC schedules were not sufficiently flexible to take account of the delay. Radio coverage was restricted to hourly sports desks, and midweek county games had to give way to the Open University on BBC 2 from about 5 pm, so programmes on Games (sic) Theory and Pure Mathematics filled the screen as Knott and Woolmer eked their way to the target. The tension was in wondering how much tension there was. Nor could time be found to show any highlights, which is presumably so there are none on YouTube.

Gillette Cup final 1974 scorecard

55-over final 1973

Scorecard

No two Lord’s finals were more alike than the 55-over finals of 1973 and 1976. Both were between Kent and Worcestershire. Kent batted first both times, making a good, but not insurmountable score. Worcestershire slipped behind, were given hope by D’Oliveira, but ultimately fell 40 runs or so short. I watched these games from the top deck of the Warner Stand, a largely Kent area on both days.

Kent’s glory years were now well under way, the trophies coming as easily as bonuses to bankers. This was the third of ten in the seventies. Seven of the team were test players, two of them—Knott and Underwood, obviously—in or near the World XI of the time. Woolmer had already played ODIs and was to be a test player two years later. The other three—Johnson, Graham and Ealham—were fine county players, and the former two might have been capped had the selectors actually been as biased towards Kent as supporters of other counties supposed they were.

Worcestershire had three current test players. Norman Gifford, unaccountably (to us in Kent, and many others) selected in preference to Underwood for the first two tests against New Zealand, where he had bowled to Glenn Turner, who was opening the batting here with Ron Headley, who would open for the West Indies in the first test later that week.

The loss of Johnson and Denness with the score on 23 forced Luckhurst and Asif Iqbal onto the defensive, so much so that after 20 overs the total was only 34. But they knew that if no more wickets were lost the runs would come, and so they did, in a partnership of 116.

They were a contrasting pair, the craftsman and the showman. Looking at the recording (posted by Luckhurst’s son), Brian Luckhurst reminds me a bit of Kane Williamson, so correct, and with a practical answer to every bowler’s questions. He was the least stylish of the Kent batsmen, a short backlift turning most shots into punches, but perhaps the most effective. This was a beautifully paced innings, and it turned the game Kent’s way.

Tony Greig said that Asif was the quickest runner between wickets he ever saw. There is plenty of evidence on the recording to support this contention. See how, as Luckhurst is halfway down the pitch completing his third run to pass 50, Asif is already at the other end, scoping a fourth.

Asif’s fleetness did for Luckhurst in the end, beaten by a howitzer of a throw from D’Oliveira from the general direction of Regent’s Park.

These days they call a batsman coming in for the final ten overs or so a “closer”. Kent’s unlikely closer that day was Colin Cowdrey, whose appearance was greeted with a certain amount of derision by Worcestershire folk, who spoke of blocking and maiden overs. What followed was a short masterclass of placement and timing, enough weight taken off the shot to get two even with seven boundary fielders (no fielding restrictions yet, of course). He was puffed by the end mind, particularly when joined by Alan Knott, perhaps the only Kent player who could challenge Asif in a short sprint. Who would blame Cowdrey for turning down a second from the last ball of the innings, given that would have placed him 22 yards further away from the pavilion, to which he was by then so keen to return? Cowdrey refuted another misconception—that he was a liability away from slip—early in the Worcestershire innings when he threw down the stumps from side on.

Kent’s opening bowlers were Norman Graham and Asif Iqbal. Like Jasprit Bumrah’s now, Norman Graham’s run up was no more than an administrative necessity, but batsmen were unused to seeing the ball from the angle that his six foot seven frame delivered it from. The effect was of a bowler faster than he actually was. Asif’s handling of the new ball was a surprise in that he had bowled only three overs in the competition thus far that season, and did not bowl at all in the first nine games of the Sunday League season. But then Bernard Julien headed off to join the West Indies touring team and somebody remembered that Asif had first emerged as in international cricket as an opening bowler. He did the job very well, with a slingly action and busy arms that looked as if they wanted to dispatch the ball long before reaching the bowling crease.

Worcestershire were going along quite well at 57 for one when Ted Hemsley made a mistake that many had made before and many would after: he took a single to the little dumpy guy at mid on. He was a yard short when the ball hit the base of the middle stump, as it tended to when thrown by Alan Ealham.

A couple more wickets fell quickly. Worcestershire were behind the clock and mesmerised by Underwood. It was a surprise to see the captain, Norman Gifford coming in at six, promoting himself above D’Oliveira and Yardley. This may have had something to do with the fashionable theory that Underwood was less effective against left-handers.

D’Oliveira soon joined him and they came close to turning the game, with a partnership of 70 in 12 overs, massive productivity in the year of the three-day week. Gifford slogged effectively, but some of D’Oliveira’s shots were sublime. All the political business that his name evokes can get in the way of remembering what a fine cricketer he was; a man Peter Oborne reckoned would have toured England in 1951, but for apartheid. As we will see, he wasn’t done with Lord’s finals yet.

The rest of the Worcestershire order folded, leaving them 39 runs short with 20 balls spare. Asif had four wickets to add to his half-century and was named man of the match by Sir Leonard Hutton (“I saw Hutton past his prime…”).

The highlights package on YouTube was posted by Tim Luckhurst, Brian’s son. No highlights package is shown in the schedules for that day on BBC Genome, so it would seem to be a piece of individual enterprise for which we nostalgists are grateful.

How shining white their kit is in those pictures; they look like angels descended from heaven, but your childhood heroes always do, I suppose.

YouTube highlights of the 1973 final

55-over final 1976

Scorecard

For those of us of a certain age, the summer of ’76 will never be beaten. Lazy, hazy, crazy days, the sun relentless and dazzling, the West Indies cricket team the same. Viv Richards announced his greatness with two double hundreds. I was at the Oval for some of Mikey Holding’s 14 wickets on a pitch so flat it would be an exaggeration to call it three-dimensional.

Zaheer Abbas with a double hundred and a hundred at Canterbury…a helicopter landing at Mote Park as Kent won the Sunday League…Cowdrey’s last game…and another Lord’s cup final win.

Kent’s XI for the 1976 final had three changes from that of three years before. Cowdrey had retired (but was to reappear once during Canterbury Week); Luckhurst and Graham had already had their seasons ended by injury, and were both to retire that year (prematurely in Luckhurst’s case). Leading the attack was Kevin Jarvis, like Graham a fine county bowler unlucky not to get a few England caps along the way. When the two played together Graham was promoted to the No 10 position, a promotion that the introduction of no player I have seen other Jarvis could have achieved.  

Cowdrey and Luckhurst were replaced by Charles Rowe and Richard Hills. Here was a straw in the wind, though we didn’t recognise it as such at the time: two players of proven international quality succeeded by two decent county pros. Rowe was embarking on the unenviable sequence of three Lord’s finals in successive years in which he would not score a run, bowl a ball or take a catch.

Only five returned from Worcestershire’s 1973 XI: Turner, D’Oliveira, Gifford, Ormrod and Hemsley. There was plenty of talent among the replacements, most of whom would become well-known county names: Phil Neale, Gordon Willcock, Paul Pridgeon and John Inchmore. The least familiar is all-rounder Cedric Boyns, who had made his way from the Drones Club specially.

And there was Imran Khan, now in the final year of a spasmodic six-season career at New Road. Worcestershire folk chanted his name to the tune of the chorus of You’ll Never Walk Alone (“Imran” for “walk on”) as he opened the bowling, but the volume diminished as the Kent openers Johnson and Woolmer saw off the new ball.

In 1973 Woolmer had been a bowling all-rounder. Three years later, he was an England batsman, his 61 here part of the reason he was promoted to open in the fourth test later that week as the selectors hit upon the notion that it would be a good idea to have openers with a combined age lower than 84, as it had been when Close and Edrich opened in the third test, at Old Trafford.

It was always more fun when a county pro who never experienced international glory turned in the key performance at a Lord’s final. Here, it was Graham Johnson’s day, the high day of a 20-year career (though I’ve written before about the scandal that was Geoff Miller playing 34 tests while Johnson played none). With Woolmer, he put on 110, the first century opening partnership in a Lord’s final. “Watching Johnson and Woolmer…no one would know that English cricket is in the doldrums” reported Woodcock.

Kent didn’t build the big total that might have followed this fine start. There were no boundaries between the 36^th to 52^nd overs. Woodcock described Gifford’s field settings as “as much like rounders as cricket” and suggested that there might be an inner ring containing a specified number of fielders, as has become standard. But there was also some good tight bowling, notably by Gifford himself, but also from Boyns, who had to step up to a full 11-over contribution after D’Oliveira limped off having torn his 44-year-old hamstring. That Kent got as many as 236 was largely thanks again to Asif’s scampering in the last ten overs.

Worcestershire started well enough, with Turner and Ormrod putting on 40 in 12 overs, but Shepherd had the New Zealander caught behind. He dismissed Neale soon after and a tourniquet was applied first by Woolmer, whose first seven overs cost only four runs, then Underwood playing the fifth of his ten finals.

The difficulty that Underwood presented can be judged by the fact that three batsmen in a row were caught by Johnson at deep square leg as they desperately sought to escape the Alcatraz that Underwood built on the line of leg stump.

There is a curiosity around the first of these catches, to dismiss Ormrod. Johnson took the catch inside the rope, but clearly continued across it. For a few years in that era, that constituted a fair catch. That clearly had not been the case in 1968, when Roger Davis caught the fifth of Sobers’ six sixes at Swansea, only to fall over the boundary for the catch to be overruled. The variation to the law that did not last long, or the gymnastic displays that are now a regular feature of boundary fielding would not be necessary.

When D’Oliveira limped in, accompanied by Turner as runner, Worcestershire were 90 for four and well behind the clock, as good as done if all they had to offer was an elderly disabled man and his carer. D’Oliveira proceeded to play what I still regard as the finest one-legged innings I have seen, rivalled perhaps by Chris Gayle’s equally futile effort in the World Cup quarter-final of 2015 (when he was not allowed a runner). With mobility unavailable, he relied on eye and power, one that of an eagle, the other what would get a small town through an afternoon.

“With short-arm jabs, D’Oliveira struck four after four and he straight drove Hills to the pavilion seats for six” reports Wisden. He never quite caught Worcestershire up with the required rate—all those fielders on the boundary saw to that—but he certainly had us worried. Only when he was out for 50 in the 47^th over did we relax, after we had stood to see him on his slow way back to the pavilion. There has never been a cricketer who has attracted such universal goodwill as Basil D’Oliveira.

Kevin Jarvis cleaned up the tail, giving him four wickets on his Lord’s final debut. The 43-run victory margin was a touch flattering to Kent. Graham Johnson won the gold award by Sir Garry Sobers.

Except for certain members of the committee, none of the Kent people at Lord’s that day would have believed that Mike Denness was in the final couple of months of his Kent career. Nobody would have thought that when we returned a year later our world would have been turned upside down by Kerry Packer (or rather the establishment’s blimpish reaction to him). In a way, that happy day was the last of our childhood, the only time in our lives that we had a full hand of illusions, none yet shattered.

The golden summer of ’76.

YouTube highlights of the 1976 final