23 – 29 August: Cricket in the Sun

The cricket ground at Cheriton Road, Folkestone was functional, with a concrete crescent of a terrace forming a stand about ten rows deep that spread out either side of the brick pavilion and around half the ground. Most of the other half  was occupied by the marquees that moved around Kent from cricket week to cricket week, temporary homes for men in suits and (fewer) ladies in hats. Put it in a city and it would be forgettable. Located as it was with a view of the North Downs, rolling down towards Dover where they became the White Cliffs, it was one of my favourite grounds.

Peter Marson’s scene setting of the second day of the match against Surrey in The Times tallies with my recollection of that week as something close to idyllic.

“Here was the perfect summer’s day, sunny with a light breeze to caress furrowed brows. Undulating Kentish Downs, etched against the palest blue skies, completed the picture”.

I got a lift from Canterbury to Folkestone in a Morris Traveller driven by a man called Frank in which a passenger was Harold Warner, something of a historian of Kent cricket. Even in this hot summer he was wearing his traditional waistcoat, jacket and mac, topped by a Homburg. As boys they watched Freeman, Woolley, Ames and Chapman, perhaps even Wilfred Rhodes who played in the nineteenth century. I have seen Brook, Bethall and others who may be active into the 2040s.

We went via the route that the Romans designed, arrow straight down Stone Street, then across the Kentish countryside to Rhodes Minnis and Lyminge and on to Folkestone. That was the way I used forever after and still do whenever I return to Kent.

Asif Iqbal, who always enjoyed Folkestone, got the week under way with a glittering hundred. Many a swordsman have not been as fleet of foot or flashed a blade as proficiently as Asif at Cheriton Road. Three years later, after he launched a similar onslaught against Gloucestershire, causing cover fielder Jim Foat to miss the following day’s Sunday League game with bruised hands.

The other contender for innings of the week was by Viv Richards, who made a rapid, fierce 122. Brian Luckhurst could not compete aesthetically with these two overseas players but scored more runs than anybody else that week with a hundred, a ninety and a sixty. It was good to see him getting past the trauma of the previous winter. Graham Johnson rediscovered the early season form that had him talked about as a possible test-match selection and made a hundred in the win against Somerset.

The decisive bowling that won that game was by Bernard Julien who had gone into the game as a batter only because of injury. In Underwood’s absence he reverted to slow bowling in the final stages of the game and took five for 55 to finish things off. As a slow bowler Julien could bowl in both orthodox and unorthodox mode. When he joined Kent he was, most unfairly, touted as the next Sobers, because of promise and his ability to bowl in different styles. Kent did not make the most of Julien’s ability, batting him low in the order even after a Lord’s test century and not providing the structure that would have enabled him to get the most from his ability. Bob Woolmer, this week batting at No 5 for England, was another who should have been higher up the order much earlier.

Here is Henry Blofeld’s report on the first day of the Somerset match.

 

I missed Julien’s decisive bowling on the final day of Folkestone week as I was at the Oval for the second day of the final test. As was (mercifully briefly) the custom for unresolved Ashes series at that time, a sixth day had been added. As we will see, this did no more than act as a sedative, a disincentive to moving things along.

As John Woodcock described “Yet again it was fiercely hot and beautifully sunny” as I took my seat in the open section of the Vauxhall Stand. I saw 271 runs for the loss of eight Australian wickets, pretty standard for for a day’s test cricket at the time, but possibly the most entertaining of the six days, which gives you a picture of the game as a whole. It began unusually with two centurions resuming. McCosker scored only one more before being caught by Roope in the slips off Old, but Ian Chappell added another fifty, finishing with 192. Doug Walters made a rare English half-century but never looked comfortable. He was stuck on 49 for so long that a wag near me shouted “I have a ticket for Tuesday if anyone wants to see Walters get his fifty”.

As was the case through much of the seventies, the Oval was geologically slow, making scoring runs and getting out equally challenging, the worst of all pitches. It took the genius of Mikey Holding the following year to produce a win in such conditions. In 1975, a draw was assumed to be the denouement from early on. John Arlott was moved to quote Andrew Marvell in his report on the second day:

“Yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity at least it must feel like that to more English batsmen than read him regularly”.

 Spare a thought for Keith Fletcher, whose treatment by the selectors in 1975 would be regarded as cruel and unusual these days. Picked for the first test when he deserved a break after the travails of the Australian tour, he was then dropped despite scoring England’s only fifty. He was then recalled at Headingley, a venue at which he had never fared well after a disastrous debut when he was picked ahead of local hero Phil Sharpe. Then he was dropped again for the Oval, a ground on which he had made 122 in similar conditions the year before. Instead, he was leading Essex against Northamptonshire with Alan Gibson watching:

“They do not seem pleased with Fletcher in Essex at present, or perhaps it is that so many Yorkshiremen take their holidays at Southend”.

Yorkshiremen were more cheerful than at most times in the seventies as they led the Championship, but had only two games to play when all their pursuers had three, so would inevitably be overtaken unless a national deluge intervened.

Performance of the week was Robin Hobbs’ hundred for Essex against the Australians. It took him 40 minutes, the fastest since Percy Fender took 35 minues for Surrey against Nottinghamshire in 1920.

Curiosity of the week occurred at Lord’s where Middlesex suffered two bowlers taking eight wickets in an innings against them for different sides on successive days. What’s more, both were career bests for international players, first John Snow with eight for 87 for Sussex, then David Brown, eight for 60 for Warwickshire. Snow ridiculed reports that Middlesex had been blown away by his pace, claiming that he had mostly bowled off spin (Snow took six of his wickets on the second day, for the sake of accuracy).

Sunday found me among 10,000 spectators at Mote Park, Maidstone, a ground that could accommodate no more than a fifth of that number comfortably. If I was lucky, I got a seat in the pavilion or on the small area of concrete terracing. Otherwise, it was a piece of four-by-two perched improbably on ill-suited logs, if at all. Kent were beaten comfortably by five wickets, ending our chances in the Sunday League in 1975. The trophy was delivered to us by helicopter at the same venue a year later.

It was a wonderful week.

The Cricketer, April 1972

It has been a while since I last blogged. Partly, this is because I have watched no cricket at the ground since the first week of the year. Omicron cut into the schedule here in New Zealand, costing us a test match at the Basin Reserve (both games against South Africa were played in Christchurch) and a couple of T20s versus Australia at the Cake Tin.

Wellington’s home domestic fixtures were concentrated into the first half of the season so as to free the Basin for the Women’s World Cup. I had intended to go to four or five games, and was contemplating flying down to Christchurch for the final, but restricted numbers meant that the tickets set aside for Wellington members were withdrawn. When, towards the end of the tournament, the limits were lifted, I still did not feel sufficiently at ease in a big crowd to attend. I watched a good deal of the competition on television and enjoyed it greatly.

When I have the time, I intend to give another season the treatment that I gave 1967 five years ago: to record it day-to-day on Twitter, with a weekly round-up here. A busy job means that I do not have the time for that yet, but the arrival of a consignment of 1970s editions of The Cricketer from my late parents’ house in Herne Bay has provided the impetus to get blogging again, and to resume reminiscence from half-a-century past.

The intention is to use editions from 1972 as the basis for a piece half a century after the month on the cover. Not a summary or a review, but as a starting point for something probably historical, but possibly contemporary.

We begin with the April edition, which features Geoff Boycott on the cover, playing an on drive like the one that was to bring him his hundredth hundred five years later. Edited by EW Swanton warns the front page, but that is the extent of the Great Pontificator’s contribution to this edition, which appears to have been left in the hands of assistant editor Tony Pawson, who fitted these duties in with writing for The Observer on cricket and football, and a full-time management job in industrial relations, a profession that in the 1970s was as stressful as bomb disposal.

Pawson headed a distinguished list of contributors that included Arlott, Cozier, Frith (soon to become editor), Gibson, Lewis, Martin-Jenkins, Peebles and Rosenwater.

Also, Ray Robinson, who reported on the final match between Australia and the World XI, which had replaced the tour by South Africa, copying the arrangement made when the Springboks’ series against England was cancelled in 1970. The England v Rest of the World matches were classics, regarded as test matches when they were played, and well worthy of that status. Only later were they downgraded, famously at the cost of the entire test career of Glamorgan’s Alan Jones.

The Australians never claimed that their games against the World XI were tests. The touring party (there were games against the states as well as the national team) included a few players who would not have been close to a genuine World XI, such as Richard Hutton, unaware that his brief test career was already over, and Tony Greig, who didn’t know that his hadn’t started (he had played in the 1970 series). Nor had Hylton Akerman’s, and his never would (I interviewed Ackerman for CricInfo on a wet day in New Plymouth, twenty years ago, when he talked about this series). None of Norman Gifford, Bob Cunis or Asif Masood could be described as world-class. Perhaps this explains why history has paid these matches scant attention.

But Robinson’s report made me take a closer look. A batting order that included Gavaskar, Kanhai, Pollock, Zaheer Abbas, Lloyd and Sobers could not be faulted for quality; neither could the spin attack of Bedi and Intikhab Alam. Pace was short, especially until Peter Pollock arrived halfway through the tour, but the cricket world then had fewer fast bowlers of international quality than at any time since. West Indians Hall and Griffith were done, and the next generation had not yet come through. Indian fast bowlers remained a contradiction in terms. John Snow would have made a difference, but perhaps he did not fancy renewing his acquaintance so soon with his friends on the Sydney hill.

In these circumstances it was not surprising that the batsmen flourished, most of all Ian Chappell, who made four centuries in his first full series as Australian captain, including two in the opener at the Gabba. There were also two centuries each for Keith Stackpole, Doug Walters and Greg Chappell. For the World XI, Ackerman made a hundred on international debut, Rohan Kanhai made two, and Graeme Pollock another. And Sobers, 254 not out at the MCG in the third international, the one thing that this series is remembered for, described by Sir Donald Bradman thus:

“I believe Gary Sobers’ innings was probably the best ever seen in Australia. The people who saw Sobers have enjoyed one of the historic events of cricket, they were privileged to have such an experience.”

When Sobers came in, his team had a lead of 45 with seven wickets standing. Wickets continued to fall at the other end. Shortly after Sobers got his century, he was left with the tail. Intikhab Alam, the mildest of cricketers, made his reaction clear when given lbw a bus ride away from the off stump. This was the season after England won the Ashes despite not getting a single favourable leg-before decision in six tests.

Other cricketers have rescued their team with a backs-to-the-wall innings. Few have done so while refusing to make any concession in terms of style or approach. There are nine grainy, black-and-white, joyous minutes of the innings on YouTube. Look at the way Sobers moves: he flows. Lillee bowling to him is ballet and theatre, as aesthetically satisfying bowler/batter combination as the game has produced.  

The World XI won by 96 runs to level the series.

It wasn’t all batting. Australia won the second game, at Perth. Dennis Lillee announced himself as a bowler of the highest quality: eight for 29 to dismiss the World XI for 59 on a WACA pitch on which Australia had made 349. He was never to beat this performance. His test best of seven for 89 came at the Oval in 1981. I was there on the third day to see six of them. That the Perth eight included Gavaskar, Lloyd, Greig and Sobers pokes fun at the lower status of the series.

For the third and fourth games, Lillee’s new-ball partner was Bob Massie, who ran through the World XI in the first innings at Sydney with seven for 76. So Massie’s 16 wickets on test debut at Lord’s a few months later were not quite the one-test wonder that many have always assumed them to be.

The first and fourth games were affected by rain. The first had three declarations with only three or four wickets down, so it is hard to say how it would have gone without the interruptions, but in the fourth the World team needed 450 with five wickets standing when the final day was washed away, so the visitors’ victory in the final game, giving them a two-one win, was not a fair reflection of the series as a whole, as Sobers, with characteristic generosity, acknowledged.

There is more of this enjoyable, neglected, series on YouTube.

It gave the Australian selectors plenty of data to work on when they picked the tour party to England. The April edition of The Cricketer devoted several pages of analysis to the results of their deliberations. Bryon Butler—better known as the BBC’s Football Correspondent—wrote a monthly press review that summarised criticism of the omissions of McKenzie, O’Keefe, Lawry and Redpath, among others.

Ray Robinson profiled five members of the party, including Massie, who he describes as an “up-the-cellar-steps” bowler, which makes me want to read more Ray Robinson. He gives the professions of four of the five, another echo from a different age.

This edition of the magazine was branded as the Spring Annual, one of two occasions in the year when a double-length edition was produced, though, at 80 pages, it was shorter than 2022’s Cricketer.

Let us end with Gerald Pawle’s profile of Cecil Buttle, recently retired as Taunton groundsman after fifty years’ service. When he started the heavy roller was pulled by a horse. Somerset owned only one set of horse boots, so had to hire horses that fitted the boots. Perhaps Rob Key could use this as a way of picking the England pace attack.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forty years on: Cowdrey beats the Australians, Lillee steals my shoe

Kent v the Australians, St Lawrence Ground, 25 – 27 June 1975

Two of best days’ cricket I ever saw came in the same week in the summer of 1975, when the sun shone from blue skies and the world was full of promise.

The first World Cup final took place on midsummer’s day: ten hours of sparkling cricket to launch the game’s Caribbean era. From Lord’s the defeated Australians travelled to Canterbury to open their Ashes tour at St Lawrence, just as they are now, forty years on.

I got to the ground for the last two hours, straight from the examination hall having taken my final two O levels. The morning was occupied with the deployment of smoke and mirrors in a quantity unseen outside a nineteenth-century mill town or the Palace of Versailles respectively, as I attempted to lure the examiners away from the conclusion that my knowledge of the Russian language was not as comprehensive as they might have hoped.

Two hours of the afternoon were spent stumbling mapless in the foothills of calculus for Additional Mathematics. I passed both subjects, but over the four decades since the benefit extracted from this achievement has never equalled that I would have accrued from the splendid day at the cricket foregone.

By the time I arrived the innings of the day was already done: 156 from the left-handed New South Wales opener Alan Turner made quickly enough to be over by tea. It remained his career-best score.

Some elegance from Doug Walters—who would always return to the field after an interval puffing on a cigarette in the tour games—and biffing from Gary Gilmour and the reserve wicketkeeper Richie Robinson rounded off the day.

At the close we wandered down to the lime tree and started a game on the outfield (it was pleasing the other day to see, on the TV coverage of a T20 game, the new tree within the field of play, as its venerable predecessor invariably was).

I removed my school shoes, which joined a small pile of items used to mark the bowler’s end wicket. Those end-of-play games were joyful, never more so than on a day when the cares of exams were done for two years. They ended only when the groundsman reclaimed the outfield and sent us away.

At one point the great DK Lillee emerged from one of the tents on that side of the ground (usually they were there only during Canterbury Week). A swarm of autograph hunters buzzed around him. Our game paused to let them pass.

Only when play closed half-an-hour or so later did I discover that my right shoe was no longer present. Schoolboy japery eliminated as a possibility, I was forced to recognise that the facts pointed only one way: the great fast bowler Dennis Lillee—who knows for what reasons of psychological turpitude—had stolen my shoe. Forty years later, I am as sure of that as I was as I limped my way down the Old Dover Road that night.

Respectably shod, I was there from the start of the second day. Ian Chappell declared overnight at 415 for eight. The Kent line-up was without the England captain (but not for much longer) Denness and Alan Knott. The great CJ Tavaré was also unavailable, playing for Oxford University. Though they cracked along at four an over (not far off the speed of light we thought then) the wickets fell regularly, not to the shoe thief Lillee, who ambled in only for eight overs of barely-trying medium pace, but to Gary Gilmour, who had appeared from nowhere to swing England out of the World Cup the week before, and the leg-spinner Jim Higgs.

Chappell did not enforce the follow on, choosing to take more batting practice instead, just as Michael Clarke has done 40 years later. I do not remember this being dull, but the scorecard suggests it was: 140 for three declared from 58 overs. The Underwood factor was strong—38 runs from 21 overs—but it was the underrated Graham Johnson who took two of the three wickets to fall, including the Australian captain, bowled for a duck.

The declaration early on the third (and final) day set Kent 354 to win in five-and-a-quarter hours. Ian Chappell told the driver of the team bus to be ready to go by mid-afternoon, which seemed a reasonable request.

But surprise is often one of the ingredients of a great day’s cricket. Just as this year nobody expected Williamson and Watling to break a world record, or Southee to bowl England out for 123, or Guptill to score 237 in a World Cup quarter-final, so then nobody believed that a 42-year-old could take Kent to a famous victory over the mighty Australians.

Colin Cowdrey was as naturally gifted a games player as there can be. It is sometimes said now that he would not have made it in the modern game because he was fat. Well, he was fat because he played in an age when he spent the whole summer at first slip (where he was one of the best catchers of his time). Both of his sons, Chris and Graham, were terrific fielders anywhere, and so would Colin have been in a different age. There are stories of him running people half his age ragged at squash simply by standing on the T and dinking the ball around the court until they could chase no more.

There has not been a batsman with more time or better timing. Only his inhibitions stood between Cowdrey and greatness. Whether from the restrained nature of the times, or personal insecurities, or the burden of captaincy, he was rarely as magnificent as he could be. David Gower is a more recent example of a player who on his best days looked as good as a batsman could be, but frustrated us by putting it all together so rarely, though in Gower’s case it could be that a few more inhibitions might have helped.

On that day though—Friday 27 June 1975—Colin Cowdrey put everything else aside and let his talent take charge. He came in at 77 for two, with Bob Woolmer batting well at the other end. 

Woolmer spent too many years low in the order—he’d have gone to another county these days—but was now taking his chance at No 3 and by the end of the summer would be scoring a match-saving century in the final test. That day he reached 50 in just over an hour with eight boundaries, but was then forced to retire hurt when hit on the elbow by Lillee. Alan Ealham was out for a duck, and at 116 for (effectively) four it seemed that the coach driver should not dawdle.

But Cowdrey found effective support in Dave Nicholls, who did a fine job for ten years as fill-in keeper when Knott was away playing for England for half the summer. Nicholls was a punchy left-hander who was sometimes selected on merit as a batsman. He had made a double hundred—quite a rare feat in three-day cricket—as a 19-year-old, but had never lived up to the expectation that had created. Now he supported Cowdrey admirably with 39 in a partnership of 126.

As the stand grew, the shoots of excitement started to break through, watered by Cowdrey’s excellence. It could be done. 350 to beat the Australians. He worked the spinners around the ground, Chappell filling a gap in one place only to see the ball going through the space thus created.

Though Lillee had barely gone through the motions in the first innings, as the afternoon went on he quickly worked up through his gears. He was offended by the possibility that this old codger, sent out to Australia a few months before to take on him and Thommo, could possibly win the game. Lillee steamed in from the Nackington Road End, shirt billowing, that most graceful, fluent of actions producing pace and wile.

Cowdrey was equal to it all, matching the smooth beauty of Lillee’s bowling with his driving, the ball hardly making a sound as bat caressed it to the boundary. He hooked fearlessly and with time to spare, Lillee’s raw speed compensating for the lack of pace in the pitch. Cowdrey’s century, his 106^th and penultimate, came up in under three hours with 17 fours.

The loss of Nicholls was quickly followed by that of John Shepherd, and 107 were needed from the compulsory final 20 overs that began at 5 pm. The young Charles Rowe, whose status as an ironic folk hero for my Blean correspondent and myself probably dates from this occasion, eased our qualms, outscoring Cowdrey with 30 in a partnership of 49 for the sixth wicket. When Rowe fell to Gilmour, 59 were still needed, so it was reassuring to see Woolmer returning to the crease, elbow bound.

Between them Cowdrey, Rowe and Woolmer accelerated in the final phase to the extent that eight an over came from the first ten overs in the final hour, even with plenty of fielders on the boundary, an eye-rubbing rate from two of the game’s supposedly stodgiest batsmen. One shot in particular is fresh in the mind from this phase of the game. Lillee bowls short and the ball rears towards Cowdrey’s head. He swivels and with perfect timing hooks to the square leg boundary leaving long leg no chance whatsoever of covering the ten yards of so needed to cut the ball off.

Soon it was done and Kent had beaten the Australians by four wickets, their first victory on this fixture since 1899 and still their most recent. My, how we stood and cheered.

Several innings have challenged Cowdrey’s that day as the greatest I have seen, most recently Guptill’s extraordinary World Cup double hundred. I would say that none has beaten it, for technique, for occasion, for quality of opposition, for surprise value, for beauty.

How great it was to have two such days within one week in my sixteenth year.

Pedantry Corner

Incidentally, Kent did not beat Australia that day. Kent have never played Australia. However, they first opposed the Australians in 1882. This year’s contest is the 34^th between Kent and the Australians. Outside internationals, touring teams are correctly identified by their nationality, except England who, since they stopped touring under the banner of MCC, should be referred to as “an England XI”.