The Cricketer, July and August 1973

 

The covers of The Cricketer at this time were often things of some beauty. Perhaps colour printing on good-quality paper at that time precluded too much overlay of text on image. Maybe it was the good judgement of David Frith, from August acknowledged on the masthead as editor. He knew how to make the most of photographs having put together several compilations of them, sometimes with Patrick Eagar, who was responsible for both these covers. 

What we have here are two character studies, framed and drawing us to the subject without distraction. West Indies’ captain Rohan Kanhai signs an autograph, the silver hair of the old campaigner contrasting with the greenness and heat of the Caribbean setting (Queen’s Park Oval in Trinidad, I think). A few weeks later, Kanhai was to make one of the best hundreds I have seen, at Lord’s in the third test.

John Snow, perhaps a little weary, turns at the end of his run up, which had an aesthetic appeal rivalled in the seventies only by those of Holding and Lillee. Does this photo look as dated as one of Rhodes or Woolley would have done to us then? The unadorned whiteness of the kit might make it so. Perhaps the ersatz patriotism of Jerusalem was not necessary when the crown and lions had the entire sweater to themselves. Rolling your sleeves up was more than a metaphor then too. 

Snow had just published a book of poetry, his second collection. It was  reviewed in the August edition by cricket’s most renowned poet, John Arlott, whose reviews were invariably kindly, as evidenced by his annual survey of cricket books in Wisden. Criticism is sugared.

The argument of these uneven, almost haphazard pieces is that, one day, John Snow is going to surprise many people – but not himself – with some highly perceptive writing.

Arlott puts Snow’s achievement in its historical context.

John Snow is the only Test fast bowler to utter a book of verse. Fred Trueman has been known to repeat some pungent rhymes but, as a composer, has always tended to a certain monotony of adjective.

The Captain’s Column had been inherited from the Playfair Cricket Monthly, and reverted to the original practice of featuring a different county skipper each month. In these two editions, Tony Greig was followed by Ray Illingworth. 

They disagreed about the structure of the Championship season. Greig favoured 16 fixtures (there were 20 in 1973). Illingworth favoured the status quo.

To reduce it to 16 would be taking away the chance of eight possible innings for our batsmen and I feel they get insufficient opportunities of playing natural cricket even today.

Both saw these as three-day games, but agreed that the playing day could be extended by an hour on each of the first two days. In Greig’s words:

 

On a full first day this should produce at least 126 overs. I believe a longer day would bring back more spin bowling.

That would have meant that two days’ of Championship cricket would have seen more balls bowled than three days of tests do now. It is worth noting that in 1973 ten of the 17 counties had at least half their games finish in draws. 

Another of David Frith’s specialities was interviewing old cricketers. In July it was the Leicestershire all-rounder George Geary. The result is a fascinating account of cricket between the world wars, and we learn that players leaving the field to freshen up happened long before Dennis Lillee did it. In the Adelaide test in 1928/29 Geary, prone to cramp, went off for a massage. 

 

Then an Australian official came into the dressing room and said he would not be allowed back on the field after treatment.

‘I didn’t know who he was. I offered to snap him through the bloody window. Later a taller man came in but I wasn’t afraid. Syd Barnes used to do it. He even went off for a bath sometimes when he felt like it!’

In August, JM Kilburn farewelled Bramall Lane in Sheffield as a cricket venue. A test venue once, in 1902, the ground doubled as Sheffield United’s home (which it still is), and a stand was about to be built across the square. Kilburn is nostalgic, presenting its golden age as being the years before and after the First World War, but the winter game’s encroachment and the decline in cricket-watching from the 1950s on means that he does not lament its passing. 

 

When spectators could be numbered in tens of thousands they generated a vitality of atmosphere to obliterate the inconveniences, not to say hardships, of watching. Numbered in tens, spectators made the cricket look forlorn and its setting grimly uninviting.

Kilburn lists his own memories of the ground, as we all might of our favourite places.

In my Bramall Lane a young Herbert Sutcliffe will for ever be racing in front of the pavilion rails to hold a breathtaking catch for ER Wilson; a perspiring and grinning Maurice Tate threatens mock strangulation for a downcast wicketkeeper who has just dropped three catches forced by wonderful new-ball bowling; Cameron of South Africa is bombarding the pavilion roof with mighty straight drives; Trueman and Peter May are locked in titanic combat for an hour; Bowes is confusing Bradman; and  AB Sellars is signalling heartbreak with ‘Match Abandoned’.

John Woodcock reported on the first two tests against New Zealand, the first an England victory by 38 runs, the second a draw with New Zealand in the driving seat. Both had featured 170s from Kiwi skipper Bev Congdon, supported in both cases by centuries from Vic Pollard. At Trent Bridge the visitors looked as if they were going to chase down an improbable target of 479. Had they done so, it would have been a record still. At Lord’s the game finished with England nine down and only 165 ahead. New Zealand’s first win over England would come five years later at the Basin Reserve; five years after that they registered the first as tourists, at Headingley. 

In the July edition, Alan Gibson reviewed The Hand That Bowled Bradman by former Somerset player Bill Andrews, who for many years would greet people with an invitation to “shake the hand that bowled Bradman”, the boast uninhibited by the fact that the Australian was on 202 at the time. 

Andrews had the distinction of having been sacked four times by Somerset, twice as a player and twice as coach. Gibson knew him well.

 

There is no malice or guile in him, though he is at times capable of a certain low cunning, of a kind that would not deceive an infant. Despite his ups and downs he has many more friends than foes. Indeed, anyone who told me that they did not like Bill would go down in my esteem (though anyone who told me he had never been irritated by him would go down too, for quite different reasons).

Gibson reports that at the time of writing, Andrews hoped to be re-employed by Somerset, so that they could sack him for a fifth time.

 

The Cricket Magazines: January 1973

Playfair Cricket Monthly was now only four editions away from oblivion. The January 1973 cover gives us some idea of why this was. It features, in black-and-white, five blokes in suits standing about. True, one was the current England captain, another one of the greatest of all off-spinners (revealed to have a shocking taste in shirts), but this was not a presentation that would leap off the shelves of WH Smith into the hands of the discerning cricket reader.

In contrast, the cover of The Cricketer is in colour, and captures the bowling action of Bishan Bedi, a thing of beauty in itself. In mid-winter, this would have been a promise of sunshine that was irresistible (I think that umpire is David Evans, but I’m not certain).

Spin bowling is something of an undeclared theme in this edition. There is a conversation between Jim Swanton and the Essex leg-spinner Robin Hobbs. It was compulsory in cricket magazines at this time for there to be at least one article presaging the death of leg-spin. You want to take them aside and say “it’s ok, there’s this three-year-old in Melbourne…”

Chris Martin-Jenkins interviews Derek Underwood, who is interesting on the question of the pace of his bowling. Critics were fixated on the need for him to slow it down and toss it up.

“If I tried to learn the art of tossing the ball up temptingly it would take me five years…Those five years would probably see me out of the England side for good.”

Underwood reports that there were two thoughtful dissenters from the consensus on this matter.

“[Ray Illingworth] told me that if I’d got a thousand wickets by the age of 26, there couldn’t be much wrong with my basic style.”

“Knottie [sic] is always on at me to push it through quicker, the complete opposite of my critics.”

There is also a profile of BS Chandrasekhar and reflections of the recent Australian tour of the UK by their off-spinner Ashley Mallett, in which he does not mention the Headingley pitch. Mallett, who was to become one of Australia’s best writers on the game, criticises England’s selectors for undermining the confidence of Keith Fletcher and Dennis Amiss. Of the young bowlers, he rates Chris Old highest.

Irving Rosenwater, BBC TV scorer for many years, gives us something different. The writer Daniel Farson had recently named Montague Druitt as Jack the Ripper. Rosenwater does not tell us why, but Google suggests that this was based on little more than Druitt’s frequent presence in Whitechapel and that the murders stopped after he committed suicide in 1889.

Druitt was a regular for a number of amateur teams of the team, such as Incogniti and Gentlemen of Dorset, as well as his local club Blackheath, whose Rectory Field ground was a regular venue for Kent for many years. Rosenwater traces Druitt’s movements during the cricket season of 1888 using the scorebooks of the time. He finds some correlation between Druitt’s whereabouts and the location of the murders, but he lived in the general area, so that comes as no surprise. There is no undiscovered alibi of a match away from London at the time of a murder.

The Cricketer had Alan Ross as book reviewer and we find him in a grumpy mood. John Arlott had compiled a book on the recent Ashes series based upon his reports in The Guardian. For Ross, the master of the tour book, this is not enough.

Arlott has written too many potboilers for his own good, which is a pity, because particular gifts and in The Ashes 1972 none of them are realised.

As a freelancer almost throughout his writing and broadcasting career, it was precisely for his own good that Arlott kept the books coming. He had a family and a large cellar to support, so literary excellence had to be compromised from time to time.

Arlott’s treatment was like a couple of gentle on drives compared to Ross’s bazballing of RS Whitington’s Captains Outrageous.

I have the illusion Whitington wrote quite decently at one time, but his style now is quite abominable ­– cheap in its effect, falsely pepped up and without dignity or decency.

and

It may seem not worth the space dealing with such an indifferent book, but the fact is that bad cricket books damage good ones, for they devalue the whole genre, and a market flooded with shoddy goods is no use to anyone. Just as bad first-class cricket makes for bad habits in the young, so do crudely contrived and presented books blunt the sensitivities of young readers.

An altogether more enthusiastic review could be found in Playfair, where Neville Cardus devoted his column to JM Kilburn’s Thanks to Cricket.

Kilburn writes admirable English, never overwriting in the recurrently lavish way which occasionally embarrasses me whenever I return to the early works of Cardus.

He and Kilburn had humble origins in common. Kilburn writes “Many of the books on our household shelves were marked with a second-hand price representing lunch foregone or tram-fares patiently saved by walking to work”. Cardus adds “I could easily have written that sentence myself”.

The forthcoming demise of Playfair Cricket Monthly meant that this was one of Cardus’s last published pieces.

There are plenty of reminders of how much has changed between then and now. Dr M Ijaz writes to The Cricketer to note that all the test-playing nations of the time, numbering six, would be playing in the 1972-3 season. He asks if this is a first. Now, it might be unusual to find a month in which any did not play in one form or another.

The Cricketer has summaries of the pre-test matches played by Pakistan in Australia and MCC in India, proper first-class games against strong opposition. Dennis Lillee was taking it seriously; he took six for 30 as Western Australia beat Pakistan by eight wickets.

Playfair lists all first-class and what we now call List A fixtures for the forthcoming season. On a rough count, there are 45 grounds that will not feature in the 2023 list, the great majority in towns that no longer see county cricket. Particularly evocative for me are the Crabble Ground in Dover, Folkestone’s Cheriton Road, Mote Park in Maidstone, and the Recreation Ground, Bath.