6 to 12 September 1975: Another Dull Lord’s Final

For the second time in the 1975 season a Lord’s final was an anti-climax, and for the same reason as the first: Middlesex batted first and did not score sufficient runs to make a game of it. Their 180 for eight in the 60-over Gillette final was an improvement on the 146 they scraped together in the 55-over contest, but John Woodcock may have been underestimating when he wrote that “For the second time this season in a one-day final Middlesex needed another 30 runs to give their bowlers a fair winning chance”.

The whole event was conducted at a stately gait, only pushing past three an over in the final stages. Lancashire followed the unwritten rule that the side chasing a small total should extract whatever joy they could from proceedings by using most of the overs available to them. They went so slowly as to induce anxiety in their vociferous if untuneful supporters, but Clive Lloyd, incapable of playing dully, took the game by the scruff of the neck, just as he had the World Cup final in June. He was a wonderful player.

The think I remember most about watching the match on television was the warm reception given to the Middlesex (and in 21 tests, England) wicketkeeper JT Murray as he walked out to bat at Lord’s for the last time. He provided one of the few highlights for the Londoners by taking what Wisden describes as “a brilliant one-handed catch” to dismiss Frank Hayes.

Nobody realised how that mundane match marked the close of one era and the start of another. For Lancashire, it was a fifth final in six years, only that of the previous year lost. “See you next year” they might justifiably have said to the gatemen as they left. Middlesex fans were still more inclined to rhapsodise about Edrich and Compton than dwell on the present.

Yet it was 15 years until Lancashire next got their hands the 60-over trophy, by which time Middlesex had won it four times. The following season Middlesex won the Championship for the first time since 1949 and were to do so (including the 1977 share with Kent) seven times in 18 years, more than any county in the rest of the century. The veneration of Mike Brearley was about to begin.

The County Championship resumed on Wednesday with, rather oddly, just three matches, two of which involved teams that had to win to stand any chance of cresting the tape ahead of Leicestershire. Lancashire succeeded, Hampshire did not.

In his preview, John Woodcock suggested that the absence of the injured Andy Roberts might be a decisive blow to Hampshire, and he was probably right. John Ward made his maiden century for Derbyshire in his final innings and Alan Hill batted with his trademark obstinacy to hold them up for much of the third day. Roberts would surely have blasted through Alan Ward and Mike Hendrick who ground things out into the last hour until Hampshire gave up on the game and therefore their slim hope of winning the Championship.

It is a measure of the times that when Hampshire chose to shake hands, had they taken the last wicket with the following ball they would have had 86 to win from seven overs with Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge to open. Now, that would be tough but quite possible. Then it was seen as fantasy.

At Old Trafford, Lancashire also faced some dogged resistance, partly from the Gloucestershire batters, but mostly from the rain, which delayed play until mid-afternoon, at which point Lancashire wrapped things up quite swiftly. They were now second in the Championship. If they secured the maximum 18 points against Sussex in the final match, Leicestershire would need the full eight bonus points to top them.

Hampshire had managed to wrap up the Sunday League, also against Derbyshire, at what must be county cricket’s most obscure venue, Darley Dale. As we have discussed, Derbyshire had lost the use of the County Ground in Derby after the opening game of the season, so for the rest of the summer wandered the county as itinerant minstrels in search of a stage. Thus did Darley Dale come to host what remains its only county cricket match, and they got a trophy presentation, fifties by Richards and Greenidge, and John Arlott and Jim Laker thrown in. With a population of 3,500, I cannot think of a smaller place to have hosted a county game. One of two here in New Zealand in the past might have matched it, for example Waikanae, north of Wellington, which has been an occasional venue for Central Districts over the years. Hampshire won easily enough by 70 runs.

Derek the Conqueror: 28 July to 4 August 1967

No outsider had wrought such havoc in Hastings since 1066. And William of Normandy only passed through; Derek Underwood returned year after year to pillage afresh. His 1967 bounty was about average: seven for 38 and seven for 44. Neither was a career-best: that had been achieved at Hastings three years before, nine for 28. In 1973 he took eight for nine. In just nine first-class appearances at Hastings, Underwood collected 61 victims. But that’s not all. Seventeen years after this appearance, Underwood’s one and only century was made here, in his 618th first-class innings. The previous day he had taken six for 12 in the Sunday League. My appreciation of Derek Underwood on his seventieth birthday is here.

Underwood’s mesmerisation of Sussex had resulted in Kent’s second win by an innings and a hundred-plus is a week. The county went into August as Championship leaders, a position that they had not been in at that time of the year since at least the Second World War, and quite possibly the First. Leicestershire were four points behind, but had played two more games. Yorkshire had a game in hand and were 12 points behind, exactly the number available for a win plus first-innings points. 

 

What’s more, Leicestershire and Yorkshire were the visitors for Canterbury week, which would decide the 1967 Championship. More of that next week, including a conspiracy theory that some Kent supporters propound to this day.

The first test against Pakistan was drawn, the visitors refusing any attempt at chasing a target of 256 at 79 an hour, which John Woodcock described as “eminently attainable”, but seems tough by the standards of the time. Even now, 256 in under two sessions on the fifth day would be challenging. Woodcock had been patient in the face of some laboured batting, describing Hanif Mohammad’s  187 not out as a “masterly exhibition of defensive batting” that was “never dull”, but he was testy by the final afternoon, writing that Khalid Ibadulla’s batting “makes postal chess seem a lively game”. 

In passing he notes that John Murray had an indifferent game behind the stumps, bad timing with every cricket writer in the country lauding Alan Knott. Though they didn’t know it, Murray and his Middlesex colleague Eric Russell were playing their last test matches.

After the test John Woodcock went to Hove to report on Sussex v Worcestershire and Basil D’Oliveira’s sixth century of the season. He noted that John Snow “summoned no great speed for the occasion”. Snow was a pioneer of resting fast bowlers between tests, with the difference that he took a break while still in the selected Sussex XI (it was an approach Bob Willis was to adopt, and I don’t criticise either man for it). Snow was a fine fast bowler with as aesthetically pleasing an action as any, apart perhaps from Dennis Lillee. Yet my abiding memory is of his loitering on the boundary, arms folded, not moving in with bowler, bored by a meaningless late season match and not caring to hide it.

It was announced that Leslie Ames, secretary-manager of Kent (a role that occupies a medium-sized team of people these days) was to manage MCC (and therefore the England test team) on its forthcoming tour of the Caribbean. Ames had filled this role on the under-25 tour of Pakistan the previous winter. More than anyone else, Ames was responsible for Kent’s rise to the top of English cricket. As respected a figure as any in the game, the maker of a century of centuries, he was able to neutralise the meddling of the amateurs in the cricket-week marquees. More here. But, speaking as we were of conspiracy theories, read John Woodcock’s piece on Ames’s appointment. 

It seems strange that an England captain with a record of four wins from five matches would not be named as scheduled, and that two men not at that time in England team would be offered as alternatives. Watch this space.

In the rest of the paper the big story of the week was the report of the Aberfan disaster of the previous year. A slag heap collapsed killing 140 people, mostly primary school pupils. It was the first national event that I recall feeling affected by, the victims mostly sitting in classrooms presumably much like our own on the north Kent coast as they perished.

The report allocated the blame two-thirds to the National Coal Board (NCB), one-third to Merthyr Tydfil Council. Lord Robens, Chairman of the NCB, had chosen to be installed as Chancellor of the University of Surrey rather than travel to Aberfan, eventually turning up 36 hours after the event. He did not resign (he offered knowing that the Minister of Power, Richard Marsh, would refuse to accept), nor did anyone else. £150,000 was taken from the victims’ relief fund to pay for the removal of remaining tips. 

Of course, disasters caused by incompetence or negligence still occur, such as the Grenfell Tower tragedy. But it is inconceivable now that there would be such a lack of accountability. The music may have been better in ’67, but this exercise provides plenty of evidence that not much else was.

I tweeted other stories this week that show that the world was different then. There was debate on the letters page of The Times as to whether pipe-smoking drivers should drive with the windows open or closed.

Finally, Mr William Freeman, 62, of Neasden, pleaded not guilty to driving his bus without consideration, a law that might fill the courts with bus drivers if strictly applied, then or now. 

Tunbridge Wells Week: 17 to 23 June 1967

“…the Nevill Ground is looking at its midsummer best for cricket week. Kent is unusually rich in grounds…and many people vote the Nevill the pleasantest of the lot”.

That could have been written now, at the end of the nineteenth century or at any point in between. Certainly, it was my sentiment when I was there last July. Here, it was AP Ryan, reporting for The Times in 1967 on the perennial Tunbridge Wells fixture between Kent and Sussex, the county border separating the two being nearby, if not cutting through the ground as the story goes.

In 2017  there were problems with the preparation of the pitch, with talk of moving the game to Canterbury at the last minute. Standards are higher now than fifty years ago when 253 was the highest of the eight innings, and Brian Luckhurst’s 126 was the only individual score higher than 64. In comparison, 2017’s “questionable” pitch saw two 350-plus totals and a 298 for two declared. That doesn’t mean that the cricket is necessarily better, and a different balance between bat and ball was essential for three-day cricket to work.

Hero of the week was Norman Graham, whose 22 wickets took him back to top of the national bowling averages. UA Titley, taking up The Times’ pen for the second half of the week, said that Graham brought the ball down from a greater height than anybody since Farnes, the Essex quick bowler of the 1930s (Titley may not yet have seen Tony Greig). “He only takes seven real paces in his run-up, an economic approach, in direct contrast with others of about similar pace, which enables him to bowl for longer periods than most.”

Unusually, Derek Underwood did not bowl against Sussex, but had match figures of seven for 48 as Worcestershire were shot out for 106 and 73.

Kent’s two wins raised them to fourth place in the Championship, six points behind the new leaders Yorkshire, who beat Northamptonshire by an innings  thanks to a point-making unbeaten 220 from Geoffrey Boycott. In less than a fortnight the great accumulator had made two of only five double centuries made in 1967. In 2016 (when the Championship consisted of 16 games per team rather than 28 as there were in ’67) there were 26 double hundreds; four-day cricket and “better” (ie batsman-friendly) pitches the explanation. 

The second test at Lord’s was a Boycott-free zone, with Amiss coming in for him and Barrington moving up to open. India reverted to their first-innings form at Headingley and were skittled out for 152. John Snow and Warwickshire’s David Brown took three each. The pitch at Lord’s was fast enough for John Woodcock to be thankful that a really quck bowler like Charlie Griffith or Graham McKenzie was playing, though I think it would have been quite fun. Besides, I doubt that McKenzie was any quicker than Snow, than whom I have not seen a smoother or more rhythmical bowler play for England.

According to Woodcock, John Murray was standing further from the stumps than any English keeper since Evans and Andrew to Frank Tyson at his typhonic fastest in Australia in ‘54/5. Murray took a world-record equalling six catches, but there was a hurricane brewing to the south-east by the name of Knott that was to blow him out of international cricket within weeks.

I tweeted three general news stories this week. Paul Fox was appointed Controller of BBC 1. Fox was a—arguably the—founding father of televised sport in Britain and also edited Panorama. His six-year tenure of the role has a credible claim to be the golden age of British TV, as colour replaced black-and-white and programmes such as Parkinson, Dad’s Army, The Two Ronnies appeared, with Fox the midwife (there were a fair few stinkers too). But what caught my eye was his salary: £5,000 a year. The Bank of England’s inflation calculator tells me that is worth £83,000 today, healthy enough but not exceptional. The nearest equivalent role today—Director of Content—is paid £325,000. 

One of the most pleasurable things about rummaging through the pages of The Times for 1967 is the parliamentary reports, detailed accounts of the day’s debates. Such coverage has all but disappeared now, the press gallery apparently occupied only by the writers of spasmodically amusing sketches. This week the House was debating decimalisation, on the principle of which both main parties agreed, while still arguing about the detail. Iain Macleod, shadow Chancellor, wanted a ten-shilling base for the new currency, while Chancellor Jim Callaghan supported the pound (as he frequently had to in more substantive ways in years to come). 

If the decimalisation debate is a curiosity, that on Leo Abse’s private member’s bill to decriminalise homosexual activity between consenting adults is horrifying. The antediluvian attitudes that rumbled out from Tory knights of the shire on the backbenches were shameful.

One may feel nostalgic for three-day cricket on uncovered pitches, but, once more, a close look at 1967 shows that the present is a better place to be.

The 1966 West Indians

Cohen, 1966.

Play word association with that, and most will say: George Cohen, doughty Fulham full back, and one of the most famous set of names of English sporting history. A hero of Wembley, 30 July 1966.

Very few will respond as My Life in Cricket Scorecards does: Rudolph Cohen, fast bowler, member of the 1966 West Indian touring team to England. Did not play a test.

The World Cup triumph has been widely and rightly remembered over the past few months, fifty years on. But by the time England kicked off against Uruguay in the tournament’s opening game, My Life in Cricket Scorecards was taking the 1966 Kent CCC Annual to school as his reading book. To him, “Hunt” was not Roger of Liverpool, but Conrad of Barbados, spelt with an “e”.

For cricket people, 1966 was a shaft of Caribbean sunlight in a dull decade. The previous season was described by Wisden as “mainly disappointing”. As for 1964, the recitation of Tom Cartwright’s figures in the Old Trafford Ashes test tell you all you need to know: 77-32-118-2. As a first step in cricket it would have been like giving a child War and Peace as their first reader.

There are some ultimate truths that can be understood as well by a seven-year-old as by anybody. Though, I was far too young to articulate it, at some level I appreciated that the West Indians were playing cricket as a form of self-expression, which is usually when the game is at its best. My attention was grabbed with the first ball of the series, square cut for four by Conrad Hunte. Here was a team that played without reticence or constraint. Hunte finished with 135, though he was dropped on seven by Ken Higgs at long leg. Norman Preston in Wisden provided the fielder with an excuse that would be without credibility almost anywhere but Manchester in summer, namely that he had sighted the ball “very late against the distant background of dark-coated spectators”.    

That day I was freed of an emotional dependence on England winning; I must have realised that it was probable that my cricket watching would be less traumatic if this was not so, a view that continued to enrich my spectating experience through the years.

Garfield Sobers made 161 in that innings at Old Trafford, the smallest of the three centuries he made in the series, which he finished with an average of 101. Then there were 20 wickets, second only to the great off-spinner Lance Gibbs, who took only one more. Against Kent at Canterbury Sobers took his career-best bowling of nine for 49. It is likely that I saw the first two of these wickets taken at the end of the second day; I was there after school for the last part of the day and have Sobers’ autograph in my 1966 Kent CCC junior membership card (cost: one guinea) to prove it, but have no specific recollection of his bowling that afternoon.

I wasn’t particularly lucky watching Sobers. The best I saw him play was at Lord’s in the first day of the final test of 1973 when he came in late in the day and made the 31 not out, carrying on the next day to 150 without any sleep in the intervening period, or so legend has it. But I did see him play, and he was the greatest player of my lifetime, so that’s something.

In 1966 Sobers also scored a Lord’s hundred, saving a match that appeared lost with an unbroken partnership of 274 with his cousin, David Holford.

The strength of the West Indian middle order was the basis of resounding victories in the following two tests to seal the series. England took a 90-run lead in the third at Trent Bridge, but in the second innings a double century from Basil Butcher, supported by fifties from Rohan Kanhai and Seymour Nurse and 94 from Sobers, took the game well beyond the home team.

There was then a month’s break in the tests so that the cricket would not distract people from the World Cup. A different time. Of course, the tour went on. Eight matches were played in the interim, including that game at Canterbury. There were 28 first-class fixtures on the tour itinerary. This would be untenable today, but it did mean that the whole party had the opportunity to become at ease in the conditions. New Zealand’s recent trouncing in India has again illustrated how a side can flounder without that opportunity. Making it compulsory for touring sides to play three first-class games before the tests would do more to make test matches more competitive, and therefore attractive to spectators, than any number of marketing gimmicks.

Here is a Movietone News report on the fourth test, at Headingley. West Indies racked up 500 in the first innings with big hundreds from Nurse and Sobers against an England attack that included the debutant Derek Underwood. The scorecard suggests a mental running of the white flag up the flagpole, with the two innings totalling 55 short of the West Indies’ one. Nurse is rarely mentioned as a significant figure of the great West Indian era, but he averaged 48 with six centuries in 29 tests, so he should be. Here in New Zealand people remember his 826 runs in the three-test series in 1969, when he had already announced his retirement.

It would be wrong though to give the impression that the attraction of that series rested only with the West Indies. For a start there was Colin Milburn, whose presence in the attritional England side of the mid-sixties was as incongruous as Falstaff would have been in Cymbeline. He batted in colour in a black-and-white world. Ninety-four at Old Trafford was followed by a blistering hundred at Lord’s.

Milburn is the subject of a new play written by Douglas Blaxland, the nom de plume of the former Kent all-rounder James Graham-Brown (there have been a few Kent players who might have been well-advised to live out their lives under a false name, but Graham-Brown isn’t one of them). The PCA has imaginatively arranged for the play to tour the county grounds. Expect the ECB to announce that a lavish musical will play the test grounds only on the same dates.

Milburn inspired a love of cricket in those who saw him, notably Matthew Engel. Backwatersman too. And me, though I don’t think that I ever saw him play live.

Tom Graveney was recalled for the second test. He was as old as my Dad, which for a seven-year-old meant that he was as old as Methuselah, but 96 at Lord’s was followed by a century at Trent Bridge, and he smiled as he played.

There was Basil D’Oliveira too. Children have a robust understanding of what is fair and unfair, so I understood with absolute clarity that it was outrageous that D’Oliveira was not allowed to play for South Africa because his skin was too dark. This, along with the brilliance of the West Indians gave me lifelong immunity from the prevailing nonsense of the Alf Garnett-Enoch Powell era.

Then there was Alan Gibson’s Old Bald Blighter, Brian Close, drafted in to lead the side in the final test at the Oval replacing Colin Cowdrey. He brought with him hard-headed professionalism in the form of Edrich, Illingworth and JT Murray. But halfway through the second day, with England 166 for seven in reply to 268, it appeared that Close had made no difference whatsoever.

One of the great rearguard actions then began, led by Graveney and Middlesex keeper JT Murray, who took my eye at first because he wore his cap at the same angle as Norman Wisdom. They put on 217 for the eighth wicket, even now the seventh-best in test history.

On the Saturday I had my first experience of the joyful anarchy of a decent last-wicket partnership, this one between John Snow and Ken Higgs worth 128. I have clear memory of accompanying my father on his grocery delivery round on a sweltering day while following the partnership on my transistor radio, re-tuned for once from Radio Caroline, which broadcast from a ship just over the horizon in the Thames Estuary. The commentators were Robert Hudson, Roy Lawrence and John Arlott. A first chance to listen to Arlott was not least among the influential experiences of 1966.

West Indies were happy enough to let England have the consolation victory, so the series wrapped up on the fourth day.

The thought that, were it not for the talented exuberance of Garfield Sobers and his team, this blog might be called My Life in Football Programmes brings a shudder to the soul.

Finally, a pop quiz, based on a Pathé newsreel coverage of the opening match of the tour, Duke of Norfolk’s XI v West Indians.

1. Who is the Norfolk XI’s keeper?
2. Who is non-striker when Sobers is bowling?
3. What position links him and Sobers?
4. Who is the bespectacled umpire?
5. What was his link with the England team of 1966?

By the way, the West Indian opener Michael Carew was more often known as “Joey”.