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.

26 July – 1 August 1975: The Bank Clerk Who Went to War

 

We come now to the curious case of the test-match career of David Steele, as strange a story as English cricket has seen in my time. As the week in 1975 begins, Steele is a 33-year-old batsman in his thirteenth year for  Northamptonshire, the archetypal county cricketer. This is his benefit year. He is having a good season and has already accumulated more than a thousand runs, with steady rather than big scores. Over the years, he had occasionally been mentioned as an outside possibility for England selection, but not this season, except in a piece by Tony Pawson in which he was named in a short list of batsmen whose time had passed, along with MJ Smith, David Turner of Hampshire and Chris Balderstone (who was picked a year later, with much less success). John Arlott wrote that his being a left-hander would be useful, a fair point undermined only by Steele’s being right-handed. Arlott was probably confusing David Steele with his brother, the left-handed Leicestershire opener John Steele. Some thought that the selectors had done the same.

John Woodcock prepared his readers for Steele’s appearance. “A bespectacled figure, almost more white than grey, he is not at all the image of what you would expect of a troubleshooter.” With the upturned peak on his cap there was a touch of Norman Wisdom about him.

It was this Steele that walked down the pavilion steps on the fall of the first wicket at the first day of the test match (having gone via the basement as he was unfamiliar with the route from the home dressing room). He watched three more depart (umpire Bill Alley had a very twitchy finger that morning) before he was joined by Tony Greig on his first day as England’s captain.

Their partnership was worth a usually unremarkable 96, but after months of being pummelled by Lillee and Thomson the sight of this apparent pensioner hooking them to the Grandstand boundary alongside his leader on the counter attack was stirring. Steele had left the pavilion an ordinary man, but returned a hero, a “symbol of national resistance” as John Arlott called him. By Christmas Steele was BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Clive Taylor of the Sun called him "the bank clerk who went to war".

Steele's fall was as precipitous as his rise. There was no winter tour, so the next tests were against the West Indies in 1976. Steele began with his maiden century in the first test and came third in the averages behind Edrich and Close. But he was not included in the touring party for India that winter, and that was that. He continued to play county cricket until 1984 and has made a fair amount of money telling the story of his short but spectacular England career ever since. He appears not much older than he did that day at Lord’s, though that is largely because he looked about 70 then.

Here is Arlott’s account of the first day.

 

At first, the second day was even better. In reply to England’s 315, Australia subsided to 81 for seven. “Not since the war, I think, had Australia suffered such a collapse on a good pitch against England, in England” reported John  Woodcock. “At lunchtime the atmosphere was like that on VE Day. It was too good to last, of course, but it bucked us all up at the time”.

Ross Edwards with 99 (at which point he became Bob Woolmer’s first test wicket) and a Dennis Lillee’s test-best 73 not out reduced the final deficit to 47.

One thing I noticed on the YouTube highlights confirmed my view that Alan Knott was half a century ahead of his time. Then, the standard guards ranged from leg to middle. Taking an off stump guard was almost unheard of. Ask Arthur Jepson for an off stump guard and he would have come at you with a stump in hand. Yet, as Jeff Thomson runs in, there is Knotty tapping his bat well outside off. Genius.

I saw none of this on television. Canterbury week, starting unusually on a Wednesday, coincided with the test match. Peter Marson, there for The Times, paints an evocative picture that takes me straight back there.

 

The organisations named in the first paragraph all had marquees at the Nackington Road End that shimmered through the week. It was gloriously hot, like the summers of our youth ought to be. Deal Beach Parlours had a new ice lolly that summer. I don’t remember the flavour, which probably had a lengthy chemical formula, but it was a wonderfully lurid turquoise. I had so many that week that the man in the ice cream van had one ready each time I approached, the transaction taking place wordlessly. The gaps in my teeth remind me fondly of the summer of ’75.

I also remember the rough reception that greeted Hampshire skipper Richard Gilliatt as he returned to the dressing rooms having declared Hampshire’s second innings closed a couple of hours later than was necessary to make a game of it. The winning team in this fixture would lead the Championship. Perhaps the knowledge of Kent’s successful pursuit against the Australians a few weeks earlier deterred Gilliatt, who eventually called a halt when he was 97 not out.

 

Gilliatt almost had the last laugh. Kent batted testily and quickly lost seven wickets. Cowdrey batted for 100 minutes to save the game.

Ill temper marked this round of matches. The heat was getting to cricketers everywhere. Leicestershire protested against a late Lancashire declaration by having Roger Tolchard bowl an underarm ball at Clive Lloyd. Ray Illingworth then promoted himself to No 3 to block.

Both these games tell us that three-day cricket relied too much on captains being willing to set targets. The restriction of the first innings to 100 overs did not move the game on sufficiently, but encouraged negative, not wicket-taking, bowling.

Hampshire topped the table, with Boycott and Hendrick leading their respective averages.

12 - 18 July: Chaos at the Crabble

 

Mike Denness’s England captaincy came to an end on the damp grass of Edgbaston. His fortunes had changed. At first he was a lucky captain, drawing a series in the Caribbean that he deserved to lose, followed by an easy summer against weaker opposition. He became unlucky as soon as the Ashes began in Brisbane, when, without warning, Lillee emerged from a long period of injury and Thomson from obscurity to form one of cricket’s most deadly pace-bowling combinations. Let us remember that later that year Clive Lloyd’s West Indies did even worse in Australia than Denness’s England, losing five-one. His winter nemeses both took five-fors in Birmingham, Lillee in the first innings, Thomson in the second, in the intervals between another piece of Denness bad luck: the rain.

The selectors were quick and merciful. The announcement that Denness was to be replaced by Tony Greig came on what would have been the fifth day of the test match, had it lasted that long. Many names had been mentioned, but Greig was the only candidate who did not fall over any of the hurdles that eliminated the rest.

The only other regular member of the test XI who was a contender was John Edrich, Denness’s deputy in Australia. The Surrey man had the grit and quality as a batter, but his county had a reputation of being disunited under his leadership. Keith Fletcher was developing a good name as Essex captain, but was thought to suffer from traumatised batter syndrome after the experiences of the winter. Of his shaky half century at Edgbaston John  Woodcock said “Fletcher’s second-innings fifty was a mixture of desperation and defiance. He will have to stay, whether he likes it or not”.

Any return to old favourites such as Illingworth or Cowdrey was agreed to be retrograde. Resorting to a county captain outside the team—Richard Gilliatt of Hampshire was mentioned more often than Mike Brearley—was how Denness had got the job. So it was Greig, despite a brashness that was a bit much for some of the establishment figures. Knott and Underwood, wisely, held no ambitions for the captaincy, though Knott stood in for Greig for an ODI in 1976.

John Arlott gave Guardian readers a shrewd and balanced assessment of what the new leader had to offer.

 

 As it happened, the Australians played Sussex at Hove this week. Greig made a strong statement by scoring a century then  blasting Greg Chappell for not declaring on the final afternoon. Things had changed.

I followed the unfolding disaster at Edgbaston on Saturday on the radio at the Crabble Ground in Dover where I was watching the first day of Championship game between Kent and Nottinghamshire, who made 328 for eight in their 100 overs, with Mike “Pasty” (he was from Cornwall) Harris making 116. He was making plenty of runs despite having taken on the keeper’s role. Harris would have been a candidate for our imaginary MCC winter touring squad that never happened. As I post this I hear that Pasty Harris has passed away (my Blean correspondent keeps me informed about the expiration of cricketers). RIP.

The Crabble was a lovely ground, set into the hillside of the North Downs as they prepared to burst out as the White Cliffs of Dover, but was in its penultimate year as a county venue. When I was back in the UK in 2011 I visited the Crabble, in the company of my Blean correspondent. Here is my account.

Fast forward to September 2023. I was spending a few days in Melbourne and take a day trip to Geelong, a pleasant coastal town an hour south of the city. In a bookshop I came across a title that I had not heard of, Brian Levinson's Cricket Grounds Then and Now. Flicking through it, I saw a piece on the Crabble and was surprised to find my name in it, referring to the piece on Scorecards. What’s more, I was in the index, sandwiched by two of the greats, George Hirst and Jack Hobbs.

 

 I was not present for the final two days of the Championship game, a pity as there was fun to be had on both. Canterbury’s St Lawrence Ground was, I’m pretty sure, the only venue on the county circuit that operated two full scoreboards, the white one where the café is now and the black one that still tops the length of the Leslie Ames Stand. Not all the test grounds provided two full boards.

Provisions at the outgrounds were not as efficient. I have forgotten what the arrangements were at the Crabble, or even where the scoreboard was, but it almost certainly involved lots of individual metal sheets hung on hooks with operators who were not as familiar with the process as those at headquarters. On the second day of the Nottinghamshire game there confusion about the visitors’ first-innings score, which became crucial when Kent were in danger of following on. Happily, Alan Gibson was present to record the chaos.

 

Two years later a similar scoreboard fiasco occurred down the road at Folkestone. With 15 left to get in five overs and six wickets in hand, Kent contrived a collapse that left that epitome of No 11 batters Kevin Jarvis on strike with three balls remaining. To quote the Kent Annual “the scoreboard suggested that two were required and Fletcher set the field accordingly, thus when Jarvis scored the winning run off his first ball confusion reigned as the batsmen left the wicket with the fielders and umpires believing the scores were still level”.

On the third day of the Championship match back in 1975, Kent chased down 330 in 72 overs, a good chase now, then an improbable one. From Gibson in The Times:

 

Nottinghamshire lost despite losing only ten wickets to Kent’s 17, but that was in the nature of three-day cricket.

I was at the Crabble for the Sunday League match that also ended in a successful Kent pursuit, an unbroken sixth-wicket stand of 60 between Dave Nicholls and Alan Ealham.

After the Championship game finished at 6 20pm on Tuesday the two teams got in their cars and drove 210 miles to Nottingham where they began a 60-over Gillette Cup game at 11 am on Wednesday. Tell the young people of today that you could get 120 overs into a day’s cricket and they won’t believe you. Kent did well to recover from 47 for five to reach 216, but still lost by 31 runs.

Alan Ealham was twelfth man for that game and fielded for the injured Norman Graham. I doubt that there has ever been a greater disparity in the quality of fielding between the replaced and the replacing. It makes the difference between Gary Pratt and the England bowlers he subbed on for in 2005 look as nothing. Ealham took two catches described by Peter Marson in The Times as “splendid”, a level of fielding proficiency of which the gangly bowler could only dream.

My future skiing instructor Barry Dudleston was in fine form, completing his third century in a month. Barry was 80 this week; going round a golf course in less than his age may be a realistic prospect some time soon. Happy birthday to him.

 

 

 

24 – 30 May 1975 A Good Week for Mike Denness

 

24 – 30 May 1975

This was the first week of the 1975 season that followed the pattern familiar to followers of county cricket in the seventies: three-day games beginning on Saturday and Wednesday with a 40-over game interposed on Sunday. For spectators it was a brilliant arrangement, particularly in Kent where the season was divided largely into cricket weeks, each at a different venue around the county: Canterbury, Folkestone, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells.

For the players, it looks like madness, more a motoring rally than cricket season, particularly the year in question when it was decreed that counties should play different opponents on Sunday to those they were against on Saturday and Monday. So this week, Yorkshire had to drive down to Edgbaston from Manchester for the Sunday game, returning to resume the Roses match on Monday; Northamptonshire went from Leicester to Bristol and back (this on a bank holiday weekend).

The present-day schedule is much more forgiving, allowing time for travel and preparation (the latter in 1975 probably being a euphemism for extra drinking). The English season has been stretched into the extremities of April and September to accommodate this. Yet still the players complain that there is too much cricket in too short a time. I have less sympathy than for their (much lower-paid) predecessors. Obviously, the workload of fast bowlers must be very carefully managed, like lead pitchers in the MLB, who play once every four or five days. Counties have a duty of care for all their players, and any deserve a break when their physical or mental health demands it.

The larger squads that counties have these days should make that possible without reducing the number of fixtures. I cannot accept that having to play T20 games on successive days once or twice a season is an intolerable burden. Even with a generous margin for wides and no balls, that adds up to no more than 60 balls for a bowler, about what our baseball pitcher would expect to throw in a game.

There were hundreds this week for stalwarts of the county game: Roger Tolchard and Jack Birkenshaw of Leicestershire; Jack Hampshire of Yorkshire; Peter Graves of Sussex, Dudley Owen-Thomas of Surrey, Phil Slocombe and Brian Close for Somerset; Alan Jones (not to be confused with Alan Lewis Jones) of Glamorgan; David Turner of Hampshire; Jim Foat, a folk hero in Gloucestershire (his maiden century); and Bob Woolmer and Graham Johnson of Kent. Johnson had a fine season in 1975 with 1300 runs and 36 wickets. Had England toured that winter he might well have been selected. It remains a minor scandal of that time that Geoff Miller of Derbyshire, a similar player, appeared in 34 tests, while Johnson played in none. His best form never coincided with a vacancy.

Alan Gibson was at Bristol for the Jones hundred.

 

As ever, Gibson reported on what happened around the ground as well as on the field. He came across the injured David Shepherd (later a famed umpire), who, he tells us, “was wearing a sweater of violent purple as though contemplating applying for a job on The Guardian”.

There were also centuries for Barry Richards and Alvin Kallicharran, both more than stalwarts. Richards was reeling them off, and was well ahead of rivals at the top of the batting averages. And one for Mike Denness, who had whose 171 against Derbyshire ended a run of indifferent form.

Bowling performance of the week was by Worcestershire’s Brian Brain, eight for 55 against Essex. “He looked like a young sociology don at Harvard” wrote Gibson. Despite this career-best, 34-year-old Brain was released by Worcestershire at the end of that season, but took a further 316 wickets in six years with Gloucestershire. His diary of the 1980 season Another Day, Another Match was an outstanding example of the genre (if anybody has a copy I would be happy to pay the postage to New Zealand). John Arlott’s brief review in the 1982 Wisden said that it was “an account of pleasure and pressure; a blend of shrewd and thoughtful observation; of humour and anxiety; the story of one man’s job – but a job that is lit by the romanticism which is in every full-time cricketer”.

The same match saw an achievement that surpassed even Brain’s. Essex leg-spinner Robin Hobbs took his thousandth first-class wicket. “No other leg-spinner, I am afraid, will do it again” wrote Gibson, echoing the universal view that leg-spin was on its way out as surely as black-and-white televisions and half-day closing. You want to reach back through the years and say “there’s this five-year-old in Melbourne…”. Of course, as far as English leg-spinners go, it was a point well-made, though in all forms of the game Adil Rashid is well clear of a thousand, including, I was surprised to discover, 512 in first-class cricket. For comparison, there were 18 players listed in the 1975 Playfair with a thousand wickets at the start of the season. Only Jimmy Anderson is past the mark in this year’s edition.

It was a good week for Denness, who was confirmed as England captain for the World Cup. John Arlott’s Monday commentary in The Guardian tells us that the decision was not straightforward.

 

Some of the criteria that got Denness over the line tell us a lot about English cricket at that time: “well turned out…good manners and bearing.” A curiosity is that this was the first time that the selection panel consisted entirely of ex-professional players.

In The Times, John Woodcock had the inside line on the selection meeting. Reporting that Charlie Elliott (a test umpire for many years, including one at Lancaster Park, Christchurch in 1971) and Ken Barrington favoured Greig, while Sir Len Hutton and Alec Bedser backed Denness. Woodcock favoured Greig, despite his established reservations about the Sussex all-rounder and his acknowledgement that others may be relieved that they did not lead MCC in Australia. He is interesting on Boycott, who announced his unavailability for England selection hard upon the confirmation of Denness. The claim from the Fitzwilliam Firebrand that he has found “peace and contentedness” with Yorkshire is hard not to smirk at when hindsight gives us knowledge of the blood letting that characterised Yorkshire cricket over the following decade or so. Here is Woodcock’s Monday commentary in full:

 

As well as being cricket correspondent of The Guardian, Arlott was also its wine writer. This week he offers advice on cooking with wine. He always followed his own advice that “it is better to be generous than cautious”.

Headline of the week, from The Times, is as applicable now as it was then:

Why Kent take so long to bowl out the opposition on good pitches.

Today, the old county languish at the bottom of Division Two and my Blean Correspondent and myself fear that it could be the worst season since the annus horribilis of 1980.

The 1975 season had been scheduled as a one with a full tour by South Africa. The World Cup and four-test series with Australia came about with the continued suspension of cricket with the apartheid state. Those who thought that sport was separate from politics might have asked themselves how that could be conceivable under a government that enforced laws in the manner reported by Stanley Uys in The Guardian. Uys, by the way, was described by a minister of the Vorster Government as "probably the most unscrupulous liar in South Africa and a self-confessed traitor", a badge of honour indeed. 

 

 

 

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.

         

         

The Lord’s finals of 1980

55-over Essex v Northamptonshire

60-over Middlesex v Surrey

I can’t recall a wetter English summer than that of 1980. Rain made a nonsense of the Sunday League game that was part of Maidstone week, and not another ball was bowled until 5 pm on the Thursday. The Saturday of the Centenary Test Match was largely spent with Dickie Bird and David Constant agonising over the constraining effects of wetness, something that Mrs Thatcher spent a lot of 1980 doing in Downing Street.

The rain was the reason why I spent the afternoon of Saturday 19 July not at Lord’s for the scheduled 55-over final, but at the Criterion Theatre on Piccadilly Circus for the matinée of Tomfoolery, a collection of the satirical songs of Tom Lehrer starring Robin Ray of Face the Music fame. Lehrer said that he gave up satire when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, on the basis that life was making a better job of it than art ever could. I think of that whenever the ECB makes another announcement about The Hundred.

For Kent, the change from the sensational seventies to the egregious eighties could not have been more stark. I returned to Canterbury for a 55-over group game against Somerset that resulted in a defeat as shattering as the 60-all-out at Taunton in the previous year’s 60-over quarter-final. As in that game, all seemed relatively well at the halfway stage. Kent made 242, with fifties from Alan Ealham and Chris Cowdrey. But after only a few overs of the reply the inadequacy of the target had become all too clear.

Opening for Somerset were the captain Brian Rose and Sunil Gavaskar, on debut for Somerset as replacement for the touring Viv Richards. Gavaskar had now got past his apparent belief—36 not out in 60 overs on the opening day of the 1975 World Cup—that this one-day stuff was not worthy of an artist of his calibre, and made as easy a 90 as one could hope to see. However, he was the minority partner in the first-wicket stand of 241. At the other end Brian Rose was unbeaten on 137 as Somerset reached their target with more than 11 overs to spare.

Back in Bristol the following weekend, I watched the home team upset the holders Essex. Graham Gooch went off quickly, but after he went for 62 the innings lost momentum, as it was to do in the final. Mike Procter, took two for 26, but it was four wickets from Alan Wilkins that did most to limit Essex to 224. Wilkins became better known as a TV commentator than he was for playing; I had forgotten that he had brought his left-arm seam across to the other side of the Severn Estuary for three seasons. Andy Stovold guided Gloucestershire home with an unbeaten 73, supported by his brother Martin with whom he put on 57 for the fifth wicket.

Essex nevertheless made it to Lord’s once more. Their opponents were Northamptonshire, who had lost the 60-over final to Somerset the previous September.

There were sufficient of we, the indolent and workshy, to come close to filling Lord’s on the Monday. Northamptonshire won the toss and chose to bat. Both XIs were unchanged from those that appeared in Lord’s finals the year before, something else that would be improbable these days (aside from the obvious detail that there are no Lord’s finals now).

It one of those games that is more interesting in retrospect than it seemed at the time, because the team that looked routine winners for 85% of the match ended up losing it. 

John Lever set the tone by conceding just seven runs from his first six overs, but it was seamer Keith Pont who took the first three wickets. At 110 for three just before lunch, Northamptonshire had the capacity to reach a reasonable total, if they increased the tempo urgently. But three quick wickets meant that the rest of the innings would be attritional. That they struggled past 200 was thanks to a seventh-wicket stand of 59 between Allan Lamb and Jim Watt.

Watt had been recalled to the Northamptonshire colours from his second retirement two years before for his second spell as captain. This was in the era before counties acquired coaching staffs the size of royal courts. The choice of captain was crucial, in a way which is no longer the case. From 1969 to 1981 the England selectors went outside the team five times so as to get the right captain: Illingworth, Lewis, Denness, Brearley, Fletcher. These days, some captains have to have serious strength of personality just to avoid being controlled from the dressing room like a PlayStation character. Later in the afternoon Jim Watt was to show the value of good captaincy.

For the second year in a row, Allan Lamb played a Lord’s final innings of striking quality. Wisden called it “a match-winning innings of beautifully executed strokes, refreshing footwork and well-judged running between the wickets” while John Woodcock in The Times described Lamb as a “strong, orthodox and forceful batsman of high class”. It was thanks to Lamb that Northamptonshire reached 209.

Lamb was in the third of four seasons spent qualifying to play for England and was building quite a reputation. Of course, he went on to have a good international career, playing in 79 tests, but he didn’t quite live up to the hype. His average of 36 was decent, but ten or so fewer than might have been expected of him after two commanding Lord’s final innings and three successive seasons averaging 60. Not the anti-climax of Hick or Ramprakash, but neither the new Barry Richards for whom we hoped.

With little more than a hundred needed off 24 overs and nine wickets left, Essex were favourites of the magnitude of Shergar in a donkey derby. What went wrong? Perhaps Essex themselves were taken in by the situation as much as the rest of us and didn’t notice that the match was being taken away from them like a scammer emptying a bank account until it was too late.

In the next 19 overs Essex scored only 50 runs and lost four wickets. As well as bowling tightly and taking Hardie’s wicket, Jim Watts changed his bowlers cannily. As well as bringing Sarfraz Nawaz (three for 23) back early, he introduced Richard Williams’ off spin late and decisively, just as he had in the semi-final at Lord’s a few weeks before. A look through the scorecards of era tells us that, much more often than now, captains used only the minimum five bowlers, and to a formula at that. A skipper like Watts who was prepared to put the template aside and rely on his wits, was a huge asset.

Norbert Phillip took 30 off two overs from Jim Griffiths, leaving 11 needed from the last, but Phillip could not get the strike until the fourth ball of the over. Essex finished six short to give Northamptonshire their second Lord’s win following the Gillette Cup in 1976. It was the closest Lord’s final so far.

The week before I had paid my one, and so far only, visit to Headingley, for the second round of the 60-over competition between Yorkshire and Kent. It had been a sobering year for us in the Garden of England with our team spending the summer in the disreputable areas of the Championship and Sunday League tables and the 60-over competition was our last chance of glory.

There was early hope with Geoffrey Boycott in one of his more funereal moods. After 12 overs Yorkshire were only 29 for one. But he put on 202 for the second wicket with Bill Athey, and that was just about that.

Athey was hailed as the rising star of his generation when he made his debut in 1976, but his career stalled as will happen to careers caught in a civil war like the one that preoccupied Yorkshire CCC in these years. Only now did he receive his county cap, which carried more status and financial significance then than now. Most counties indicated uncapped status discretely; Kent players had a small II under the horse on the sweater and cap. Yorkshire went for ritual humiliation. Uncapped players wore navy-blue banding on their sweaters rather than the sky-blue, yellow and navy combination of the capped players. Athey had waited only four years. Arnie Sidebottom, capped on the same day, had made his debut seven years before. Athey stuck the atmosphere in the Ridings for a couple more years then moved to Bristol, where I enjoyed his stylish, organised batting for nine years.

Boycott made 87, Athey 115 and Yorkshire finished on 279 for six, a mountain for a side whose confidence was as low as Kent’s at this time. The report in The Times (by Keith Macklin, better known as a commentator on football on TV and rugby league on the radio) says that the third-wicket stand of 96 between Asif Iqbal and Woolmer had the match on a “knife-edge”, but my memory is that the required rate climb prohibitively throughout the partnership. The last eight wickets fell for 90, leaving Yorkshire 46-run winners. Sidebottom celebrated his cap with four wickets and that fine bowler Chris Old took three.

So to Lord’s on the first Saturday in September for an all-London final between Middlesex and Surrey, the top two in the Championship in 1980. The absence of bucolic partiality was to the liking of Woodcock of The Times, who described the atmosphere as “pleasantly orderly, smacking more of the saloon bar than the skittle alley”.

Three valedictories took place that day. It was the end of Gillette’s sponsorship of the county knockout competition (though my Blean correspondent and myself refer to any domestic one-day competition as ”the Gillette Cup” to this day).

It was John Langridge’s last weekend on the first-class umpires list (he also officiated at the Sunday League game at Canterbury the next day, where I was also present). Langridge should be in any XI of the best players not selected for England. He made 34,380 runs at 37.45, almost all for Sussex, and contended with Hammond as the best slip fielder of the era. Langridge was 70, but returned occasionally for a few seasons to come. Now, umpires have to retire at 65, an unnecessarily ageist rule, brought in, it was said, to usher umpire Bird from the stage without too many curtain calls.  

It was also the occasion of John Arlott’s last commentary. He had famously ended his final test match commentary the previous Tuesday with “and after Trevor Bailey it will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins”, but returned for an encore this day. Arlott’s departure created a tremendous fuss, including a front-page piece in The Times by his friend Alan Gibson, who wrote that Arlott had “a gift of phrase such as no other cricket commentator has possessed”. During one of his spells that day Arlott authenticated this by describing the tall, bald South African fast bowler Vintcent van der Bijl as being “like a young Lord Longford, only not as benevolent”.

The game resembled the earlier 55-over final closely, but without the late negligence that cost Essex that game. Surrey never really got going against an attack that Woodcock rated as superior to England’s: Daniel, van der Bijl, Selvey, Emburey, supported by Hughes (Edmonds did not play here). They only passed 200 (just) thanks to some late aggression from David Smith and Intikhab Alam.

Woodcock noted that Intikhab’s 12 overs were the first leg spin he had seen all summer. As I write, I am still working my way through the 2006/7 Ashes, Shane Warne’s last, magnificent, bow. Leg spin was not dead. The best was yet to come.

Mike Brearley adopted the same cautious approach that had been so disastrous in the World Cup final the previous year, but on a slow pitch with 90 fewer to chase, it was more appropriate here. Brearley finished unbeaten on 96. Middlesex had been at Canterbury for the previous three days and the scorecard of that game tells me that Brearley had made 104 the previous day. I was there and generally have a good memory for events, something on which these pieces are predicated, but I can’t recall anything of that century. I was going to make a crack about Brearley’s academic style of batting, but here was the game’s highest score on a turning pitch against Underwood, who finished with seven wickets, so this was quite an innings, worthy of memory. I’m pretty sure that, unlike Boycott at Folkestone in 1977, Brearley won’t have loitered behind the lines at the non-striker’s end, partly because he is a man of integrity and partly because Phil Edmonds would have run him out had he tried.

Two hundred runs under pressure in two days shows that Brearley was a better batsman than his England record suggests. It prompts me to issue my periodic reminder that Brearley once scored 300 in a day. It was at Peshawar on the North-West Frontier, captaining MCC Under 25s against North Zone. It wasn’t a club attack either; Intikhab Alam bowled that day too. Brearley reached his hundreds in 155, 125 and 50 minutes respectively. To add to the quizzicality of the occasion, his opening partner was none other than Alan Knott, who scored his maiden century. Knott was the second-highest scorer in the Championship match that preceded the final, sweeping Emburey and Edmonds like Franz Beckenbauer.

Back at Lord’s, Roland Butcher provided the game’s most attractive batting to finish the match off with six overs to spare. His 50 included three sixes and five fours. Butcher became one of a series of cricketers around this time to be selected for the winter tour after a good September final performance. He made his test debut in his birthplace of Barbados a few months later.

It wasn’t all bad in the sodden summer of 1980. I was at the Oval for the final day of the fourth test, when Peter Willey and, less probably, Bob Willis batted long enough to save the game. Also at Lord’s for the fourth and best day of the Centenary Test against Australia. We hoped that 1981 would be a better year, but could not have hoped it would be that much better.