10 - 16 May 1975 The Good and Bad of Geoffrey Boycott

 

Geoffrey Boycott was the focus of much attention this week, as he was so often in these years. Against Worcestershire, he made an unbeaten 152 and thus became only the third Yorkshireman (after Sutcliffe and Hutton) to register a century against the other 16 counties also his fiftieth in the cause of the white rose. Wisden said “Few of these previous efforts can have been technically better”. Nobody else passed fifty, except a bludgeoning Chris Old when the game was dead on the third afternoon.

The excellence of Boycott the batter was universally acknowledged, even by those who thought that he might speed up in his interest of his team from time to time. The following day the praise turned to blame, as it so often did. Boycott refused to respond to Norman Gifford’s declaration 101 in arrears by setting a meaningful target, an approach that John Woodcock did not care for:

 

These were more cautious times; later in the season I was at Canterbury when Richard Gilliatt of Hampshire was booed off the field for failing to set a target in similar circumstances.

Boycott had not yet answered the question of the day: would he play for England this season? As Woodcock records, he had been absent more than present for several years.

 

The great man’s reluctance to don the England cap has sometimes been put down to a reluctance to face the fast bowlers of the time. This is unfair. He had dropped out after the first test against India the previous year when there were runs to be harvested despite his habit of falling to the pedestrian left-arm seam of Erinath Solkar. When he pulled out of the tour to Australia in the winter Lillee was widely considered to be finished because of his back and Thomson was never mentioned. It was because Denness (and before him Tony Lewis in 1972/73) had been preferred to him as captain. Had he grimaced and borne it, Boycott, rather than Greig, would probably have succeeded the Kent man in 1975. Woodcock had a bit of a blind spot re Greig, even pre-Packer, but his appraisal of the Sussex captain’s chances of leading the national team: “His appointment would have to be conditional upon his renouncing altogether the law of the jungle” would have been widely shared in the St John’s Wood area.

The only opener who might claim more renown than Boycott was Barry Richards, probably the best in the world in 1975. His unbeaten 96 took Hampshire to victory and the top of the Championship table. Alan Gibson was at St Helen’s to rhapsodise.

 

I was at Canterbury on Saturday to see Kent lose to Sussex in the 55-over competition, a vengeful John Snow (11-4-11-3) keen to demonstrate to Denness the foolishness of his omission from the winter’s tour. I recall a spectator who was right behind the arm describing on the bus home the late swing of the ball that trapped our beleaguered leader lbw for one. Snow was at the crease to guide Sussex home in the 55^th and final over. Two hundred and fifty-two runs in 106 overs would have the marketing people these days phoning the Samaritans, but the low scoring games are often the most fascinating. “Kent’s golden touch has deserted them” wrote former Kent player Tony Pawson in The Observer. This was to be the case for most of this season, the worst of the seventies for Kent.

Sunday saw fewer overs but more runs, including a record aggregate for the Sunday League with Somerset’s 270 topping visitors Gloucestershire’s 255 at Bristol. Here, it was the other great Richards, (IVA), who set it up with 126 not out (six sixes and 13 fours). Sadiq Mohammad made 131 in reply, but with insufficient support.

Who said “there’s a mistake there, Gloucestershire would be at home in Bristol”? Not so. This was at the Imperial Ground in Knowle, south of the River Avon that marked the historic boundary of Somerset. I watched a Sunday League game there four years later.

That Sunday I was at Folkestone, or at least assume that I was, though I recall nothing of the game, even after reading the report in The Times by Gerald Sinstadt, better known as Granada TV’s football commentator. He highlights two things: the cold, but there have been so many cold days at the cricket that they stick to each other like buns too long in the freezer, one no more memorable than another. Also the running between the wickets of Mike Denness and Brian Luckhurst. When I see murmurations of  starlings performing their swooping impeccably synchronised displays, I think of Denness and Luckhurst stealing singles with wordless understanding.

 

Off-the-field cricket news concerned the standoff between the BBC and the TCCB (forerunners of the ECB) over the TV rights for the four test matches against Australia. The BBC had increased its offer to a “final” £116,000 (the equivalent of about £890,000 now according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator). The ECB’s current arrangement with Sky TV for all cricket is said to be worth £220 million a year. Of course the BBC had an effective monopoly. ITV, now with a daytime schedule, would not contemplate a rival bid.

The Godfather Part II was released that week. “Few movie sequels are as good as the films they follow and even fewer have about them an air of necessity. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is a rare exception” was the verdict of Philip French in The Guardian.

Most chilling headline of the week: “Inflation in Britain running at over 30%”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cricketer, September and October 1973

September’s edition includes accounts of two games at which I was present. The first was the 55-over final between Kent and Worcestershire. 

I have written about this game before, and recommend the YouTube highlights, in which the players glisten  like ghosts in their pristine white. 

I enjoyed watching Leicestershire’s win in the recent 50-over final. Harry Swindells’ century was as good a backs-to-the-wall innings as there has been in a one-day final for fifty years (see below), and the result was too close to call until the final ball. It is good that three provincial counties have won the competition since the final was moved to Trent Bridge, but that is partly because the Undead (as my Blean Correspondent perceptively calls it) has shorn it of its names. Fifty years ago, half of the participants were contemporary internationals, and four—Cowdrey, D’Oliveira, Knott and Underwood—were gods.

By the time of the second game to be featured in The Cricketer, the 60-over quarter-final at Hove, Kent had the Sunday League all but sown up, so we went to Hove expecting something in the nature of a formality, foolishly bandying about the word “treble”. I cannot agree with Gordon Ross’s assessment in his one-day round up that this was a “wonderfully happy day”. In fact, it was one of the more miserable that I have spent at a cricket ground. 

These were the days before the Ms 23 and 25, so our East Kent coach took a circuitous route across the North Downs and the Weald before becoming caught up in the transportation spider’s web that was the town of Lewes in those days. Lewes is now renowned for its excessive commemoration of Guy Fawkes, but that one visit to the town made me understand that time spent there would cultivate a proclivity to arson. Busses were to be trouble all day, as it turned out. 

We arrived shortly before the first ball was bowled, the only space available being an uncomfortably small area of grass with a limited view in the fifth or sixth row on the boundary at the sea end of the ground, on a sweltering day. It was from here that I watched Richard Elms open the bowling for Kent. 

Elms was a left-arm bowler of sharpish pace, and was a reasonable batter, but never attained a regular place in the team, largely because his control was not reliable. He was included here because Norman Graham was ill and Bernard Julien was on tour with the West Indians. It was the biggest game of his career, but he would not recall it fondly. Elms bowled four wides in the first over of the game, at a time when one-day wides were ruled much more leniently than they are now. 

The make-up of the Kent team was odd, and is inclined to generate retrospective sympathy for Elms. Now captains expect to have six or seven bowling options, and to use them (New Zealand in the current World Cup are an exception, and that worries me). But, as was the norm then, Kent used only five bowlers. Graham Johnson delivered more than 400 overs of off spin in the Championship in 1973, but Denness preferred to flog Elms even though it was obvious that his confidence was going out with the tide on Hove seafront. 

Ross’s report highlights John Snow’s pace, but the damage had already been done by the Sussex batters, with Roger Prideaux’s 79 leading the way. Prideaux was one of those players who could look terrific on his day, of which this was one. With a little luck he might have had a test career that stretched beyond three games. Instead, he is mostly remembered as the man who dropped out of the Oval test of 1968 to be replaced by Basil D’Oliveira, thus initiating the series of events that led to the cancellation of MCC’s tour of South Africa.

Sussex’s 263 for six was more than any side had successfully chased in the Gillette Cup, which was in its eleventh season. After Tony Buss had Luckhurst caught at slip, Snow, with an irresistible combination of pace and movement, accounted for Denness and Asif Iqbal, and at 14 for three that was about it. The great fast bowler finished with figures of 7-5-8-2. I wouldn’t swear to it, but the runs may have been two edged fours, so impossible did it appear to score off him. The trundling Buss brothers took five between them, three for Tony and two for Mike.

Sussex got to Lord’s, and as Gordon Ross reports in the October edition, again removed the top three quickly. But Gloucestershire were Proctershire.

[Mike Procter’s] technique is such that he needs precious little time to find his bearings and he launched himself immediately, seizing on two short balls from Michael Buss…and thumping them good and proper for six.

He followed his 94 with two for 27 in 11 overs as Sussex fell 40 short. This was after 101 and three for 31 in the semi-final against Worcestershire. It was like having a tornado on the team.

As I write this, the collar of my sports shirt is turned up, as has been my habit these fifty-plus years, in perpetual salute to Garry Sobers, who is pictured thus attired on the cover of the September edition. Sobers played for West Indies in the three-test series on which John Woodcock reports in these editions, though he had passed the captaincy on to Rohan Kanhai. 

I was present for the first day of the final test. Lord’s had a quality of light all its own on sunny days late in the season, particularly when watching from the grandstand side of the ground as we were that day. The lower sun combined with a bit of extra moisture to give the spectacle the air of a dream sequence, appropriately enough for West Indies, who were 335 for four by the end of the day, “as large a score from the opening day of a Test match in England as there can have been for some long time” according to John Woodcock.

That is from his report in The Times. Strangely, The Cricketer gave him only six paragraphs to sum up this excellent game, half the space allocated to each of the two ODIs that followed the tests, not enough to mention Rohan Kanhai’s 157, one of the finest test innings that I have seen in person. 

By this time, Kanhai had the statesman’s grey hair but still batted like matinee idol. There was plenty of stylish, aggressive support from his Guyanese colleagues Roy Fredericks (51) and Clive Lloyd (63), and at the end of the day from Sobers, who was 31 not out at the close. The great man went on to150 next day, notoriously having caroused through the night in the interim.

One of the things I like about John Woodcock’s writing is that you can always tell when he has really enjoyed himself. He is one of us, somebody who loves being entertained by the best players, regardless of who they play for. In the above extract he conveys something of the joyous atmosphere of a West Indian test match in London. The negligence shown by the cricket authorities in squandering this reservoir of knowledge and enthusiasm is one of the worst things that has happened to English cricket in the last half century. 

It was a match of many landmarks, such as Bob Willis’s debut home test. Woodcock describes the first over of the game as “the fastest over I have seen this season”. This validates the enduring image that I have in my mind of that morning: Willis storming in from the Nursery End through the morning shimmer. 

It was the game of the Saturday bomb scare with most of the crowd on the field and HD Bird initiating his own legend by perching on the covers on Grandstand. Later that afternoon Geoffrey Boycott was caught on the boundary hooking off the last ball of the day, something that many of us remember whenever he fulminates about the recklessness of modern batting. 

This was the last test match to be covered by EM Wellings of the Evening News, and Chris Martin-Jenkins’ first as a Test Match Special commentator.

It was also Ray Illingworth’s last test as England captain. EW Swanton sums up the selectors’ reasoning:

But when some decline in his own form, both as a batsman and bowler, coincided with the second of two shattering Test defeats it was clear that a new leader must be tried.

He reminds us that Illingworth’s selection to replace the injured Colin Cowdrey in 1969 had been a “surprise appointment”. He could have added “inspired”, given that Illingworth was to lead the Ashes-winning side in 1970/71 and hold them at home the following year.

Mike Denness was appointed as his replacement, the announcement tactlessly made while Leicestershire were playing Kent at Folkestone, causing, according to Barry Dudleston of the visitors, Illingworth to exit the dressing room via a window and drainpipe to avoid the waiting press. Appointing a captain from outside the team was not unusual; both Tony Lewis and Illingworth himself had recentlybeen given the job in these circumstances. But the selectors ignored two current county captains—Boycott and Greig—to do so. It was a decision that would lead to Boycott’s boycott. 

It also rekindled one of cricket writing’s great feuds. EW Swanton, in his Off the Cuff column, writes of a generally positive press reaction to Denness’s appointment:

…apart from some odious, sneering comment from a predictable quarter. I imagined that most people would at once identify Michael Parkinson, that caricature of a Yorkshireman who is guaranteed to glorify anything and anyone who comes from his own small corner of the world and to denigrate almost all else. 

He goes on to say that he does not regard Parkinson as a “bona fide cricket writer” before a big finish:

As I say, this sort of piffle no longer attracts intelligent readership. But how the great Yorkshiremen, from Hirst and Verity to Leyland and Rhodes must be turning in their graves at this travesty of the true Yorkshire spirit as it has served the county and England so well and for so long.

Parkinson replied in similar vein in his Sunday Times column.

Robin Marlar contributes an interesting profile of Derek Underwood. Marlar sees Underwood as a seam bowler playing a spinner’s role, and attributes  this down to his father laying a concrete pitch in the garden for the young Underwood to develop his skills upon. Good for seam, not for spin, apparently.

He presents this time, 1973, as a turning point in Underwood’s career. He says that a change in the lbw law, making the bowler pitch in line in all circumstances, had made things more difficult, though this had been reversed in 1972. There were other issues.

Derek Underwood has the action of a medium-pacer. It is a fine action. Rhythmic. Controlled. Plenty of body. It lends itself to accuracy. He also has stamina. He can bowl for hours. But now he knows that this is not enough. To be as great a bowler in cricketing annals and affectations as Wilfred Rhodes or Jim Laker or even Bishan Bedi he has to be able to get wickets all over the world and not primarily in England, the seamer’s paradise. What is he to do? Is he to change his action and become a spinner, pure and simple? Or is he to develop another action and operate in two distinct styles? Who will teach him to spin the ball? 

At this stage Underwood had taken 144 test wickets. He finished with 297, plus 16 more at 27 in World Series Cricket, which probably cost him anything up to a hundred more in his peak years. Overall, in Australia he took 50 wickets at 31, in India 54 at 26, all without making any apparent changes to his action or style. 

The same pattern occurred when uncovered pitches were done away with in 1981. That will sort Underwood out, they said. In the first two seasons under the new rules he took more wickets than anyone other than Malcolm Marshall and Richard Hadlee.

The cover of the October edition has Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge at Southampton. Richards was already acknowledged as a great player. Greenidge was not yet in the West Indies team, but within a few years these two would be opening for a putative World XI. With quicker thinking, England could still have picked him when the photo was taken. Yet at the time the presence of overseas players in the county game was widely decried. It was a golden age for county cricket, though we were slow to recognise it as such. The photo is of its time. Two kids, shirts off, ignorant of skin cancer (but nobody in shorts). The older guy to the right who would have seen Phil Mead play. The younger guy with the bad haircut and shades, who thinks he’s cool though he isn’t. If the photo had been taken at Canterbury that would have been me. Hampshire were county champions in 1973. 

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 Cricketer: July 1972

 

The Ashes were the main attraction of 1972 and The Cricketer was fortunate to have John Woodcock as its test match reporter. The July edition carried his account of the first test, played at Old Trafford in early June.

England won a seam-dominated match by 89 runs. John Snow took eight wickets, backed up by Geoff Arnold and Tony Greig with five each. Greig was making his test debut, though this would have come as a surprise to him, given that he had appeared four times for England against the Rest of the World in 1970, contests that were regarded as test matches at that time. He was also ever present in the Rest of the World team that had played in Australia the previous winter, matches that were never categorised by the Australians as tests, though, as discussed here previously, they were manifestly of test quality. Greig also made two half centuries at Manchester.

Anybody who has read much of this blog will know of my admiration for John Woodcock, but he did have a blind spot when it came to the nationality qualifications of England cricketers in general, and of Tony Greig in particular. It will be remembered that he wrote that one of things that explained the Packer schism was that Greig was “not a proper Englishman”. His report here develops this theme.

The ideal England team would be composed of Englishmen, pure and simple. One might have said the same when Ranji, Duleep or Pataudi were playing, or when D’Oliveira was first picked. If I were an Australian I might wonder about the fairness of it all.

But then I might count up the number of Aborigines in the Australian team, find that there were none, and reflect that my team consisted entirely of players who were, in the great scheme of things, recent immigrants themselves.

Woodcock reports that only 36,000 attended the test, which lasted well into the fifth day. That is less than a third of those who went through the gates of Old Trafford for the equivalent fixture in 2019, a comparison that those who argue that test cricket is on permanent decline should note.

Alex Bannister, long-serving Cricket Correspondent of the Daily Mail (and no relation of Jack Bannister, as far as I know) had a series running featuring a different county each month. In July it was Worcestershire. The article ranges between the past and the present in a pleasing way. I learned several things, including that county secretary Mike Vockins was an agricultural biochemist (which might have come in useful when the Severn made one its regular visits to the Worcester outfield), and that the Nawab of Pataudi senior (the same as cited by Woodcock, above) became a Worcestershire player only after having been turned down by Kent. This would have been around the time that Lord Harris insisted that Walter Hammond had to serve a two-year qualification for Gloucestershire because he had been born in Dover while his soldier father was stationed there, so perhaps embracing Pataudi would have been a double standard too far, even for that scion of the aristocracy.

Bannister rated the 25-year-old Glenn Turner highly.

There are two Turners – one intent on crease occupation; the other a magnificent strokemaker. In either mood – and I prefer the latter – he is one of the world’s leading batsmen.

Another New Zealander, John Parker, was on the Worcestershire staff in 1972. Years later, when I was writing for CricInfo, Turner and Parker joined us in the press box at Seddon Park in Hamilton and reminisced about their New Road days. The conversation turned to the use of statistical analysis in modern coaching. One or other of them said something along the lines of:

We had a computer that gave feedback based on the study of the available data. It was called Norman Gifford and it used to stand at short leg giving insightful readouts such as “what the eff are you bowling that effing crap for?”.

I am writing on T20 Blast finals weekend, against which the ECB have scheduled an ODI against India, thus depriving the participating counties of their international players. A similar issue half a century ago saw the boot on the other foot. Surrey and Sussex both refused to release their players to appear for MCC against the Australians in the traditional pre-tests fixture, preferring to retain their services for the Benson and Hedges Cup. I generally avoid a romantic view of cricket in those days, but a time when counties could tell Lord’s to stuff it was a great one in which to be alive.

Denis Compton and John Snow both defended the decision, but the majority of the cricketing establishment was outraged. Crawford White of the Daily Express wrote that “as a member of Surrey for 20 years and more, I think that this is a disgraceful decision”.  MCC Secretary Billy Griffith called it “absolutely deplorable”, while EW Swanton, as Bryon Butler put it in his monthly press review, “drew his sword”.

History of a most regrettable sort has been made…It never occurred to me for a moment that this fixture would not be held sacrosanct…In football, one hears, England suffers from the selfishness of clubs. That is football’s affair. It is cricket’s affair to put country first rather than the short-term financial advantage of a sponsored competition, however good in itself…cricket has been done a grave disservice, which is sure to have strong repercussions.

This is vintage Swanton. “Football” and “sponsored” become terms of abuse. MCC is awarded dominion status. We see in our mind’s eye the oafish member of the lower classes to whom he slips sixpence for furtive news of the association game. And he gets it completely wrong. By the way, that whirring noise is Swanton turning like a rotisserie chicken at the news that the Varsity match has been exiled from Lord’s.

John Arlott profiles Peter Lever. His opening paragraph will move any of us who treasure county cricket.

The heart of English cricket is the county game; and the essence of county cricket is not the Test star who dominates it but the ordinary county cricketer who is there every day and gives it his constant and fullest effort. He does not, like the representative players, miss a dozen county games a year to play for his country. He is a man for all seasons; county cricket is for him an achieved peak and a fulfilment.

But the highlight of the July edition comes in the School Review. It is the historic first appearance in the press of the great CJ Tavaré. Then captain of Severnoaks School, he made 116 including 12 fours and—wait for it—ten sixes.

No doubt this news will provoke ill-judged and distasteful remarks from the class of person who in earlier times would have earned a crust by slipping news of Aston Villa’s away form to Swanton, and who know Tav only as the obdurate fellow who was the tax manual of England’s batting in the early eighties. But it will come as no surprise to those of us who knew the Sunday Tavaré, the man who would dismantle any attack in the country over 40 overs. Three of the Australians at Old Trafford would still be around in 1982/3 to play tests against Tavaré.

 

 

 

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.