The Cricketer. December 1973 and January 1974

These days there is cricket everywhere you look. A few days ago here in New Zealand we could watch great finishes to simultaneous test matches overlapping with the finals of the domestic T20s (we are spared coverage of the franchise competitions in South Africa and UAE). 

It was not always thus. The Cricketer for December 1973 has virtually no cricket on which to report. The only account of a match is Alan Gibson’s on the final of the inter-diocesan Church Times Cup (triumph for the Gloucester diocese), though John Edrich files from South Africa on the tour of DH Robins’s [sic] XI of which he was a member. This report is notable for the absence of the word “apartheid”, a triumph of omission as striking as Basil Fawlty’s failure to mention the war, or the sabbatical taken by “sandpaper” during the recent canonisation of David Warner as he ended his test career, 

The magazine struggles to fill its 32 pages, and the grainy photo of Keith Fletcher is well below the usual standard for covers. The contents page contains promise, but this rarely translates into anything memorable. I was naturally  interested in Colin Cowdrey’s piece on Kent’s season, with wins in the 40 and 55-over competitions, but it was no more than an efficient summary that arranged the obvious into a cogent order. 

Much the same applies to Gordon Ross’s look at 11 seasons of the Gillette Cup, in which the first person singular shoulders far too much of the burden. 

There is a note from Australia on the waiting lists for membership at the MCG and the SCG, respectively 55,000 and 15,000 at that time. Those numbers have increased in the intervening half century; more than 200,000 now await their MCG member’s pass. A friend of mine had an application form for Melbourne Cricket Club membership filled in on his behalf as an infant, as so many Victorians do. Years passed. When he was 18 his mother rang him, distraught. She had found the application form, unposted, in a draw. This is the saddest story I know. 

There is poignancy aplenty in this edition. Jack Iverson’s death would feature in David Frith’s chronicling of cricketing suicides, but Frith does not mention cause in his obituary of the ultimate mystery spinner here. Sir Leonard Hutton contributes a coda in which he does not overwhelm Iverson with praise. The key, according to Hutton, was to play Iverson as an off spinner. He says that “most of our batsmen found themselves over-positioned to cope with this type of bowling” so does not appear to have shared this insight with teammates. 

David Frith interviews Colin Milburn, who had returned to county cricket in 1973, four years after the car crash that cost him an eye. The tone is optimistic, but there are enough portents that there would be no happy endings to the story of Milburn’s cricket, or his life. 

 

Back in the Northamptonshire middle order, there were a series of 30s and 40s, but not until the final game of the season did Milburn pass 50 for the first time, scraping an average of 20, which was double what he managed in 1974. He told Frith that batting at No 6 made things difficult and that he did better when opening because the shiny new ball was easier to see. In Perth when interviewed, Milburn hoped that the bright Western Australian light would have the same benefit and had hopes of playing in the Sheffield Shield, a fanciful notion even in a place where he was as much a hero as he was in Northampton.

Milburn was part of the BBC TV commentary team in 1969, when he must have still been in some sort of trauma following the accident, but was not asked back (though he was an occasional summariser on BBC Radio in the late 80s). At the time of the interview he was recently engaged, but that came to nothing. The considerable sum for 1973 of £19,000 from his testimonial was in trust: “on his own admission it would have been ‘chaotic’ to have given him the lump sum”, another sign of future troubles. 

In 1988, when I worked occasionally for Cricketcall (I had turned down the Gloucestershire contract, but that’s another story) one of my colleagues had recently worked with Milburn and reported that he gave the impression of having slept rough. He died in a pub car park in 1990, having inspired a love of cricket in so many so saw him play.

The January edition has tributes to Howard Marshall from EW Swanton and Alan Gibson, following a three-paragraph obituary in December. As Gibson says, had Marshall died in 1938 “there would have been a headline about him on the main page of every newspaper”. Marshall was then one of the BBC’s best-known voices, and was the leading commentator on cricket, rugby and ceremonial occasions. He was the first to give extended ball-by-ball commentary, famously on Verity’s match at Lord’s in 1934. 

Marshall devised the grammar of cricket commentary, and did the same for radio news reporting as the head of the BBC’s war reporting unit. He reported from the Normandy beaches on D-Day. But after the Victory Tests of 1945, and the occasional ceremonial commentary, he gave up broadcasting in favour of a career in commerce. He might have continued for another 25 years. 

Howard Marshall deserves a biography; he is important enough as a broadcaster and led an interesting private life. He left his first wife for the film critic Nerina Shute, who later deserted him with their French maid. 

The January edition is richer in content than its predecessor, and includes a couple of interesting investigations into cricket history. Gerald Brodribb, whose niche was the evolution of six hitting, questions the veracity of what the Guinness Book of Records and Wisden long accepted as the longest hit with a cricket bat, Walter Fellows’ 175-yard smite during practice at the Christ Church Ground in Oxford in 1856. Brodribb looks for evidence that the hit was measured properly and verified, and finds none.

David Frith’s ability to find sad stories in cricket’s past is further illustrated. Here, his subject is Billy Bates of Yorkshire and England. Bates toured Australia with great success. At Melbourne in January 1883 he made 55 at No 9, then took seven wickets in each innings as Australia followed on, taking the first English test hat-trick in the process. His name appears  on the Ashes urn, presented to the England captain, Hon Ivo Bligh, after on the tour. 

Bates’ first four tours of Australia were all successful. It was on the fifth that his life went suddenly wrong. He was hit in the eye in the nets, an injury that ended his career at the top level. There are parallels with Milburn here. The rest of Bates’ life was a struggle. He died at 44. 

On Scorecards, we have often talked about the Rest of the World series in England and Australia in this era. The January edition reminds us of a third, consisting of two matches in Pakistan to raise funds after devastating flooding. The World XI was a mix of English and West Indian players, topped up by a couple of locals. The Caribbean contingent were mostly world-class, or something near it, but has an unexpected opening partnership of Mike Brearley and Harry Pilling. Keeping was Keith Goodwin, then Farokh Engineer’s deputy at Lancashire.  

There were centuries for Brearley, Kallicharran, and Asif Iqbal, and two for Zaheer Abbas, as well as attractive innings from Clive Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai and Colin Cowdrey, though the fact that Cowdrey’s rarely seen leg breaks nabbed two victims suggests that the level of competitiveness waxed and waned. Pakistan won both games.

The Cricketer, November 1973

 

The cover has action shots of two young cricketers who had done well in 1973 and were both off to the Caribbean with MCC and England. For Bob Willis, his home debut in the last test of the summer was an early step on the path to 325 test wickets, the England captaincy and Headingley ‘81. For Frank Hayes, the best was already past. His century on debut at the Oval accounted for almost half his test-career runs, made in nine tests, all against the West Indies. 

The November edition of The Cricketer was the Winter Annual, the centrepiece of which was always the Journal of the Season. Over the years, this was the work of, among others, John Arlott, Alan Gibson and Tony Lewis. In 1973 it was in the hands of Mike Brearley, in his second year as captain of Middlesex after returning from academia, and not yet the deity that he was to become. The rules for the Journal were its author wrote a weekly reflection on the cricketing events that were then posted to The Cricketer so as to prevent the application of hindsight.

Brearley isn’t quite in the class of those other writers as a stylist, but we go to him for insight, of which there is plenty, for example this analysis of Ray Illingworth upon his loss of the England captaincy.

He is very open, a lover of argument; he will have a dispute out with anyone, face-to-face. He supports his players, but expects 100% at all times. He is a devoted captain, never losing concentration, confident in his own ways; he has done marvellously at critical moments. He respects hard work in others, having worked hard himself. He has been a symbol for many cricketers and cricket followers in a still class-infected game.

Brearley, along with Peter Walker and Jack Bannister, had negotiated the first disbursement of TV rights money to the Professional Cricketers Association, all of £3,500 per annum for four years. More significantly, they persuaded the TCCB (the predecessor of the ECB) to initiate a non-contributory pension scheme for county cricketers. 

They were not afraid to deploy the confrontational approach to industrial relations typical of the seventies. 

,,,it was also decided, after a ballot of all members, that if we did not reach agreement we should take action to prevent televised cricket from being as attractive to the public as it normally is.

In this light, we must reassess the career of Geoffrey Boycott. We have clearly been wrong to see him as self-serving accumulator, grimly placing  his own average above the interests of team or paying public. In truth, this son of the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire was waging class war with the willow, making the bourgeoisie regret their colour TVs. 

Boycott is the recurring theme of the Winter Annual. Alan Gibson writes, in his Cricketers of the Year piece:

I cannot help wondering whether Boycott will ever make a good captain. He does not seem able to capture and control the inner man.

BI Gunatunga, on the letters page, disagrees, and thinks that Boycott, not Denness, should lead MCC to the Caribbean. Like many another fan of the Fitzwilliam’s finest, he does not go in for shades of grey in his assessment.

I consider Boycott to be a much-misunderstood cricketer mainly because he appears to be so different from other players. He is an immensely gifted cricketer, whose constant striving after perfection bespeaks a character well-suited to leadership. 

Geoffrey Boycott is the brightest star in the cricket firmament. Is it not, to say the least, a short-sighted act to deny the honour of leading England to a man whose present role in the England team has a classical parallel in that of Aenas in the destiny of Rome?

Mr Gunatunga wrote from Sri Lanka so may not have had his opinion tempered by the experience of watching Boycott bat too often. 

Boycott also turns up in Irving Rosenwater’s survey of 1973’s statistical oddities. During the second test against West Indies, he retired hurt from separate injuries from two successive balls, which Rosenwater thought to be unique. 

Back to Gibson, who was summoned for a nightcap with EW Swanton during the Headingley test.

This turned out to be a delightful occasion, though abstemious and informal. I am pleased to report that his theological position is still sound.

Gibson’s selections as Cricketers of the Year include a British Rail employee. 

…on a crowded train between Bristol and London, I was pleased, but surprised to find myself adopted by one of the buffet car attendants, who plied me with food and drink throughout the journey, when I never stirred a step from my seat. When I thanked him afterwards, he said, ‘Always a pleasure for you, Mr Arlott’.

There is an interview with Bishan Bedi, poignant given his recent passing. The tributes presented him as a man of firm views and strong principles, characteristics on full display here. 

Cricket should be an exciting game with batsmen playing their shots and bowlers trying to get them out. In England, however, too many captains want to keep the game tight. They keep the fielders back to save singles when they should have them up for catches. 

Bedi would have approved of Bazball.

On Sundays we see bowlers like John Snow bowling without a slip. This is ridiculous. Even I must have a slip. Sunday cricket is rubbish in my view. It is not real cricket. People come to watch it because it is Sunday and they have nothing else to do. It is not attacking cricket at all, but defensive cricket. 

No fines then for criticising the product (as he would never have called it). 

David Foot writes about Gloucestershire, focusing not on their Gillette Cup final win against Sussex, but on their Championship game against Glamorgan, a week later. I often finished the season at the County Ground in Bristol, and recognise it from Foot’s description.

It was the last afternoon of the season at Bristol, a ground which had been likened to a mausoleum a little too often for comfort, and more recently to the sands at Weston (by Somerset’s captain Brian Close). You don’t expect stirring sport on the final day. 

The home team were chasing a target of 267, but when the ninth wicket fell at 210 it seemed that the season’s end was only a few balls away. No 10 John Mortimore was capable enough, but he was now joined by Jack Davey, perhaps the only genuine challenger to Kent’s Norman Graham for the title of worst No 11 in county cricket. Davey’s 13 innings thus far in 1973 had produced 29 runs. Yet he had become something of a cult figure for the locals, particularly in the Jessop Tavern. Alan Gibson would leave the press box to shout “put them to the sword Jack” when Davey approached the crease. How fortunate that Foot was there to immortalise his heroics that day. 

The first one he received was right on a length, doing a bit off the seam. He stretched forward and pushed the ball back. The classic defensive forward stroke. Feet and bat positioned exquisitely, elbow up for the gods to see. The MCC coaches could have been inspired to poetry on the spot.

Davey equalled his career best of 17 in a partnership of 57 with Mortimore to take Gloucestershire to victory, and they “returned to an ovation as genuine as anything in the Gillette final”. The win moved Gloucestershire up two places to fifth in the table, but short of the prize of £500 for fourth place. It meant nothing, yet it meant everything and if any of the few that bothered to make their way to the cricket on a dank autumn day are still above ground, they will treasure the memory yet. 

The summarised scores of the Indian Schoolboys tour is replete with names that were to become familiar in the decade to come: Briers, Gatting, Hignell, Parker, Slocombe, DM Smith and the great CJ Tavarḗ,What a treat it would have been to be at Bristol to see 150 by VJ Marks. A King’s School batter name of Gower made 50 against visitors from South Africa.

Geoffrey Howard who was about to retire after a quarter of a century of first Lancashire, then Surrey, provides an informed summary of the changes that he had seen and, in some cases, instigated. More than that, he looks forward with some prescience, foreseeing—

• a sponsored, 16-match County Championship of two divisions (though he doesn’t approve of the latter; for some years he put together the fixture lists and says that this would become “a nightmare”)

• ODIs with every tour

• world cups in England

• neutral umpires.

Scyld Berry writes about lob bowling. I don’t recall seeing Berry’s name in The Cricketer before this, so it may have been the start of one of cricket journalism’s most distinguished careers. He gives us an entertaining history of the art of lobbing, which he suggests has some science to it, with greater variety than overarm can offer. After running through the options for seam, swing and spin, Berry lists more exotic alternatives. 

Then there is the second-bounce yorker, and of course the daisy cutter; the full toss straight to the shoulder…and as a first-ball speciality the harmless low full-toss to the off-stump that is tentatively driven to extra-cover.

GH Simpson-Hayward of Worcestershire took 23 wickets with lobs against South Africa in 1909-10.

With his low trajectory and ample turn off the matting he could not be “lofted” with safety or even driven along the ground with confidence; pushes and pokes were the best means of resistance. 

Did not Brearley once turn to lobs on the last afternoon of a county game? I suppose that Trevor Chappell might be regarded as the last international lob bowler if the daisy cutter is in the lobber’s armoury. 

What I miss about the seventies is how easy it was to infuriate those who deserved to be infuriated. Here is JF Priestly of Kent on the letters page.

I was appalled at the general turn-out of the two teams in the Varsity match at Lord’s. Only one Cambridge player was wearing his coveted light blue cap when fielding…one player had an unruly beard, long hair generally was the vogue, some of the players had not even bothered to clean their boots, flannels were different shades, and the only good thing to say about them was their good bowling and most excellent fielding.

No doubt when Mr Priestly went to the cinema he judged the film by the straightness of the ice cream seller’s tie. 

The Cricket Magazines: April 1973

This was the last edition of Playfair Cricket Monthly. Founder and editor Gordon Ross was to become executive editor of The Cricketer incorporating Cricket Monthly. This is presented as a marriage of equals, a blend of the two titles, but my memory is that The Cricketer, which does not mention the merger, remained much as it was, with the coda to its masthead disappearing fairly soon. The spirit of Playfair continued in The Cricketer Quarterly, edited by Ross, a compendium of scores and statistics that filled the gap before the information became available in the following year’s Wisden.

The magazine emerged from the Playfair Cricket Annual, which started in the forties and which Ross continued to edit until his death in 1985. He passed away at Lord’s at the end of a day’s cricket, a departure that any of us might wish for ourselves. The Playfair Cricket Annual continues; this year’s will arrive in our mailbox yesterday, and it is still the most convenient way of looking up a wide range of information. 

A flick through shows why magazine one survived while the other did not. The Cricketer is attractively laid out with photographs on almost every page. Playfair has great slabs of text and lengthy paragraphs. It appears to be short of advertising.

There is plenty of international cricket recorded this month. England’s series in India ended on a flat pitch in Bombay (as it then was), with centuries for Engineer, Vishwanath, Fletcher and Greig, the last two both maidens. India therefore won two-one. A million-and-a-quarter spectators attended the five games. John Woodcock describes it as:

…the series which England should have won; as the one they threw away with some really rather faint-hearted batting in the second and third Test matches.

That was not the end of the tour. A victory by MCC against Sri Lanka is reported this month (test status was still nine years away), and then it was off to Pakistan for three more tests. 

The hosts in that series were recently returned from New Zealand, where they won a three-test series one-nil, as RT Brittenden reports in The Cricketer. What a batting line-up Pakistan had. Zaheer Abbas, Kent’s own Asif Iqbal, Majid Khan, Wasim Raja and Sadiq and Mushtaq Mohammad. The bowling—Sarfraz Nawaz, Saleem Altaf and Intikhab Alam—was not too bad either. In no country has the mismatch of talent and achievement been so large as Pakistan’s. Peter Oborne’s excellent history of Pakistan’s cricket, Wounded Tiger, explains why this is so. More recently, Wasim Akram’s Sultan, ghosted by Gideon Haigh, shows how undermining internal division and rivalry could be. This one was a Christmas present from my wife, a convert to the view that there is no such thing as too many cricket books.

Pakistan’s victory came at the old Carisbrook ground in Dunedin, built on 201 from Mushtaq and 175 from Asif. But here in New Zealand the series is remembered mostly for the world-record breaking tenth-wicket stand of 151 at Eden Park between Brian Hastings and Dick Collinge. The previous record was held by Wilfred Rhodes and RE Foster during the latter’s famous 287 at Sydney in 1903. The Cricketer asked the 96-year-old Rhodes for his memories of a stand that lasted little more than an hour. “I made 40 in that time. I weren’t just defending” said the great man.

Tony Cozier reports in The Cricketer on the first test between West Indies and Australia in Jamaica, a high-scoring draw. I notice that Rod Marsh was out hit wicket for 97, so the air would have been as blue as the sea. 

Of the five tests featured this month, only one was not drawn. The rest were all a day or so off a definitive result. Such matches are now quite unusual. It is a paradox that now, when test cricket’s existence is under threat, the long form of the game itself is much more entertaining than it was fifty years ago. 

Both magazines devote several pages to events in South Africa, particularly the recent tour by the DH Robins XI, ostensibly a private affair but bearing a marked resemblance to an England A team, including Bob Willis, John Hampshire, John Lever, Frank Hayes and several other future test players. 

You wouldn’t think it possible to devote seven pages to cricket in the Cape in this era without using the word Apartheid, but they manage it. The extent of the self-delusion is massive, that cricket can exist in splendid isolation, free of all social and political context, and that the non-white populations should be content with a small amount of money to improve facilities and a few days’ coaching. 

Gordon Ross reported on his recent visit to the Republic. After two pages of crayfish mayonnaise and trips to the races he eventually addresses the issue, but shamefully so:

We paused for some time at the section reserved for the Coloureds [at Newlands]. How absorbed they were in the cricket; how magnificently behaved they were. I couldn’t help but see in the mind’s eye, a D’Oliveira somewhere among them, and fervently hoped that they might enjoy better facilities than ‘Dolly’ did. I am interested only in cricket and cricketers; not politics, race or colour. I only wish somewhere there was a solution to it all.

There was Gordon, yes there was. 

Alan Gibson reviews four books by the same author, who, having been dead for 57 years, was in no position to rebut; it was WG Grace, or rather, his ghostwriters.

Of course, the books were ‘ghosted’, though that practice was not quite so common in his day as it is in ours, nor so widely accepted by the public. Had WG been exposed on television, his most innocent admirers might have wondered where all those fine phrases came from.

Arthur Porritt held the pen for what Gibson considers the best of these books. In his own autobiography, Porritt describes the challenges of this collaboration:

Grace was choke full of cricketing history, experience and reminiscences, but he was a singularly inarticulate man, and had he been left to write his own cricketing biography it would never have seen the light. …Grace accepted me as collaborator with his utmost heartiness, and, although the task of getting the material from him was almost heartbreaking, I enjoyed the work immensely.

The Cricketer has an account by Mike Brearley on his winter travels, first in India, covering the first three tests for The Guardian and The Observer, then in the Caribbean, guesting for Kent, as described in the March editions. He reflects on the challenge of being a current player who turns reporter.

I found cricket-watching enhanced by the journalistic duty; my concentration was sharper and I like having to formulate my response to the day’s play…As a colleague of the players I felt faintly inhibited from any harsh words I might have thought, partly by a sense of solidarity in the face of a public which can be unappreciative, partly by the fear that criticism from me might be taken to imply a belief in my own ability to do better.

The next time England played in India, Brearley was a member of the team, allowing judgment to be made on this matter. 

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.