The Cricket Magazines: March 1973

What a treat to find two articles by Alan Gibson in The Cricketer. The first is a profile of Tony Greig, England’s outstanding player on the tour of South Asia at the time of publication. I maintain that Greig has never been given quite the recognition he deserves for being one of the best of his time, and one of England’s finest all-rounders across the eras.

Gibson hints that Greig was undervalued at this early stage of his international career too. After two years in Sussex Seconds while he qualified as an overseas player, Greig was an immediate sensation, with 156 on Championship debut. It should be remembered that he committed to playing for England before South Africa’s exclusion from international cricket, yet it seemed that English cricket, presented with such a gift, was unwilling to unwrap it, fearful that it might be a bit showy or extravagant.

Greig eventually made his test debut (or so we then thought) in 1970 against the Rest of the World. Gibson reports:

In the second match at Nottingham, which England won (probably the best performance by an England side since the Second World War) he had as much as anyone to do with the victory, taking four wickets in the first innings and three in the second. The batsmen whose wickets he took were Richards (twice), Sobers (twice), Kanhai, Engineer and Barlow. 

Despite topping the bowling averages, and scoring a fifty in the third match, Greig was omitted from the Ashes tour party that winter, and left out throughout the 1971 season, the selectors’ preference being for the more pedestrian Richard Hutton. 

Both players were selected for the Rest of the World squad that toured Australia the following winter.

No doubt both were chosen in the first place because of Australian determination not to pick a Rest of the World side that approximated to the real strength of the Rest of the World: but it did not turn out to be so pointless a series as was intended, and of the two English all-rounders it was Greig who made his mark.

Gibson concludes by reporting the opinion of his colleague at The Times, John Woodcock, to whom he refers by the usual sobriquet.

The Sage of Longparish is not himself a tall man, and has not always been enthusiastic about Greig in the past. What he really feels is that all the best cricketers are five foot three. A judgement from this quarter is therefore convincing.

Gibson’s second piece is titled Cricket in Fiction. It is an amiable ramble that touches upon, among others, Richards, de Selincourt, Dickens, Sayers and, of course, Wodehouse. Also JL Carr, whose recently published A Season in Sinji is mentioned in the opening paragraph, and to which Gibson returns near the end.

I would have enjoyed it if he had left out the cricket.

He forces his analogies, he strains his language, to show that life is just a game of cricket, which is neither more or less true than that life is just a bowl of cherries, some of them going bad, or a sack of potatoes, or – well, whatever analogy happens to come to you. 

Mr Carr is very strong on breasts and lavatories, which I suppose is mandatory in the modern novel. Just as I was beginning to get interested in the bosoms, there was a piece about cricket; and just as I was beginning to get interested in the cricket, back came the bosoms, and the dirt, and the violence. No doubt life is like that : but since we all have to experience it anyway, I doubt if we have any obligation to read about it as well.

Both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly reported on the third and fourth tests between India and England. The hosts took a two-one lead in the third, but only by four wickets. England could not cope with the most renowned of spin trios, Bedi, Chandrasekhar and Prasanna. Fletcher’s unbeaten 97 apart, no England batsman made more than 20 in the first innings, and none more than 21 except Denness’s 76 in the second. These were notable innings by both future England captains, but they went almost unnoticed. Pat Pocock took four wickets as India made hard work of their target of 86. As the Sage writes, “With another 50 runs in the bag [England] would probably have won it”.

One thing that I learned was that Derek Underwood could not play in this game, having awoken with a temperature on the first morning. I had thought that Underwood, round-shouldered smoker that he was, had never missed a test match for fitness reasons, but this was illness, not injury. “If any wicket in India was likely to be suited to Underwood’s many talents it was this one in Madras” said Playfair’s anonymous correspondent, who had probably cobbled the report together from press reports, given that the magazine was now an issue away from oblivion. 

In the fourth test, England achieved a lead of 40, but India’s first innings occupied the whole of the first two days on a slow pitch that offered bowlers little, so a draw was the outcome. The highlight was captain Lewis’s 125, his sole test century. The Sage:

Having said that the time had come to attack the Indian spinners, Lewis, in Kanpur, did something about it. When he came in Bedi had bowled nine overs for eleven runs and England were 48 for two…Lewis at once jumped out to hit him over mid-on for four. He had got 70 against Bedi on a turning pitch in England last season by using his feet, and this is what he did now.

Tony Lewis might have been picked for England at any time in the previous decade. The list of batsmen no better than him who were is long. As Woodcock says, the innings showed what Lewis might have achieved “had he had the advantage of playing on better pitches than those in Glamorgan”. 

Another tour is featured in both magazines, that of Kent, as Sunday League champions, to the West Indies. I have written about this tour before but was unaware that both The Cricketer and Playfair carried extensive reports on it, by Michael Carey and Howard Booth (of the Daily Mirror, if memory serves) respectively.

In my original article I called out Wisden’s description of my former skiing instructor Barry Dudleston’s bowling as “chinamen” as wrong, given that the Playfair annual consistently listed him as “SLA”, but it seems that it was indeed wrist spin that he purveyed on this tour.

According to Booth, Colin Cowdrey “rated him a more effective bowler than Ken Barrington on these pitches”. He got Rohan Kanhai out first ball, although it needed a brilliant catch by Alan Ealham off a full toss.

One promising Antiguan batsman was noticed in both reports. This is Carey’s description:

The locals made an entertaining fight of it, largely due to Vivian Richards, a 23-year-old batsman of sound technique and bold method. Cowdrey felt he would play for the West Indies soon.

In Playfair, Cardus laments “the virtual disappearance of the spin bowler”, which was to overstate the case when most counties still went into matches with two slow-bowling options. He tells a story about SF Barnes (and we must remember that in matters of factual accuracy Cardus was the Fox News of his day) and a match that celebrated his eightieth birthday. Barnes was to bowl the first ball and was asked what he intended. “I’ll bowl the first ball but I don’t know about a full over. I can’t spin now, my fingers are too old. I suppose I’ll have to fall back on seamers—any fool can bowl ‘em”.

The Cricket Magazines: February 1973

Both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly featured reports on England’s first two test matches in India. Print media were the way in which we learned what had happened in this series. There are short, grainy highlights packages of the second and third tests on YouTube, but I do not recall any of it appearing on television in Britain, even on the news. There was no radio commentary. BBC Radio, without a cricket correspondent following the compulsory retirement of Brian Johnston at 60, did not even send a reporter, relying on Crawford White of the Daily Express to phone in reports to Today on Radio 4 and at the close of play.

The two tests were terrific contests that followed a similar pattern, with low scores on turning pitches—238 was the highest of eight innings—with England chasing targets of around 200 in both. They succeeded in the first test, but failed in the second.

The absence of sound and pictures meant that some fine performances barely registered at the time and have been forgotten about since, most notably Geoff Arnold’s nine wickets in the first test, in which India’s quicker bowlers (if Abid Ali and Erinath Solkar can be so described) delivered only 12 overs. 

At 107 for four chasing 206 and the ball turning like a cornered viper, the match looked to be India’s for the taking, but an unbeaten century partnership by Tony Lewis and Tony Greig took England home. John Woodcock, reporting for The Cricketer, called Greig “the outstanding English cricketer”. Like nobody else until Ben Stokes, the future England captain thrived when the odds were stacked high on the side of quality opposition. 

Lewis was captaining England on test debut, the first to do so since Nigel Howard twenty years before, also on an India tour that the established captain didn’t fancy. None have done so since, for England, at least. Lewis made a duck in the first innings,and came in for the second with the match in the balance, so his unbeaten 70 was quite a performance, unnoticed by most as it was made on Christmas Day, with few papers printing on Boxing Day. England’s victory “was worth all the mistletoe in the world” according to Woodcock, who gives us a sense of how India was consumed by cricket, more specifically test cricket, by describing the aftermath of their win in the second test.

The streets around the hotel where the Indian team was staying had to be closed to traffic; thousands of those inside the ground kissed the turf and performed cartwheels of delight. The result may have been a setback to England, but it was a marvellous thing for cricket in India. Had India lost I would have hated to be Wadekar, so short are people’s memories.

Ajit Wadekar had led India to their first test and series win over England fewer than 18 months before, but his house was attacked when his team lost three-nil in 1974, so Woodcock is not being alarmist. 

Playfair was now on its last legs, three issues away from oblivion, a pity as there is some fine writing in the February edition. Basil Easterbrook’s piece is entitled How a Cricket Writer Can Cope With Wet Days. 

You can of course dash off a feature article, which might fill in half an hour, or compile your expenses account, which will take all morning.

Easterbrook then embarks on an entertaining survey of some of the public houses near cricket grounds in which he has passed wet days. 

Neville Cardus was in the final two years of his life and not terribly well but his piece on Sussex is a late glimpse of a craftsman capable yet of top form atthe tail end of his career, like Cowdrey’s winning century for Kent against the Australians in ‘75. 

In the first paragraph he describes turn-of-the-century Manchester as “a city of begrimed solid dignity” and follows with a word—ratiocinative—that I had to look up, which is always fun. Here it is. 

Both titles carry pieces by former players on the contemporary game, which always have the potential to become a bog of better-in-my-day self-justification. 

In The Cricketer HL “Stork” Hendry, who played 11 tests for Australia in the 1920s, starts with a paragraph that swallow dives into heart of the morass, rescue improbable.

Cricket-lovers are disappointed and disturbed that the great game of cricket, hitherto regarded as a character-builder, is losing some of its attraction to the public.

He dismisses the counter-attractions of other sports as a factor, as they had always been around, but concedes that “the craze of young people to own motor cars has been a contributing factor”.

Hendry’s explanation is “Averages”, his shorthand for batsmen paying too much attention to their own statistics, and not enough to the needs of the team or the crowds. 

Decades ago the goal of the batsman was a century; having attained this they usually proceeded to get out.

The introduction to the piece records that Hendry scored 325 not out against the New Zealanders in 1925-26.

In The Cricketer Charles Barnett, whose Gloucestershire career also began in the twenties, is altogether more understanding of the challenges faced by the modern cricketer, with whom he sympathises for having to adapt between different forms of the game and back again over a single weekend. It does seem astonishing that counties would begin a Championship game on a Saturday, play a separate 40-over match on a Sunday (sometimes in a different county), then resume the three-day game on Monday morning. 

Barnett puts forward a common proposal of the time, that young batsmen of promise should be omitted from one-day teams in their formative years. He even takes the trouble to suggest that counties make arrangements with golf clubs so that these youthful flowers might be fully occupied on their days off, presumably lest their unoccupied minds strayed to unclean thoughts of reverse sweeps.

Barnett is dismissive of the orthodox view that the influx of overseas players to county cricket is a bad thing, 

Their very example is now there for every young player to see and if wise try to copy.

He also has the good idea that run outs from direct hits should be recorded as ‘thrown out”, with the fielder credited.  

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 Magazines: November 1972

Cricketer’s November edition was always the Winter Annual in these years, a double-sized volume (though about 20 fewer pages than a standard copy these days) at the cost of 50p, or, as our grandmothers would have said at the time, ten shillings (the normal price was 20p). It is worth every p or d, with plenty of fine writing.

The centrepiece of the Winter Annual was always the Journal of the Season. A prominent figure would write a weekly summary of events, posting it to the offices of The Cricketer so as to avoid augmentation with hindsight. In 1972 it was in the hands of Tony Lewis, captain of Glamorgan but starting the transition into his subsequent career of commentating and writing.

Lewis followed the Ashes on television, declaring that he had become “a fan of Benaud, Laker and Dexter”, fortunately given that he was to spend almost 20 years in the professional company of the former. He had the distinction of recording his own appointment as captain of MCC and England on the winter tour of South Asia. Already, he had a pleasing turn of phrase. Dennis Lillee running in to bowl was “like a Welsh wing three-quarter in full flight”, high praise from a man of Neath. With the moustache in common, he must have had Gerald Davies in mind.

Some of the issues that Lewis discusses remind us of how much has changed. He describes seeing Ken Higgs playing for Leicestershire, and Bob Cottam for Northamptonshire as an “unreal” experience. Now, players shifting counties happens routinely from week-to-week. Both Cottam and Bob Willis (who had gone to Warwickshire from Surrey) had to miss the first couple of months or so of the 1972 season as their moves were contrary to the wishes of their former counties, a ruling that deprived the England selectors of two possible options for the Ashes.

I had forgotten that Fred Trueman turned out for Derbyshire in the Sunday League that year. If memory serves, he was joined by Fred Rumsey in a partnership that was redolent of the era of round-arm bowling.

The best Journals of the Season came in the late seventies when they were in the hands of Alan Gibson, who is given a page to reflect on the season in this edition. Gibson aficionados will be pleased to find that the first paragraph is devoted not to the cricket, but to his travails in getting to and from the cricket. Train strikes are not a new thing in Britain.

On several occasions I had the alarming experience of having to drive a car, something I do about as readily as riding a buffalo. At Pontypridd, I spent an hour and a half trying to find the ground. When I did get there, there was no play, and on departing I took a quite spectacularly wrong turn, and found myself some while later climbing a precipitous Welsh mountain…The following day, after triumphantly driving from Bristol to Swansea and back, I took a wrong turning within a quarter of an hour’s walk from home, and managed to cover another twenty miles before I arrived. The God in the machine is too strong for me.

Much of the article is a defence of three-day Championship cricket. A four-day Championship was being mooted, though it was not until the late 80s that it became more than talk. Gibson uses the Championship cricket he saw in 1972 to mount a case. I am a sucker for a Wilf Wooller anecdote and he refers to one of the best, Wooller’s offer over the PA system at Swansea (as Secretary of Glamorgan) to refund spectators their admission money as Somerset under Brian Close were being so boring.

The problems with three-day cricket were evident in 1972, and I think that its abandonment was correct, but we would all throw our hats in the air in celebration of Gibson’s final paragraph:

I do not get too depressed about the future of the championship, because however they pitch it, it has already shown itself to be a nine-lived sort of cat.

The Cricketer maintained an extensive network of international correspondents, the only source of news of overseas domestic cricket in the pre-internet age. RT Brittenden was their man in New Zealand. Later, it was Dave Crowe, father of Martin and Jeff. When he passed away suddenly soon after I moved to New Zealand, I emailed The Cricketer offering my services. They replied saying that they were wondering why they had not received his copy, and appointed Bryan Waddle.

In November 1972, Brittenden’s column was a profile of all-rounder Bruce Taylor. Hindsight can make fools of us all.

Taylor dearly loves a little flutter on the horses. When he takes a bet, the other runners might as well stay in their stalls. If there is a team sweepstake, Taylor will win it. In a mild sort of way, he has a Midas touch.

That may have been Taylor’s own view. Some years later he served a prison sentence for fraud as he attempted to service his gambling debts.

The Indian correspondent, KN Prabhu, has some advice for Lewis and his tourists that remains good today: “it is good to remember that what is funny in Coventry may not be as funny in Calcutta”.

The appointment of David Frith as Deputy Editor of The Cricketer was announced. Fifty years on, Frith described the circumstances of that appointment in the most recent edition of The Nightwatchman. It was partially due to Richard Nixon. A few months previously, Frith had written about tracking down the old Australian pace bowler Jack Gregory, who he located in Narooma, 100 miles south of Sydney.

Gregory was suspicious of journalists, having been stitched up years before. He was about to go fishing when Frith cold called, but was watching live TV coverage of Nixon’s visit to China, which gave Frith the chance to stay and interview Gregory without the subject being quite aware of it.

John Arlott secured Frith an interview/audience with EW Swanton, held behind the broadcasting boxes at the Oval during the final test. It turned out that Gregory was a boyhood hero of Swanton’s, and when the penny dropped that Frith was the man who had found him, the matter was settled.

Frith was the most significant figure in the world of cricket magazines for the next generation. He soon became editor of The Cricketer, and later founded the Wisden Cricket Monthly. I particularly enjoyed his book reviews, in which he would hunt down factual errors like a dog sniffing out truffles.

Tracking down fast bowlers was his speciality in 1972. In this edition it is Eddie Gilbert, the indigenous fast bowler who played for Queensland in the 1930s, but not Australia, despite being described by Bradman as the fastest bowler he ever faced.

This time, Frith thought that he was undertaking historical research; he visited a psychiatric hospital in Brisbane in the hope of settling the date of Gilbert’s death. Instead, he was astonished to be told that the bowler was still alive, and resident at the facility, to which he had been committed because of mental illness that was the consequence of alcoholism. This was a common fate among people who were treated deplorably by the Australian Government.

This was not a nostalgic meeting like that with Gregory.

He shuffled into the room, head to one side, eyes averted, impossible to meet…Five feet eight with long arms: the devastating catapult machine he must once have been was apparent.

‘Shake hands Eddie,’ his attendant urged kindly.

The hand that had propelled the ball that had smashed so many stumps was raised slowly; it was as limp as a dislodged bail. He was muttering, huskily and incoherently, gently rocking his head from side to side.

There is plenty more good writing in the Winter Annual. Alan Ross carries off the tricky job of reviewing the editor’s autobiography, Sort of a Cricket Person, with balanced aplomb. The farceur Ben Travers recalled his friendship with Vic Richardson, Australian captain and grandfather of the Chappells. Humphrey Brooke analysed Hammond’s tactics in the Oval test of 1938 (what distant history that seems, but the same in time terms as a feature on the 1988 summer of the four captains would be today). Chris Martin-Jenkins profiled David Steele, three years before he became the bank clerk who went to war and defied Lillee and Thomson.

Sir John Masterman, academic, spymaster and novelist, contributed a piece entitled “To walk or not to walk”. After a page of entertaining reminiscence of appalling umpiring, Masterman’s refreshing conclusion is that it should be left to the umpires. He calls walking “mistaken chivalry”.

Playfair, now only five issues from extinction, is thin by comparison, in both size and quality, though it does have Neville Cardus, who writes about cricket reporters, past and present. Cardus, somewhat improbably, claims to have been assiduous in recording the facts, making notes after each delivery, until…

I was observed by Samuel Langford, senior music critic of the Manchester Guardian, a Falstaffian man, unkempt, ripe with humour, and indifferent to the fact that frequently his flies were not buttoned. He saw me taking notes every ball. ‘What’s all that for?’ he asked. ‘Tear it up. Watch the game looking for character’.

This was advice that Cardus embraced with a convert’s enthusiasm.

Myself, I never once used the words ‘seamer’ or ‘cutter’ in all my Press Box years, writing 8,000 words every week, from May to late August.

New Zealand v West Indies, First Test, Basin Reserve, 1 – 4 December 2017

The third test of the year at the Basin Reserve, but the only one this season. When England are here in three months or so they won’t play a test at the Basin, the first time that has happened since the last time England came here straight from Australia, in 1974/5. A pox on your two-test tours.

The Basin was lovely, just a couple of weeks short of its crimson-clad best, when the pohutukawas are out. We have had the warmest run of December weather in the twenty years I have been in New Zealand, so the bank was unseasonally parched. The crowd was not sparse, but not big. This is the same corrosive logic that undermines the County Championship and, soon, tests in England: don’t play first-class cricket in peak season because not enough people watch. Bookend the season with it instead. There, smaller crowds, what did we tell you?

West Indies’ surprise win at Headingley three months ago added to the appeal of this series. Braithwaite and Hope became players you want to see on the back of their partnership in that game. Mundane prospects can provide interesting test cricket as we found when Bangladesh were at the Basin at the start of the year.

The refurbished scoreboard appeared from its plastic shroud today, installed by Pyongyang Scoring Inc. It has a shiny black fascia, replacing the green one. This is a bit of a pity. A different coloured scoreboard can give character to a ground, but I don’t think that any are left. Canterbury’s white and Worcester’s green have both gone in recent years.

The light bulbs at the top of the board recording team and batsmen’s totals have been replaced by a digital display. The bulbs tested spectators’ eyesight (“is that 8? Or 3? Or 0?”) and mental arithmetic, so are not mourned, but anybody thinking that the considerable expenditure on renewing the board would result in accurate scores being publicly available must stand accused of hopeless naivety. For one thing, the display went blank quite often. For another, during the intervals it would say something like “Welcome to the Basin tea interval in progress” cleverly alleviating the common problem of people mistaking the groundstaff for players, but not letting anybody arriving know the score until play resumed.

The designers of the digital display appear to regard the possibility that any cricketer would have a name longer than seven letters as absurd. Thus the New Zealand captain is William and the West Indies opener B’thwai.

First day

It was the seventies all over again. The West Indies were in town and the bowling was fast and throat-high. However, the chin music was not a Caribbean beat, rather Now is the hour, the time to say goodbye. The chief purveyor of the damage was Neil Wagner, who bowls with the fury of a man who has spent the last two hours on hold with a call centre. His seven for 39 was the best first-day test return for a New Zealand bowler. He’s a bit of a puzzle: a short man (for a fast bowler) who is quick, but not that quick, yet who can get bounce out of a dead cat. It’s the precision that does it, ball after ball homing in on the batsman’s ribs like Derek Underwood’s malicious alter ego.

The spite that the Basin pitch habitually reserves for batsmen on the first morning was not an excuse; just ten minutes before the interval they were 75 for one. When I arrived during the break it was 79 for three; 40 minutes later, 109 for nine as subsidence turned to landslide. Twice in this time, Wagner was on a hat-trick.

First, Shai Hope gloved a legside catch, Blundell’s first in tests. That brought in debutant Sunil Ambris who played his first ball in test cricket confidently down to fine leg. Most eyes followed the ball, so there was general mystification at why Ambris was making his way back to the rooms. He had played from so deep in the crease that his back pad had brushed the stumps with sufficient force to dislodge the bails, thus making him the first in 140 years of test cricket to be out hit wicket to his first ball in tests. Shades of Roy Fredericks in the first World Cup final.

Four overs later, Chase was caught at leg slip, the flared trouser of fielding positions, so long out of fashion, then skipper Jason Holder was yorked first ball, showing that Wagner can make occasional visits to lengths closer to the stumps.

Shane Dowrich helped New Zealand along by setting off from the non-striker’s end with the ball almost in Mitch Santner’s hand at cover point. A direct hit sent him on his way with yards to spare. Kemar Roach and Shannon Gabriel showed more resolution than some of their colleagues up the order in a tenth wicket partnership of 29 taking the final total to 134.

The following day in Adelaide Joe Root put Australia in and has spent the days since in the stocks as a result. Here, Williamson put West Indies in and got no credit at all.

The West Indies’ coach, Stuart Law, blamed his batsmen for playing too many poor shots, but bad shots are sometimes the consequence of consistently good bowling. Wagner was outstanding but was well-supported by the other bowlers, Boult in particular.

The day’s loosest shot was played by Kane Williamson who steered a long hop to gully. Tom Latham was the other New Zealander out this evening, hooking to mid on a ball from Holder that was a tad quicker than he expected. The home team finished the day at 85 for two at the end of a calming evening session where progress was quite slow, but the pleasure of being at the Basin on such a lovely day meant that nobody cared.

Second day

Trevor Bailey used to say of the England attack of the late 80s that they could change the bowler, but not the bowling. This was substantially true of the West Indies here, a little spin from Chase and Braithwaite apart, it was yeoman-like right-arm medium fast all the way. Not that the bowling was poor—the run rate did not rise above three an over until the 90th over of the innings—just that it lacked menace.

Jeet Raval was first out this morning, to a very good ball from Roach that pitched on middle and off and moved away just enough. Raval made 42, which is approximately his average after seven tests. There are murmurings from the media that he is getting out when set too often, but for most of us the fact that we have an opener who gets set is comfort enough. Forty-two after seven tests is a good average and the test opening pair looks of less concern than for some time.

Henry Nicholls got off the mark first ball with a pulled four to long leg. At the other end Ross Taylor looked in another class. On TV Ian Smith observed that Taylor was playing two games, back foot against Holder, front foot against Roach and doing both admirably.

Nicholls gloved a caught behind first ball after lunch, but was reprieved by a third-umpire no-ball call. He is becoming the artisan of the middle order, making the most of his talent with good judgement to the fore. With Taylor he put on 127 for the fourth wicket. The partnership ended when Taylor was out to an lbw review for 93, just as we were readying ourselves to celebrate his 17th test hundred, bringing him level with Williamson and Crowe at the top of the New Zealand list.

Nicholls was caught at fine leg off Cummins for 67, and Santner followed soon after, bowled by a straight one. At 281 for six the lead was healthy but not yet decisive.

Colin de Grandhomme (or deG’Ho as the scoreboard knows him) hooked two of his first three balls for four. We settled back for another de Grandhomme cameo, being careful to reduce blinking to a minimum so as not to miss it. But today’s innings was different from his usual crash-bash 18 or so. The strong hitting was still there, with 11 fours and four sixes, but the wafts outside off were almost entirely absent. It was still quick, a century from 71 balls, the fastest made by a New Zealander except for Brendon McCullum’s 54-ball farewell in Christchurch against Australia a couple of years ago (not forgetting that Nathan Astle got from 100 to 200 against England at Lancaster Park in 2002 in just 39 balls). His minimalist celebration when he reached the century—helmet off, bat raised, get on with it—was very Kiwi. He was caught at long on for 105.

Those of us who question de Grandhomme’s place in the test team must acknowledge that he has produced a test-class performance with the bat to match his six wickets at Hamilton against Pakistan late last year. Such fun to watch too, the village blacksmith come to the city.

De Grandhomme put on 148 for the seventh wicket with debutant Tom Blundell, the Wellington wicketkeeper in for the injured BJ Watling. This broke the New Zealand record against the West Indies held by Martin Crowe and Ian Smith in 1985. More than any batsman I can recall, Blundell’s stance at the crease is that of a baseball batter, knees bent and bat raised above the shoulder until the ball leaves the bowler’s hand. He finished the day on 57 not out but with last man Boult with him. New Zealand were 447 for nine, lead of 313. From tea to close 180 were added.

The Museum bookstall never fails to delight at the Basin test, and today it came up with a beauty. AA Thomson’s Cricket My Happiness. I became reacquainted with Thomson during the exercise of recreating the 1967 season and spent some of the afternoon discovering delights on every page. I have just opened the book at random on page 65 and found this, regarding the young FS Trueman:

Scotland Yard takes no keener interest in the whereabouts of a missing criminal than do the Yorkshire county authorities in the whereabouts of a promising young fast bowler. When Fred Trueman reached the Headingley nets he came under the quizzical scrutiny of Bill Bowes and Arthur Mitchell, who, following immemorial Yorkshire custom, did not tell him how good he was, but noted, without open disapproval, that he had a good action, a strong frame and a strange liking for the hard work of fast bowling. I remember my step-Uncle Walter’s getting angry getting angry with somebody who denied the basic intelligence of cricketers.

“Ridiculous,” cried my ancient relative. “Most sensible chaps in the world. Though mind you,” he added thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t exactly say fast bowlers…”.

Third day

Some expected a declaration first thing, but with three days left it was worth letting Blundell and Boult get what they could. This turned out to be more than anyone expected. Only when Blundell got into the 80s did it occur to us that he stood a real chance of making a century on debut. From then on, the loudest cheers were generally reserved for Boult for surviving, though he is one the more capable No 11s I have seen and ramped Roach for six. Blundell, a naturally aggressive batsman, became cautious as he neared the landmark, perhaps excessively so. He took 19 balls to move from 98 to 100, during which time Boult was dropped off a sharp chance at short leg and survived an (optimistic) lbw review. A celebratory six followed, then the declaration, always a touch humiliating when a last-wicket partnership (here worth 78) has not been broken.

Blundell is the tenth New Zealander to start with three figures and I have been there for the last three, the other two being Jimmy Neesham at the Basin against India in 2014 and Hamish Rutherford versus England in Dunedin the year before. One of the ten was Rodney Redmond, who never played again, and given Blundell’s status as stand-in keeper it was suggested that he might emulate this regrettable feat, but even had Watling been fit to keep in the second test a place would surely have been found for him; he looks good enough to have a future as a batsman.

West Indies began their second innings needing 386 to make New Zealand bat again. Openers Powell and Braithwaite looked comfortable enough (though Powell would have been lbw to Boult had it been reviewed) until Wagner came on (again mysteriously after de Grandhomme) and challenged them to a hooking contest. Braithwaite is too circumspect to respond, but Powell was game and two sixes resulted. But a glancing blow to the helmet may have unsettle him and explained the tame return catch he gave to Henry soon after.

The partnership of 94 between Braithwaite and Shimron Hetmyer was the highlight of the test for the West Indies. Twenty-five-year-old Braithwaite is from Barbados. He has a test average of 37 and a test temperament. Hetmyer is from Guyana and will be 21 on Boxing Day. There is a flair about him that makes the spectator think that they might be watching the start of a considerable career. He led West Indies to victory in the last under-19 World Cup and with Braithwaite and Hope may be the foundation of the best West Indian test batting line up for a generation. It was a surprise when he was out to a leading edge off Henry for 66 in 89 balls. Braithwaite and Hope took West Indies through to 219 for two at the close.

The bookstall spread its stardust once more. The Playfair Cardus, a collection of Sir Neville Cardus’s writing for the Playfair Cricket Monthly in the 1960s. This was particularly interesting given Backwatersman’s recent piece on Cardus, who (here at least) is not quite as readily quotable to the modern reader as Thomson Most of the pieces are nostalgic, particularly about the heroes of his youth, above all Frank Woolley. It is idealised, of course, but if you can’t be romantic about cricket, what is left?

I wasn’t there on the fourth day. Braithwaite went for 91 at 231, the first of eight wickets to fall for 88 runs. New Zealand won by an innings and 67 runs.