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 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 Cricket Magazines: December 1972

 

The first four pages of Playfair are, mystifyingly, devoted to a preview of the domestic season in South Africa, to be contested exclusively by white players, though the political context is referred to only obliquely. More commendably, The Cricketer had a correspondent on non-European cricket in South Africa, A Akhalwaya. He reports on the reaction to the end of Basil D’Oliveira’s test-match career in his homeland, reminding us how much it meant to the non-white population to have one of their own playing at the highest level.

Here in South Africa we found ourselves unabashedly supporting England. Whenever England played no more did we ask: ‘What is the score?’ Instead, it became ‘What did D’Oliveira score?’ or ‘How many wickets did he take?

…One wonders which country the schoolboys will now support.

The Cricketer has a review of the season by Tony Pawson that in structure is strikingly similar to Tony Lewis’s Journal of the Season in November’s issue. Could there have been a miscommunication that led Pawson to think that he was i/c the Journal in 1972? If so, it was a felicitous error, as Pawson was always worth reading. Occasionally, his path crossed with mine, for example in May:

Knott’s bewildering range of quick-footed shots brought him a century in each innings at Maidstone.

I was there for the second of these centuries. It was my first visit to Mote Park, a ground that became a favourite, the English venue that was most like our parkland grass bowls here in New Zealand. Pawson’s own batting for Kent, a generation earlier, was by all accounts similar to Knott’s in its fleetness of foot and scurrying between the wickets. Pawson also contributes portraits of Colin Cowdrey and Donald Carr.

Another day of fond memory is pictured, 10 September when Kent won the Sunday League by beating Worcestershire at St Lawrence. Guardian of the telephone in the Canterbury press box, Dudley Moore (who must have got tired of being asked where Peter Cook was) summed up Kent’s route to the title, culminating in chasing 190, the biggest target they faced all season. A century partnership between Luckhurst and Nicholls took them home.

David Frith made an early impression as Deputy Editor of The Cricketer by conducting an airmail interview with Clarrie Grimmett, the New Zealander who took 216 wickets with his leg spin for Australia. It’s fascinating. Grimmett says that his greatest regret was that he was not selected for the 1938 tour to England.

I had hoped to continue my great association with Bill O’Reilly; this breaking of our partnership was a terrific blow to both of us…The only reason I can think of for my omission is that I was thought to be too old.

As Grimmett was 46 at that time, he probably had a point. Though born in Dunedin, the leg-spinner learned his cricket at the Basin Reserve in Wellington, for whom he made his debut in the Plunket Shield when he was 17, leaving for Australia when he was 22.

Grimmett received an early lesson in the realities of Sheffield Shield cricket from New South Wales skipper Monty Noble, who berated him for getting through his overs too quickly (a six-ball over in a minute-and-a-half!) so not allowing the quickies a rest.

He nominates Stan McCabe as the greatest strokemaker he saw. Grimmett’s choice of the major batsman that he had a strong chance of dismissing is a surprise: Bradman.

          I always felt he was uncomfortable against good-length spin.

On modern cricket, he deplores short-pitched bowling, but blames the batsmen for it.

If they learnt correct footwork instead of ducking (and getting hit in the process) short bowling would die a natural death.

Both publications carry articles concerning Warwickshire’s Championship-winning captain AC Smith (the Edgbaston Smiths AC and MJK were known by their initials). Richard Eaton interviews him in Playfair, while The Cricketer piece carries Smith’s byline. Given his notorious statement to the media years later as CE of the TCCB: “no comment, but don’t quote me”, it is no surprise that Eaton’s is the more illuminating.

Warwickshire’s trip of brilliant West Indians, Gibbs, Kanhai and Kallicharran was supplemented mid-season by Deryck Murray who took AC’s place as wicketkeeper. Naturally, Smith turned to bowling instead.

I am a liquorice allsorts bowler. I think I can bowl cutters when the wicket is soft or broken, but I like to get the ball shone a bit and swing it on a good wicket,

He does not attempt to describe his bowling action, which was as chaotic as any I have seen, and accompanied by a pantomime villain’s grin at the point of release.

Mike Denness, in his Captain’s Column in Playfair, bemoans the travel demands made on county cricketers. One weekend began with a journey…

…from Folkestone on a Friday night to play Somerset at Glastonbury. On the Saturday night we motored up to Derby, returning on Sunday night to Somerset.

On the Tuesday evening we headed north to play Yorkshire at Bradford.

They played cricket on all these days, and the motorway network was nowhere near as developed as it became. It is surprising that there were not more injuries or deaths. As crowded as the fixture  list now remains, it is much more reasonable than it was.

This is the best edition of Playfair that I have come across so far. There is also Cardus on Ranji, Stephen Green on the Treasures of Lord’s and an interesting interview with the Glamorgan player Tony Cordle by Basil Easterbrook. Cordle was then about halfway through a county career that saw him take almost a thousand wickets, often in bowling partnership with Malcolm Nash.

He was one of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean, and suffered many of the indignities of that community when he arrived in London. Relatives whisked him off to Cardiff, where, most fortuitously for Glamorgan, a job interview happened to be held overlooking the Cardiff Arms Park cricket ground. He decided to join the Cardiff club, despite, unusually for a Bajan, never having played in an organised game.

There is an interesting video on YouTube of a recent interview with Cordle by Glamorgan historian Andrew Hignell.

 

The Cricket Magazines: October 1972

I have fallen behind in my surveys of the cricket magazines of half-a-century ago. My summer holiday task is to catch up, starting with the October editions.

The focus of both The Cricketer and Playfair Cricket Monthly was the fifth test at the Oval that concluded the best Ashes series in England since the Second World War. It was decided on the sixth day, the last test in England to have such a provision until the final of the World Test Championship in 2021.

Centuries by both Chappells gave Australia a first-innings advantage of 115, but debutant Barry Wood’s 90 led a strong response to set a target of 242, a cinch in the era of Bazball but quite a challenge in 1972.

England were handicapped by the depletion of their attack through the second innings: D’Oliveira had a bad back, Illingworth turned his ankle and Snow had the flu, “sick and shaking” as he managed a single over with the second new ball.

At 171 for five, Jack Fingleton, according to Basil Easterbrook, “groaned and said ‘It’s too many for us now’ ”, but Paul Sheahan and Rod Marsh took them home without further loss.

England’s top scorer in the match was Alan Knott, with 92 and 63. The other day one of the Australian TV commentators said that Adam Gilchrist had re-written the book on how wicketkeepers batted in test matches. Gilchrist, brilliant as he was, merely added a chapter to Knott’s draft. This match was one of many on which Knott had a critical influence with the bat, and in a way that ignored cricket’s geometry. He would have broken the bank in an IPL auction.

Both titles agree that Australia deserved to (at least) draw the series. Easterbrook’s summary put it in historical context.

Australia won both their victories after losing the toss. They had the series outstanding bowler in Lillee, the best supporting bowler in Massie and their batsmen produced five centuries, whereas the best England could manage were three innings in the 90s. If Australia, who were beaten in vile weather in Manchester and on an unworthy pitch at Leeds, did not have the luck this time it perhaps went some way to compensate for the period between 1961 and 1968 when three Australian sides in no way superior to England…undeservedly held on to The Ashes.

John Woodcock agreed that Lillee had a decisive influence, which he expressed in the language of the time.

He runs a tediously long way; yet to see him pounding in to bowl, and to put oneself in the batsman’s shoes, is to know one is watching a man’s game.

Not quite how I would put it, but Lillee running in, shirt billowing, with a Dick Dastardly scowl, was one of the great sights of cricket.

Clive Lloyd made one of the finest Lord’s-final centuries in the first World Cup in 1975. Three years earlier he made another as Lancashire won the Gillette Cup for the third successive year (Jack Bond, Lancashire skipper, is pictured with the trophy on the cover of Playfair). It was the centrepiece of the reports by Michael Melford for The Cricketer and Gordon Ross for Playfair. Melford noted the power of Lloyd’s drives:

…most of them, off fast bowling, went at such a pace that the bowler, deep mid-on and deep mid-off scarcely moved before the ball was past them.

For Ross, it was the cross-bat shots:

Three times he cleared the boundary ropes with massive pulls, and it made no difference whatsoever who was bowling; this was utter domination of the attack.

Bryon Butler’s press review in The Cricketer collected more acclaim for the Guyanan, from Arlott, Swanton, Marlar, and from Dennis Compton, who got quite carried away in the Sunday Express:

This was the greatest innings I have ever seen at Lord’s at any level. I have seen and played against Sir Donald Bradman, Walter Hammond, Stan McCabe, Sir Frank Worrell, Clive [sic] Walcott, Everton Weekes and many other great players in full flow: but I have never seen an attack torn to pieces like this.

The October editions cover the first ODIs—or one-day tests as they were referred to—played in England, the first anywhere except for the hastily arranged inaugural at Melbourne the previous year. England won an entertaining series two-one. In the first game, Dennis Amiss became the first century-maker in this form of the international game.

It will surprise many to see that, in the absence of the injured Illingworth, England were captained by Brian Close. A more obvious choice might have been Tony Lewis, already named as captain of MCC’s tour of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known). Illingworth, along with Boycott and Snow, had made himself unavailable for a gruelling schedule that included eight test matches over more than four months.

EW Swanton’s editorial in The Cricketer once again deployed the royal pronoun in critiquing the tour party:

We must admit to disappointment that the promising new material among the 21-25 brigade has been overlooked.

The only player under 25 was Chris Old. The India correspondent of The Cricketer, KN Prabhu, reported on an underwhelmed response to the selection. The editor of a sports magazine demanded that the tour be called off if England were to be represented by a second XI. The Indian Express was barely less damning, saying that the team

…might be well balanced in that the standard of its batsmanships [sic] and bowling are likely to balance each other in mediocrity.

Prabhu himself was not so quick to write off the tourists, noting the success of various members of the party as members of an International XI some years before.

England won the first test in India before losing the next two narrowly, by 28 runs and four wickets. The final two matches in the series were drawn, as were all three in Pakistan, a reminder of how historically difficult it has been to attain a positive result on those pitches. The achievement of the McCullum/Stokes team in winning three-nil in similar conditions is one of the great achievements of the intervening half century.

       

       

The Cricketer & Playfair Cricket Monthly September 1972

 

Excavations in the cupboards of Scorecards Towers have unearthed a second magazine to provide an insight into the cricket of half a century ago: the Playfair Cricket Monthly. The April 1966 edition of this publication was the first cricket magazine that I owned; The Cricketer did not become a regular fixture until five years later.

The Playfair magazine complemented the annual of the same imprimatur. Both were edited by Gordon Ross. The annual remains a must-have for the serious cricket watcher in the UK to this day, but by September 1972 the magazine was in its final months. It was swallowed up by The Cricketer in 1973. Playfair concentrated almost exclusively on the international and first-class game, while its senior rival encompassed cricket at all levels.

The September editions of both focussed on the third and fourth tests of what was becoming one of the finest Ashes series since the Second World War. John Woodcock reported for The Cricketer, while Basil Easterbrook was there for Playfair.

Easterbrook’s name will ring a bell with those who have Wisdens of the 1970s on their shelves, as he has a feature in almost all of them, on subjects ranging from ducks (“the dreaded cypher”) to county cricket’s workhorses, the Mohammad family and Compton’s summer of ’47.[1] He was cricket correspondent for the Kemsley regional newspapers, so his byline rarely appeared in the national press, which was their loss; he writes lightly and perceptively.

Here is an extract from Derek Hodgson’s obituary of Basil Easterbrook in The Independent:

Like most of his generation, he was unenthusiastic about the advance of commercialism but he was once put in charge of the Press Box hospitality at Worcester by a new and happily naive sponsor. The hacks were duly impressed on the first lunchtime when a bottle of Chablis arrived at each seat. Easterbrook beamed.

The next day more wine arrived accompanied by a fly-past from the Red Arrows. Challenged to top this, on the last day, Easterbrook smiled and pointed out of the window to where, under the shadow of the cathedral, the groundsman's hut had gone up in flames.

He was a small, bright, perky man who could be waspish with fools and angered by injustice. He always had a new humorous story. We had not seen him in the box since 1983 but we still miss him. He spent his later days watching Torquay United, not always happily, but he was always keen to tell you of the latest developments with the Gulls.

England and Australia went to Trent Bridge for the third test at one-all. Ray Illingworth astonished the cognoscenti by putting Australia in. This seems nothing nowadays; at the Basin Reserve there would be widespread swooning if the skipper winning the toss did not insert, but this was the era of uncovered pitches, rest days, and unreliable weather forecasts. A captain giving the opposition first use of the pitch on Thursday morning was gambling on there being no rain from Saturday on.

Losing such a wager was to be the downfall of Mike Denness at Edgbaston three years later. Illingworth got away with it here, though the pitch gave little of the expected help to England’s seamers, though there were a succession of dropped catches on the first day. Things got worse in this regard. Woodcock says that England’s fielding in the second innings was “the worst anyone could remember from an England side”.

Keith Stackpole’s century headed Australia’s 315. England replied with only 189, and an unbeaten 170 from Ross Edwards left a target of 451. Brian Luckhurst led the rear guard with 96 over five-and-a-half hours. It was England’s top score in the series, which made it all galling for we Kent people that he was dropped after Headingley. England lost only three wickets on the last day, on a pitch Easterbrook calls “this gentle featherbed”. In these days of Bazball England would have had a go at scoring 340 in the day, but in those more timid times it was out of the question, particularly as a draw meant that Australia would have to win the next two tests to win the series.

It is easy to throw around emotive words like ‘disgrace’ and ‘scandal’ as labels for the pitch on which England won the fourth Test by nine wickets with two days and ninety minutes to spare, but rather more difficult to justify them.

So begins Easterbrook’s report in Playfair. Mention this game to an Australian fifty years on, and those words will be the least of the vocabulary that is offered in response. That the match saw the return of DL Underwood to the England XI fuels the conspiracy theory. He took ten for 82 in the match and, as Woodcock wrote, “Whichever side Underwood had been playing for would almost certainly have won”.

Bryon Butler’s In the Press in The Cricketer quoted two distinguished Aussies who started as their compatriots have gone on. Ray Lindwall in The Sun:

Call me an Aussie squealer if you like [OK, we will­-Ed] but I am angry and disappointed that we should lose the Ashes this way. These spinners’ pitches have cropped up too often in England for me to shake them off and say ‘Hard luck, isn’t it?’

Jack Fingleton in the Sunday Times interviewed the groundsman in the presence of Joe Lister, the Yorkshire secretary.

When I mentioned the abnormal spin, Mr Lister intervened to say “Well wait and we will see how the Englishmen handle this pitch.” I replied “But we have no Underwood or Illingworth.” Mr Lister said he didn’t like the inference[2]. I told him I would reply to him later. It was the pitch I was interested in.

Twelve of the other 21 wickets also fell to spinners. The two reporters have contrasting explanations for the spin-friendly nature of the pitch. Easterbrook blames a thunderstorm three days before the game that flooded the field and hampered pitch preparation. Woodcock says that the groundsman, alarmed by a hand injury inflicted by Willis on Boycott in a Gillette Cup game a couple of weeks before, took too much grass off the pitch.

On the afternoon before the Test it was obvious for all to see that the pitch was to be a burial ground for fast bowlers.

Stackpole’s 52 apart, none of the Australians contributed more than 26 in the first innings, though Easterbrook cites Inverarity and Mallett’s eighth-wicket partnership of 47 in defence of the pitch. I recall watching on TV (we got our first colour TV that year, from Radio Rentals) as Underwood tied them up in an afternoon session in which Australia lost six for 40 (though coverage was interrupted by racing from Goodwood; the deprivations we suffered in the seventies).

That England secured a lead of 117 was largely down to the 104 that Illingworth and Snow put on for the eighth wicket. I have written often enough that Illingworth is as good an example as Brearley of a captain picked for his leadership rather than his runs and wickets, but he was most likely to come up with a gritty fifty when the top order had not delivered. Snow had considerable ability with the bat, when he could be bothered. He finished his career opening the batting for Warwickshire in the Sunday League.

Paul Sheahan’s unbeaten 41 was the best Australia could manage in the second innings, and Luckhurst hit the winning run before the end of Grandstand. Five of the England team turned out for their counties in the Sunday League the following day.

Playfair featured the Captain’s Column. In past years a different captain had contributed each month, but in 1972 it was the sole preserve of Kent’s Mike Denness. How things have changed over half a century.

…two of my own county’s Test cricketers, Alan Knott and Brian Luckhurst, battled through a five-day Test against Australia and were faced with an eight-day break before the next Test.

…as a county captain I have found the greatest difficulty this year I keeping the players at their peak with long breaks between games.

…we have found in Kent that we have had no cricket on two Saturdays. I would have thought that Saturday is the one day we must play cricket.

Both titles reported on the first Benson and Hedges Cup final. John Arlott was there for The Cricketer. It was as unmemorable as a final could be, with Leicestershire taking 47 overs to overtake Yorkshire’s 136, though it was Leicestershire’s first trophy in any competition.

Arlott found one aspect of the day distasteful.

The mass singing which accompanied the prize-giving was a stern indication of the difficulties cricket speech-makers are likely to encounter in the future.

I generally found the B&H final to be more raucous than the 60-over equivalent, presumably because it was outside the football season.  

Here is more on Basil Easterbrook from The Questing Vole (aka Patrick Kidd).

---

[1] In researching Easterbrook’s writing I have discovered that my 1971 Wisden is missing pp149-152. Is it too late to return it for a refund?

[2] It must have been the pressure of the moment that caused Mr Lister to confuse “inference” with “implication”.