30 August to 5 September: The Never-ending Test Match: Leicestershire Make Their Move

 

The fourth test match was the longest game of cricket ever played in England, and was still drawn when it finally ended after six days.

When I left the Oval at the end of the second day England were 513 behind Australia with all wickets standing and four days to go, there being a sixth day available as the series could yet be drawn. This situation, and how it was resolved, tells us much about how attitudes to test cricket have changed over the past half century. Now, McCullum and Stokes’ England would have their eyes on a lead acquired at sufficient pace to make a win possible, as they did at Multan in 2024, replying to 556 with 823 to set up the win. In 1975 such an eventuality would have been considered incredible, not worth discussion. Survival was the only aim, which meant that the pace would be measured, particularly on an Oval pitch that offered the bowlers nothing and attacking batters not much more. John Woodcock described it as “being as dry as the Nullarbor Plain, and much the same colour”.

On the third day, England subsided to 169 for eight, which Woodcock wrote was “as poor a display as any in the last year”. Yet over the next three days England ground out 538 in the second innings to save the game. Edrich, made for this situation, opened with 96. Steele the folk hero registered his fourth half-century in six innings and Roope made 77, which turned out to be his highest test score. It is pleasing to record that the draw was finally secured by the Kent pair, Knott and Woolmer’s, sixth-wicket partnership of 151.

It was not pretty. Woolmer’s 149 was the slowest century for England against Australia. Ten successive overs before tea on the fifth day were maidens. John Arlott called it “one of the best defensive performances in the history of test cricket”. It is probable that modern batters would not be capable of mounting such a rearguard, though the existence of DRS might also have been a mitigating factor: “At Lord’s Fagg and Spencer gave everything out. At the Oval Spencer and Bird gave everything in”, according to Woodcock.

Australia were left with 198 to win the game in about 30 overs. Now, they would have had a go. Then, not a chance.

In the County Championship, it was the week in which Leicestershire moved from being outsiders to putative champions. They began at Tunbridge Wells, achieving a first-innings lead of 78 thanks to an unbeaten ninth-wicket partnership of 136 between fast bowlers McVicker and McKenzie. Kevin Jarvis, in his first season, took four for 43 as Leicestershire were dismissed for 123 in the second innings. At 160 for four, Kent looked like being the team to make a late charge for the Championship, but Ray Illingworth’s excess of cunning made him an appropriate leader of Foxes and he induced a collapse of the last six wickets for 23 runs to leave his team winners by 18 runs. Illingworth was the bowler for four of the six, and caught one of the other two. No doubt he took quiet satisfaction that his replacement as England captain was the defeated leader.

Leicestershire then went home to Grace Road to face Middlesex (whose minds may have been on the Gillette Cup final on the day after this fixture). The performance of the match was by my personal skiing instructor Barry Dudleston, who made 107, described by Peter Marson in The Times as “an innings of high quality”. Illingworth again weighed in with second-innings wickets that ensured a modest victory target. The two wins left Leicestershire 17 points clear of Yorkshire with a game to play, though third-placed Hampshire had a slightly better chance of catching them with two games left and a 27 point deficit (there were 10 points for a win and a maximum of four batting and four bowling bonus points).

On Sunday, Leicestershire lost to Hampshire, with Barry Richards rolling out anther century. This left Hampshire four points ahead of Kent (four points for a win), but with a much superior run rate, which meant that there would have to be two mathematically improbable results to deprive them of the trophy.

A curiosity among the cricket scores this week was the Fenner Trophy, played over the then unusual duration of 50 overs per innings. It was a three-day knockout tournament that was part of the Scarborough Festival. Yorkshire and Hampshire defeated Kent and Gloucestershire in the semis, and Hampshire beat the hosts despite (or perhaps because of) a century by Boycott in the final. The teams were close to full strength despite it being played at the end of an intense season, but the inducements, financial and liquid no doubt, were sufficiently enticing. There were five-figure crowds throughout.

 

The Cricketer, September and October 1973

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parkinson replied in similar vein in his Sunday Times column.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cricketer, July and August 1973

 

The covers of The Cricketer at this time were often things of some beauty. Perhaps colour printing on good-quality paper at that time precluded too much overlay of text on image. Maybe it was the good judgement of David Frith, from August acknowledged on the masthead as editor. He knew how to make the most of photographs having put together several compilations of them, sometimes with Patrick Eagar, who was responsible for both these covers. 

What we have here are two character studies, framed and drawing us to the subject without distraction. West Indies’ captain Rohan Kanhai signs an autograph, the silver hair of the old campaigner contrasting with the greenness and heat of the Caribbean setting (Queen’s Park Oval in Trinidad, I think). A few weeks later, Kanhai was to make one of the best hundreds I have seen, at Lord’s in the third test.

John Snow, perhaps a little weary, turns at the end of his run up, which had an aesthetic appeal rivalled in the seventies only by those of Holding and Lillee. Does this photo look as dated as one of Rhodes or Woolley would have done to us then? The unadorned whiteness of the kit might make it so. Perhaps the ersatz patriotism of Jerusalem was not necessary when the crown and lions had the entire sweater to themselves. Rolling your sleeves up was more than a metaphor then too. 

Snow had just published a book of poetry, his second collection. It was  reviewed in the August edition by cricket’s most renowned poet, John Arlott, whose reviews were invariably kindly, as evidenced by his annual survey of cricket books in Wisden. Criticism is sugared.

The argument of these uneven, almost haphazard pieces is that, one day, John Snow is going to surprise many people – but not himself – with some highly perceptive writing.

Arlott puts Snow’s achievement in its historical context.

John Snow is the only Test fast bowler to utter a book of verse. Fred Trueman has been known to repeat some pungent rhymes but, as a composer, has always tended to a certain monotony of adjective.

The Captain’s Column had been inherited from the Playfair Cricket Monthly, and reverted to the original practice of featuring a different county skipper each month. In these two editions, Tony Greig was followed by Ray Illingworth. 

They disagreed about the structure of the Championship season. Greig favoured 16 fixtures (there were 20 in 1973). Illingworth favoured the status quo.

To reduce it to 16 would be taking away the chance of eight possible innings for our batsmen and I feel they get insufficient opportunities of playing natural cricket even today.

Both saw these as three-day games, but agreed that the playing day could be extended by an hour on each of the first two days. In Greig’s words:

 

On a full first day this should produce at least 126 overs. I believe a longer day would bring back more spin bowling.

That would have meant that two days’ of Championship cricket would have seen more balls bowled than three days of tests do now. It is worth noting that in 1973 ten of the 17 counties had at least half their games finish in draws. 

Another of David Frith’s specialities was interviewing old cricketers. In July it was the Leicestershire all-rounder George Geary. The result is a fascinating account of cricket between the world wars, and we learn that players leaving the field to freshen up happened long before Dennis Lillee did it. In the Adelaide test in 1928/29 Geary, prone to cramp, went off for a massage. 

 

Then an Australian official came into the dressing room and said he would not be allowed back on the field after treatment.

‘I didn’t know who he was. I offered to snap him through the bloody window. Later a taller man came in but I wasn’t afraid. Syd Barnes used to do it. He even went off for a bath sometimes when he felt like it!’

In August, JM Kilburn farewelled Bramall Lane in Sheffield as a cricket venue. A test venue once, in 1902, the ground doubled as Sheffield United’s home (which it still is), and a stand was about to be built across the square. Kilburn is nostalgic, presenting its golden age as being the years before and after the First World War, but the winter game’s encroachment and the decline in cricket-watching from the 1950s on means that he does not lament its passing. 

 

When spectators could be numbered in tens of thousands they generated a vitality of atmosphere to obliterate the inconveniences, not to say hardships, of watching. Numbered in tens, spectators made the cricket look forlorn and its setting grimly uninviting.

Kilburn lists his own memories of the ground, as we all might of our favourite places.

In my Bramall Lane a young Herbert Sutcliffe will for ever be racing in front of the pavilion rails to hold a breathtaking catch for ER Wilson; a perspiring and grinning Maurice Tate threatens mock strangulation for a downcast wicketkeeper who has just dropped three catches forced by wonderful new-ball bowling; Cameron of South Africa is bombarding the pavilion roof with mighty straight drives; Trueman and Peter May are locked in titanic combat for an hour; Bowes is confusing Bradman; and  AB Sellars is signalling heartbreak with ‘Match Abandoned’.

John Woodcock reported on the first two tests against New Zealand, the first an England victory by 38 runs, the second a draw with New Zealand in the driving seat. Both had featured 170s from Kiwi skipper Bev Congdon, supported in both cases by centuries from Vic Pollard. At Trent Bridge the visitors looked as if they were going to chase down an improbable target of 479. Had they done so, it would have been a record still. At Lord’s the game finished with England nine down and only 165 ahead. New Zealand’s first win over England would come five years later at the Basin Reserve; five years after that they registered the first as tourists, at Headingley. 

In the July edition, Alan Gibson reviewed The Hand That Bowled Bradman by former Somerset player Bill Andrews, who for many years would greet people with an invitation to “shake the hand that bowled Bradman”, the boast uninhibited by the fact that the Australian was on 202 at the time. 

Andrews had the distinction of having been sacked four times by Somerset, twice as a player and twice as coach. Gibson knew him well.

 

There is no malice or guile in him, though he is at times capable of a certain low cunning, of a kind that would not deceive an infant. Despite his ups and downs he has many more friends than foes. Indeed, anyone who told me that they did not like Bill would go down in my esteem (though anyone who told me he had never been irritated by him would go down too, for quite different reasons).

Gibson reports that at the time of writing, Andrews hoped to be re-employed by Somerset, so that they could sack him for a fifth time.

 

The Cricketer & 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).

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[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”.

 

Kent win the Gillette Cup, Yorkshire are champions: 2 to 8 September 1967

I’ll be writing separately about the Gillette Cup final. My first visit to Lord’s, and Kent’s first trophy since the First World War, are worth special commemoration, fifty years on. 

The other prize of the week—the only other one available in domestic cricket in 1967—went to Yorkshire, who were assured of the title when Mike Bissex was leg before to Don Wilson to secure first-innings lead. Raymond Illingworth took 14 for 64, all on the second (and final) day. He was on a hat-trick three times, which may be a record.  The match was played at Harrogate, one of seven venues used by Yorkshire for their Championship programme.

So, as it turned out, I had seen the first day of the Championship decider, the game at Canterbury a month or so earlier. Had Kent won that one, the Championship pennant would have flown over Kentish fields three years earlier than it actually did. Had Underwood, Knott and Cowdrey not all been suddenly picked by England…(let it go, just let it go).

Arthur Milton was playing for Gloucestershire in that game. He only scored 38 in the game, but that was enough to make him leading run scorer in first-class cricket, with 2,089 from 49 innings, even more of an achievement as it was made for the bottom county. Milton’s story has been well recorded. He was the last double cricket/football England international. These days, he could open a bank on the back of that, but not then. When when he finished playing sport Milton became a postman, and he enjoyed it so much that when they told him he had to retire he took up paper rounds that covered the same route.

Keith Fletcher and Ron Headley both went to the crease 58 times in first-class matches, both joining 68 other batsmen in passing the thousand mark. Mike Buss of Sussex achieved this at the lowest average: 21.46. 

Tom Cartwright bowled most overs (1,194) and took most wickets (147). In common with eight others in the top 21 of the averages, he conceded under two runs an over. 

A comparison of the first-class averages of 1967 and 2016 shows how much the balance of the game has swung towards the bat (then a slender thing that could be comfortably lifted in one hand and would last for several seasons). Ken Barrington’s 68.84 would have put him in fifth place on 2016. But Barrington was 14 ahead of second-placed Denis Amiss, whose 54.41 would have left him one place short of the top twenty. 

The reverse is true of the bowling, of course. Jimmy Anderson’s top-placed 17.00 would have only got him to No 13 in ’67. There were only three bowling averages under 20 last year (one of which was by Viljoen of Kent, who I’ve never heard of); there were ten times as many in the summer of love. 

The Scarborough Festival, summer’s death rattle for so many years, featured an England XI playing the Rest of the World. These games were an end-of-season feature for several years in the mid-sixties. They were of historical significance for several reasons. When in 1970 the tour by South Africa was cancelled at the last moment, the concept of a Rest of the World team was there waiting, ready to fill the void. The Rest of the World also played a one-day round robin, grandly if hyperbolically called the “World Cup”, of which more next week. 

There is also the composition of the team. Graham McKenzie of Australia, the rest an equal mix of West Indians and South Africans, at a time when apartheid made such a mix illegal had the game taken place within the jurisdiction of the apartheid government. So the opening partnership of 187 between Eddie Barlow and Seymour Nurse was nicely symbolic and would have spoiled Dr Vorster’s breakfast the following morning. 

Barlow made another ninety in the second innings, sharing a partnership of 118 with Rohan Kanhai, who “played, as so often, as though he could have batted with one hand” wrote AA Thomson. England were set 373 in five hours, a target that no England side, official or unofficial, would have contemplated going for in 1967 in any circumstances other than a festival match. John Edrich made an aggressive 87 but Lance Gibbs induced a collapse to 179 for six. However, the Middlesex pair of Murray and Titmus continued to be attacking in a stand of 112 in under two hours to save the game. Thirty thousand spectators watched over the three days and thoroughly enjoyed themselves, though they may have wondered why this sort of enterprise could not be seen other than by the seaside in September. 

It was the first time that world outside Guyana became aware of Clive Lloyd. He looked like a short-sighted librarian who had absentmindedly wandered onto the field, but then there would be a blur as he covered an unreasonable amount of ground with two of three strides, then the stumps would be in disarray, the batsman bemused in mid-pitch, wondering what had just happened.

Outside cricket, Barry Davies, then commentating for Granada and writing for The Times, reported confusion over the new four-steps rule for goalkeepers. Did the counting start when they first touched the ball, or when they picked it up?

Alan Gibson switched effortlessly to rugby for the winter, starting with this report, which may have been more entertaining than the match it described (a goal, by the way, is a converted try, with a try worth only three points).

Mr Gilbert Clark of Fishponds in Bristol discovered that his late wife had left their house to a dog’s home. A trusting man, he believed that his wife had taken this action in the belief that she would outlive him. I’m not so sure. He kept the house but it cost him £1,000 for a dog ambulance. A grand would have been a fair slice out of the value of a Fishponds residence in 1967.