17 - 23 May 1975 The Appeal of the Shoreditch Sparrow

This week in 1975 was given over to one-day cricket, with the final two rounds of the zonal stage in the 55-over competition and the Sunday League. Again, the scoring was generally as modest as a Jane Austen heroine. Minor Counties (North) were dismissed for 67 (Nottinghamshire’s left-arm quick Barry Stead five for 26), MC (South) for 94 and 83, Oxbridge for 93. Worcestershire fell 49 short of Northamptonshire’s 152. Another left-arm seamer tending to the portly, John Dye with five for 30, was central here too.

At Lord’s, Kent made just 137 for nine in 55 overs, of which John Shepherd contributed 96, a Bannermanesque[1] proportion of the total. Otherwise, only Underwood made double figures. Shepherd came in unusually high at No 5 here, which is where he would have batted regularly for most counties rather than his perennial No 8 for Kent. There are any number of similar examples of Shepherd making runs when others failed. His three for 21 ensured that his runs were just enough for Kent to win. No player contributed more to Kent’s success in the seventies than John Shepherd.

Alan Gibson was there. I do agree with him that low-scoring one-day games are the most interesting kind. It is a measure of the financial development of the game in the subsequent half-century that now it is the fast bowlers who break down. Then it was their cars.

 

Later in the week Gibson was at the Oval for Surrey versus Gloucestershire, which meant that he was sure to report on the performance of one of the main players in his repertory company, Robin Jackman aka the Shoreditch sparrow.

 

Jackman was a magnificent appealer, quite the best of his generation. With a noise sometimes mistaken for a passing aircraft he would turn, throw his arms in the air and continue backwards down the pitch, finishing close enough to the batter to shake hands, this after a run up double of the length that the subsequently generated pace suggested it should be. That his dash to the boundary did not prevent an all-run four was no shame; the Oval field in those days was vast, barely contained within a single postal district.

In a footnote to Gibson’s account it was reported that in the 52^nd over of Surrey’s reply umpire Peter Rochford failed to add an extra ball to the over for a wide. The match finished with the scores level but with Gloucestershire the winners having lost fewer wickets. These days, even in a non-televised match, such an error would be picked up by the match referee and communicated to the middle. In the past, counting mistakes were more frequent than might be thought, and, like other umpiring decisions were more widely accepted as part of life’s rich tapestry.

At Chelmsford, Brian Edmeades of Essex was caught on the boundary, but fielder Roger Marshall told the umpires that he could not be sure that both feet had remained inside the boundary (I’d bet that it was marked by a painted line rather than a rope). Edmeades was reprieved, and was unbeaten at the end of the innings. When the numbers were crunched at the end of the day that one wicket enabled Middlesex to qualify for the quarter-finals at the expense of  Sussex. Perhaps Sussex skipper Tony Greig had renounced the law of the jungle as urged by John Woodcock (see last week).

More slow scoring in the Sunday League. I was at Canterbury for the visit of Yorkshire, another game that fails to register in the memory, but the scorecard attests that I was there. 

The Times reporter was Michael Horsnell, at the beginning of three decades as a staff reporter. He covered crime and other issues rather than sport, possibly the result of his experience at St Lawrence that day.

 

Derbyshire had a bad week. On Saturday they lost to Lancashire by 67 runs. “Since for them any total over 150 constitutes and unseemly run orgy, it was clear that Derbyshire would have to rise above their usual mundane level with the bat to win” wrote Derby-based reporter Michael Carey (later to be come cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph). Later in the week Brian Bolus resigned as skipper, to be replaced by Bob Taylor.

Trawling the archives provides a reminder of stories that took up a lot of space at the time, but are now forgotten. One of these was the question of whether Montreal’s the new Olympic stadium would be ready for the 1976 summer games. Such was the level of doubt that this week Mexico City offered to dust down the 1968 stadium as an alternative.

The upcoming referendum on membership was the biggest continuing story. Like referenda on anything, the protagonists presented their view as the universal elixir while the truth lay ignored halfway between them.

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[1] In what is now regarded as the first test match Charles Bannerman, who faced the first ball, went on to make  167 out of a total of 245, which remains the highest proportion of an innings contributed by one batter in a test match (67.35%). Shepherd’s innings was 70.07% of the total. 

Hat Tricks I Have Seen (Part 1)

I have seen seven hat tricks over my half-century in the stands.

Have I been lucky to have been there for so many, or deprived to have witnessed so few? A straw poll of two people suggests the former. My Blean correspondent reckons that he saw one of Dean Headley’s in 1996, the year when an epidemic of Kentish hat tricks stared down the laws of probability. The other half of my sample has been hat-trick free for forty years or so despite spending many summer days at the Basin and other New Zealand venues, so seven seems a good return. After all, there have only been 41 hat tricks in all test cricket.

Of my seven, one was in a test match, four in the County Championship, one in the Sunday League and the other in the kiwi curiosity that was Cricket Max. Over a short series of posts I will describe them in chronological order, with the fixture linked to the scorecard.

1.  Robin Jackman, Kent v Surrey, County Championship, Canterbury, 21 May 1971

Simon Langton Boys’ School was just half a mile down the Nackington Road from the St Lawrence Ground, so on a match day I invariably took my seat during the tea interval.

That Friday I arrived on the final afternoon to find Mike Denness and Brian Luckhurst setting a good pace in pursuit of a target of 207 in roughly 40 overs, which sounds nothing much now, but would have been thought a tallish order then. No doubt quick singles, taken without a perceptible call, kept the scoreboard turning. Never have I seen a pair bat with more understanding of each other than Denness and Luckhurst.

Denness went with the partnership at exactly a hundred, and Cowdrey soon followed. Alan Ealham joined Luckhurst. Ealham’s career statistics—average 28, 7 centuries in 16 years—are not impressive on the face of it, but they tell nothing like the full story. Time and again, when an injection of momentum was required it would be Alan Ealham who would provide it with a quick 30 or 40, anonymous in the scorebook, devastating on the field.

So it was today. With 58 needed from the last ten overs, Wisden says that “Ealham really punished the Surrey attack” (which won the Championship that year) and the Kent annual that he was “hitting hard”. You bet he was. In no time he was on 45, and Kent were 11 short of victory, coasting it seemed.

Alan Gibson called Robin Jackman the “Shoreditch Sparrow”. This made the public schoolboy (St Edmund’s in Canterbury, as it happens) appear more of a common Londoner than he actually was, though he certainly bowled in the artisan tradition. Fast-medium off a long run up with short steps, Jackman was on the edge of test selection for a decade. At the Oval test match in 1976 I sat next to a couple of friends of Jackman. He had been talked about for much of that summer, but not picked and they relayed his view that, at 31, his chance had gone. Four years later, he played the first of four tests.

His lbw appeals had the volume of a soprano and the passion of a barrister arguing for the life of a murderer. A few years ago, when commentating on a test in India, he criticised a bowler for appealing loudly and I emailed to ask if he was any relation to the RD Jackman who appealed for Surrey.

Here, he had Ealham caught-and-bowled, then bowled Bernard Julien off the last ball of the over. The hat trick was completed off the first ball of Jackman’s next over when Stuart Storey “brilliantly caught” (Kent Annual) Luckhurst. John Shepherd was also out in this period, causing nervousness among the faithful, but Knott and Woolmer took Kent to victory with seven balls to spare.

2.  Derek Underwood, Sussex v Kent, County Championship, Hove, 31 August 1977

1977 was an uneasy season. The Kerry Packer issue had exploded with the impact of an asteroid on the dinosaurs, though it did not so much make cricket’s T Rexes extinct, as provoke them into a cacophony of over-reaction and foolishness. Six players at Hove that day had already signed for WSC: Derek Underwood, Alan Knott and Asif Iqbal of Kent, and for Sussex Imran Khan, John Snow and Tony Greig, who was cricket’s Darth Vader in the summer that Star Wars first appeared in cinemas. Bob Woolmer’s “defection” (to use the absurd language of that confused time) was announced the following Saturday.

The dinosaurs were trying to drive the WSC players out of county cricket, so it was possible that it was the last we would see of these fine players if the dinosaurs continued to rule the world. In itself, that made the trip to Hove worthwhile, as did the fact that Kent had their best chance in seven years of winning the Championship.

It was a dismal summer in terms of the weather as well as cricketing politics; just few days previously, my Blean correspondent and myself had spent much of a test match Saturday afternoon sheltering under the terraces at the Oval, our only consolation a grotesque tenth wicket stand between Bob Willis and Mike Hendrick during the brief period of play.

Play did not begin until three o’clock at Hove that Wednesday. The Kent Annual says that “Knight [who has just taken office as MCC President] attacked vigorously and Barclay defended dourly”, a division of labour that produced a second-wicket stand of 61. But as the afternoon wore on the pitch started to dry out and the wickets started to fall, though only two of the first six went to Underwood, which suggests that it was difficult rather than lethal.  

Imran Khan was the first leg of hat trick, falling to a diving catch by Bob Woolmer at short leg. Woolmer continued to field at short leg—still in the helmetless era—long after many players would have called rank and retreated to the slips.

John Snow was next. With a little application Snow could have become a bowling all-rounder, but his attitude to batting suggested that he felt it a bit beneath him, though not as much as fielding was, as those of us who watched him on the boundary, immobile with arms folded in a Championship match will recall. It would be dishonest to pretend that I remember what shot Snow offered to Underwood on this occasion, but trust that it was a wild swipe. One way or the other, he was bowled.

That completed the over, so Tony Greig had six deliveries to get down the other end to face the hat-trick ball. Ten were scored off the next over, which leads one to consider whether nine or 11 might have been attainable without great inconvenience. But it was Arnold Long who was left to keep Underwood out.

I have written before that my Blean correspondent and I have spent much of our prime on perfecting the selection of the All-time Boring XI. The wicket-keeping position has caused us particular angst, because boring keepers are oxymorons. The role seems to demand skittishness and militates against tedium bat-in-hand.

So the incumbent is A Long, the very man who now stood between Derek Underwood and his first hat-trick. It was Long’s anonymity that won us over. We had seen him play often, yet could remember nothing that he had done. But Long’s approach to this situation persuades me that we should look again.

You see, on a drying pitch, with the world’s best exponent of such conditions on a hat trick, Long—facing the first ball of his innings remember—chose to charge down the pitch even before the ball had left the bowler’s hand. They could have given him 20 goes at this and the outcome—the easiest stumping of Alan Knott’s career—would have been the same every time. Perhaps it was some sort of protest at this captain leaving him in the line of fire.

It was Derek Underwood’s only hat trick, so was quite something to have seen. The rain washed out the last day, the Packer players were allowed to return to county cricket (though Greig did so for only a few games, so I never saw him play again), and Kent shared the Championship with Middlesex.

It was six years until I saw another hat trick.