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 season ends: 9 to 15 September 1967

The 1967 season ended with the World Cup, which will surprise those who take the orthodox view that the first World Cup was played eight years later. Neither was it the first, a similar event having taken place the previous year. The tournament consisted of a three-match round robin between England, Pakistan and the Rest of the World XI. All matches were played at Lord’s. The shortening evenings meant that they were 50-over contests at a time when 60 overs were the norm, or 40 on Sunday afternoons.

Just as the designation of the game played in Melbourne in March 1877 as the first test match is somewhat random, so there is a case for regarding these games as the first one-day internationals. The quality of the players was more than good enough to warrant the status, particularly the World XI, with its potent harmony of South Africans and West Indians. For years I intended to write about these matches as the first, lost ODIs, but was beaten to it by Philip Barker, who had an interesting piece on the subject in Wisden 2016.

Eddie Barlow made an unbeaten 74 against England, then took four for 23 against Pakistan. Barlow’s name is rarely mentioned when the great all-rounders are discussed, but it should be on the list, at least. He took 571 first-class wickets at 24, 15 less than his batting average. The margin in his 30 tests is +11. He was outstanding in the 1970 Rest of the World series, scoring two hundreds and topping the bowling averages with 20 wickets at 19.80. 

The three-day match at Scarborough between the World and England XIs had been watched by 30,000, but the one-day tournament met public indifference and was not repeated, which is odd given that domestic one-day cricket had become so popular. Perhaps they should have stayed in Scarborough and replaced the rather dour Yorkshire v MCC game in which Geoffrey Boycott made a century as indigestible as seaside rock. 

My cricket watching for 1967 concluded at Canterbury for the Gillette Cup winners challenge match against the touring side, the second and final such fixture.  The thing I remember best about that day was a six hit by Stuart Leary that cleared the famous in-field lime tree. Not the uppermost branches perhaps, but certainly those that bulged out to one side. I had forgotten that Alan Dixon took five that day, following the seven in the quarter-final. Leary and Dixon both had fine seasons. 

Yorkshire beat MCC, thanks to their young off spinner Geoff Cope. AA Thomson was at Scarborough throughout the nine-day festival, delighting Times readers as he had all season with phrases that said more than others would manage in a couple of hundred words. Barlow and Nurse’s partnership “contained every stroke from the book and several daring ones from the appendix”. Lance Gibbs was “the notorious master of guile, who by autosuggestion made them in turn pick the wrong ball to hit”. Milburn “had his leg stump uprooted and the spectators’ tide of pleasure inevitably receded”. 

These were the last cricket reports that AA Thomson wrote. He was too ill when the 1968 season began and died in early June. Here is his obituary:

Alan Gibson had turned from cricket to rugby and reported from three grounds in three days in the first half of the week. It was a surprise that the third of these was Bristol v Cardiff, one of the games of the season in those pre-league days, oddly scheduled for a Wednesday evening with a 6 30 kick off (presumably there were no floodlights at the Memorial Ground in those days—they had arrived by the time I first stood on the terraces in the late seventies, though a full moon in a cloudless sky would overpower them). Bristol led twice but were well beaten in the end, no disgrace when the opposition had Gareth Edwards and Barry John at Nos 9 and 10. 

Tony Nicholls was John’s opposite number, but not at No 10. He would have been wearing shirt F, in Bristol’s tradition of using letters instead of numbers. It was confusing when Leicester were the opposition; they also used letters, but in sequence from the front row, rather than the full back as Bristol did. If the game was boring spectators could find solace in Scrabble. Nicholls was head of geography at Cotham Grammar School when I did my teaching practice there (as a history teacher) in 1982.

Silbury Hill in Wiltshire was to be excavated. The Times report shows how little was known about it beyond that it was a pre-Roman artificial hill. The excavation found that it may date back as far as 2500BC, but deepened the mystery of why it was constructed, as it was found not to be a burial site. Why would people have spent thousands of hours outside, subject to the worst of the weather, on an apparently pointless endeavour? Perhaps they were passing the time while waiting for the County Championship to be invented.

One of the things I have enjoyed about the 1967 project is the realisation that there is little under the sun that is new. This week came a proposal from a civil engineering company to build an airport in the Thames Estuary, an idea that has resurfaced in recent times under the new ownership of Boris Johnson. 

Boris has not taken up another bright idea from fifty years ago—the inevitability of Britain switching to driving on the right-hand side of the road—but it is only a matter of time.

This ends the weekly series of pieces summing up the week fifty years ago. There will be three more posts over the next couple of weeks or so to finish off the 1967 retrospective, looking at the Gillette Cup final, thinking about cricket now and then, and reflecting on the process of recreating a cricket season through social media.

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.