Derek Underwood at 70

If, under threat of some kind of cruel and unusual punishment, such as death or having the cricket writing of Piers Morgan read to me, I was compelled to name one cricketer as my favourite, a few names would pass through my mind.

Early heroes, such as Colin Cowdrey and Asif Iqbal. Great players who I have seen do magnificent things, like Viv Richards and Kumar Sangakkara.

CJ Tavaré, obviously.

The case for Brendon McCullum is compelling, at a time when measured writers say that he is changing test cricket (a few days ago, he hit his first ball in a test match for six over extra cover).

But two names stand above the rest, always have, always will: Alan Knott and Derek Underwood, Kent and England’s greatest wicket-keeper and spin bowler (though there is strong local competition in both categories). Today, l’ll choose Underwood, if only because last week he celebrated his 70^th birthday.

Not that you could tell by looking at him. There were a couple of glimpses of Underwood in the crowd at the Lord’s test, looking much as he has always done, barring a case of creeping sideburns in the early seventies. He looked quite capable of taking off the jacket and tie, rolling up the sleeves and delivering a perplexing ten overs or so.

The run-up would have changed no more than it did from 1963 to 1987. Fifteen steps culminating in an elegant uncoiling, buttoned shirt billowing in the breeze.

For years Playfair persisted in describing him as LM rather than SLA, which was true but missed the point, just as foie gras might be accurately described as meat paste. Underwood took the spinner’s role, to bowl long, constricting spells on good pitches and to attack when the ball turned. No commonplace spinner though, being quicker, Swiss-clock accurate and, at least early in his career, bowling cutters as much as conventional spin. The fact is that if he was injured, a spinner, not a seamer, took his place.

But there’s the thing. In 25 years when was he injured? I don’t recall him missing a test, or a county game of any significance. Yet the thought persists that if the young Underwood were to turn up for a county trial today, round-shouldered, slightly stooping, cigarette on and lacking in enthusiasm for weights and shuttle runs, he would be sent to the gym, or obscurity.

The first thing people say about Derek Underwood is that he was lethal on drying pitches, and so he was, perhaps the best ever at this now-lost art. Underwood ball-in-hand with a damp patch on a length made the Christians v the lions look a fair fight.

The most unplayable over I ever saw was bowled by Underwood against Hampshire at St Lawrence in 1984. The era of uncovered pitches had ended, but water seeped past the protection and the pitch was wet.

Kent declared their first innings at 179 for four when play resumed late on the third afternoon. Both teams forfeited an innings and Hampshire were left with 180 to win in more than two hours, an offer that they took with the eagerness of a man who, given the chance to purchase Tower Bridge for a thousand pounds, does not stop to consider that it must be a scam.

Fifty-six all out in 27 overs, Underwood seven for 21, the ball defying physics and geometry as it leapt and spat. In that single, magnificent, over Chris Smith, Mark Nicholas and Trevor Jesty all demonstrated that they were good batsman by managing to get an edge to one of these conundrums. I would have defied anybody—Bradman, Hammond, Tendulkar, anybody—to have touched any of the other three deliveries.

But don’t think that Underwood was just a wet-pitch bowler. Some did, even then. “That’ll sort Underwood out” they said around the counties when fully covered pitches came in for the 1981 season. Over the next two years only Malcolm Marshall and Richard Hadlee took more first-class wickets than Underwood, then in his mid-thirties and playing for a team in decline.

Then look at his record overseas, where he took 152 of his 297 test wickets. In Australia he took 50 wickets at 31 (plus 16 at 27 in the WSC “supertests”), in India 54 at 26. In New Zealand he fed like a whale at a plankton convention with 24 wickets at 13 in just four tests; all those soft pitches and inadequate techniques.

He was also one of the finest one-day bowlers of his time, his mid-innings spells as inhibiting to acceleration as a line of sleeping policeman along a straight road. Underwood's parsimony was a major factor in Kent’s one-day triumphs of the seventies.

As I write I am watching a replay of the second in the current ODI series between England and New Zealand in which 400 has become the new 260. How would Underwood have coped in the era of big bats and fielding restrictions?

Well, batsmen would have been forced out of respectful prudence, and he would have gone for more runs, certainly. But that William Tell accuracy, and the change of pace, would still be there; get it slightly wrong and the ball goes straight up in the air. He would win as many matches now as then.

World Series Cricket effectively ended his test career; there was a reluctance to pick WSC players for England even when they became available once more, and Underwood was picked only for a single test against the West Indies in 1980 and the tour of India and Sri Lanka in 1981/2, so played little in his peak years. Earlier, as England captain, Ray Illingworth often preferred Norman Gifford to Underwood, passing over a painter of subtle portraits in oils in favour of an efficient whitewasher of walls and ceilings.

Had Underwood’s England career not been interrupted, Jimmy Anderson would still be chasing the England test wicket record.  

Offer me a ticket on a time machine to go back to watch just one innings of any in cricket history, and I wouldn’t choose Bradman’s 300 in a day at Leeds in 1930, or even WG’s 344 at the St Lawrence for MCC in 1876. I’d go to Hastings on 2 July 1984, to see Derek Underwood, in his 618^th first-class innings, score his only century.

I recall the day clearly, and the memory is a reminder of how far the information revolution has taken us. I had not caught any of the radio sports bulletins during the afternoon, and got home late, so it was only when I picked up a copy of the Bristol Evening Post that I had an inkling of the drama on the Sussex coast.

There it was in the stop press: Underwood 84*. It will astonish anybody under 30 that only after two hours of mental torment was I able to establish that Underwood had indeed secured his century (nobody I knew even had teletext). But it was before the pubs shut, and my non-cricketing flatmates were happy to repair to the Alma Tavern in Clifton to raise a glass that they hadn’t paid for to a man they had barely heard of for an achievement that they didn’t understand.

The relationship between Derek Underwood and the Central Recreation Ground, Hastings—scene of the triumph—was to akin to that of Henry VIII and the monasteries: an infinite source of easy pickings. Twenty years before the century, it was there that Underwood achieved his career-best bowling figures: nine for 28. In 1967 he took seven in both innings and in 1973 took eight wickets for nine runs. In just nine first-class appearances there, he took 61 wickets.

On the day before the hundred I enjoyed watching TV coverage of Underwood taking six for 12 at Hastings in the Sunday League, the best one-day figures of his career barring an eight-wicket skittling of Scotland in his final season, so he has the best one-day bowling performance on the ground as well as the best first-class performance. These records are frozen in eternity; under the frozen foods, in fact: the ground is now buried under a supermarket.

So, again I raise a glass to you and your achievements, Derek Underwood. You are my favourite cricketer. At least until 9 April next year, when Knotty turns 70.

Kent v Leicestershire, Gillette Cup quarter-final, Canterbury, 31 July 1974

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/34/34529.html

It is always cheering to wake up in the Wellington chill to news that the old county has won overnight. This has happened pleasingly often recently, particularly in the Sunday League (as my Blean Correspondent and I still choose to refer to 40-over cricket).  Six wins in a row have taken Kent to the top of their group with one match to play. That will be against Sussex, who are just a point behind. So it will, almost, amount to a quarter-final at the St Lawrence Ground on Bank Holiday Monday. Almost, because the best second-placed team will join the three group winners in the semi-final draw, and my calculations (not always a reliable guide) suggest that the defeat would have to be huge for Kent to be pushed out of this position.

I hope that the ground will be full, just as it was in the glory days. Let us select a scorecard from July 1974 by way of illustration. Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, Richard Nixon was about to resign from the White House, George Macrae’s Rock Your Baby was No 1, and Kent played Leicestershire in the quarter-final of the Gillette Cup.

The two counties had already contested a quarter-final at Canterbury that year, in the 55-over competition. Leicestershire won that one. They batted first and reached 238 for six, a reasonable score for the time. Barry Dudleston’s 79 was the top score, his partnership with Brian Davison of 98 from 18 overs the heart of the innings. Dudleston was to become my personal ski instructor a decade or so later, but that’s a story for another day.

It was a school day, so I saw none of that, arriving hotfoot down the Nackington Road in mid-afternoon to be told by a collective groan that things were not going well. You can read the noise of a cricket crowd quite easily if you have been in enough of them and there was no mistaking that this was a “God there’s another one gone” groan: Kent were 12 for three.

Brian Luckhurst was steadfast at one end, but wickets kept falling at the other. Some hope was retrieved when Bernard Julien was promoted to No 7 and shared a partnership of 87 with Luckhurst at a reasonable pace. It was the only time I can remember Julien being given any responsibility with the bat and the result suggests that it might have been done more often. He had scored a quick hundred in a Test at Lord’s the previous year, after all. But there was talent everywhere in the Kent order in those days, and Julien at No 7 meant that Bob Woolmer, who was to score a Test hundred against Australia the following year, was down at No 9.

Luckhurst was out for 111 trying to hit the penultimate ball of the innings for six when ten were needed. He won the man-of-the-match award despite Graham McKenzie having taken five for 34, winning the game with decisive spells at either end of the innings. It’s a batsman’s game.

So seven weeks later the teams met again to contest another quarter-final, this time with 60 overs a side. That year, these two counties were the best in the country, at one-day cricket, at least. Just to make it even more interesting, there was the sub-text of Denness v Illingworth, the incumbent England captain against his predecessor. Raymond Illingworth had not been pleased by this turn of events and – I was to learn during the après-ski at a later date – was particularly keen to put one over on Kent. As we will see, it was not to be his day.

I was there by nine o’clock, but the cars would have been lining up down the Old Dover Road from daybreak, the first in observing the tradition of what John Arlott called “the Canterbury breakfast” by getting out the camping stoves and starting the sausages sizzling. By the time McKenzie bowled the first ball to Luckhurst at 11 o’clock the ground was full; Wisden gives the attendance as 12,000. It was the best day of a wet summer.

All day, there were echoes of the match a few weeks earlier. Again, Kent lost early wickets, starting with Graham Johnson. Colin Cowdrey came in at three. Cowdrey’s reputation as a fine batsman, but a cautious one led opposition supporters to expect him to block all day. In the 55-over final the previous year, there were jeers and laughter from some Worcestershire folk as he came to the middle with only a couple of overs to go. But he increased the scoring rate with shots so deft and well-weighted that he scored two from almost every ball he faced, even with the field back in those pre-circle restriction days. He was puffed at the end though.

By the way, guess where Cowdrey often fielded in one-day cricket. At backward point. So did Norman Graham. It was where the captain hid his slow fielders. A generation later and it had become the place from where Jonty Rhodes, Paul Collingwood and the other guns leapt, dived and threw the stumps down.

This day was not Colin Cowdrey’s. He was out for a duck and Kent were 22 for two. That was where our anxiety peaked for the day, as Mike Denness joined Luckhurst for a partnership of 149. One of the great pleasures for Kent supporters was to watch these two bat together. They complimented each other so well, Luckhurst strong on the onside, Denness on the off. Almost a decade of opening the batting together had given them the trust and understanding that made them thieves of a quick single, two baseball batters stealing base at the same time. There was no calling to alert the opposition to their mischief either; no need when both knew what the other was thinking.

When Denness went for 72, Alan Ealham came in to rev things up. When people look at the Kent line-up in the seventies they might wonder how Ealham came to have a regular place in a team that otherwise comprised international players, and how he went in above Knott, Shepherd, Woolmer and Julien for many years. His career figures – an average of 28 with only seven centuries in 16 seasons – are ordinary. They tell not a quarter of the story. Besides being the finest boundary fielder I have seen, he made his runs when they were most needed. Look through the scorecards and count how often his 50 or sixty was highest score in a low total, or, like today, when quickfire 40 was the difference between a gettable total and one that was beyond reach.

Ealham added 57 with Luckhurst (who finished with 125) then 42 in four overs with Knott. Illingworth drew much of the fire, conceding 23 from one over and finishing with the figures of 12 overs, no maidens, 76 runs and no wickets. Mention Illingworth (and it should be made clear that he was a fine cricketer and one of England’s best captains) to my Blean correspondent or myself to this day and we will intone these figures with the seriousness of a Buddhist monk teaching the eightfold path.

Kent’s total of 295 disappeared over Leicestershire’s horizon thanks to parsimonious use of the new ball by Graham and Shepherd. Brian Davison gave them hope with a splendidly aggressive 82. He hit Derek Underwood for 18 in one over, as many as the great man ever went for I would think. It was good to see Davison featured on the Tasmanian avenue of fame at the Bellerive Oval a few weeks ago. He had a few years at Bristol when he was past his best, as so many did. When he was out, that was effectively it, and the final margin of victory was 66 runs.

I hope that the modern Kent team go into their big match with something of the confidence of their predecessors from 40 years ago. They could do with a Luckhurst or an Underwood of course, but Rob Key would have had a place in that great team, there is exciting young talent (I’d love to see young Sam Billings bat) and a few Alan Ealham types who can make a difference on the day. I’ll be up early to see how they get on.

Update: I said that only a huge defeat could exclude Kent from the semi-final, and so it was, by 9 wickets with ten overs to spare.

 

Soul for Sale

St Lawrence Ground, Canterbury

The county cricket blog on The Guardian website has become one of the best sources of writing on county cricket, but a contribution from David Hopps on Friday was alarming:

Mention of Kent's parlous financial state – and the revisited theory that they might eventually move their HQ closer to London in search of Twenty20 riches – has brought a few emails from those in the know. A few Kent captains have observed over the years that the great error of Lord Harris, the second captain of England and a man who played for Kent for 40 years, was to choose a ground in Canterbury, which is somewhat out on a limb.

Jim Woodhouse, a former Kent chairman of cricket, suggested a move towards London 20 years ago and there was so much huffing and puffing from EW Swanton and the like that nothing was heard of it again. It could only ever happen if Kent went bankrupt and began again with a wholly different philosophy. Kent's entire ethos is based upon cricket played on beautiful, tree-lined grounds and for that perhaps cricket should be grateful.

What makes this apocalyptic vision scary is that the possibility of bankruptcy cannot be dismissed, such is the state of the county’s finances and the epic scale of the mismanagement over several decades that has brought this about (see previous post on the foray into the world of pop promotion).

However, David Hopps’ interpretation of the history is very wide of the mark. By the time of the modern county club’s formation in 1870 (when organisations centred on Canterbury and Maidstone merged) the St Lawrence Ground had been established as the county’s leading venue for several decades, through the success of Canterbury Cricket Week (which had not always included a county team). Lord Harris may be condemned for many reasons, but the choice of Canterbury as the county’s headquarters was obvious and, for more than a century, meant nothing in terms of where Kent played cricket.

As recently as the Championship season of 1970 Kent’s home championship fixtures were played on nine grounds around the county: Blackheath, Canterbury, Dartford, Dover, Folkestone, Gillingham, Gravesend, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells (with a Sunday League game at Beckenham bringing the overall total into double figures). Canterbury had only the two games of Canterbury week, one Sunday game, and one Gillette Cup fixture (incidentally, neither Hesketh Park, Dartford, nor the Garrison Ground, Gillingham could be described as “beautiful”, nor, fond of it as I was, could Cheriton Road, Folkestone).

Quality of pitches and facilities, and the cost of transporting increasing amounts of paraphernalia from ground to ground (especially after the dreaded advertising hoardings came into fashion in the mid-seventies) meant that that Blackheath, Dover, Gillingham and Gravesend had been lost by the end of the seventies, but Folkestone and Dartford (on and off) hung on into the nineties, and Maidstone until just a few seasons ago.

The Mote, Maidstone

There is an issue here; the majority of the Kent population (and the membership) lives in the west of the county, including the south-eastern suburbs of London. It is reasonable that more cricket should be played in this area, though whether investing heavily in the Beckenham ground is the way to bring this about is questionable. I support the decision to play a home T20 game at the Oval (not a new idea, incidentally, and I have seen Kent play a home game at the Oval – any guesses?).

However, the view that the county would necessarily be better off by shifting needs to be challenged before it gains hold. Firstly, the St Lawrence Ground is not in the middle of Romney Marsh, nor on the Goodwin Sands. Neither the fording of rivers nor the transfer of bags to a team of sure-footed yaks is necessary to get to it. It is about a mile off the A2, the main route out of London to the south and east, and is easily accessible from everywhere else in the county.

People managed to get there easily enough in the seventies, when Kent had a winning, attractive team. Attendances were consistently higher than they were at the Oval or Lord’s for county games (and probably still are). And as I can testify from two decades spent watching county games in the wasteland of the County Ground, Bristol, being located in a large population centre does not guarantee crowds. Come to think of it, Gloucestershire makes a relevant case study; more money is made from the Cheltenham festival (location comparable with Canterbury) than most of the rest of the season at Bristol.

But more than that, cricket is a game with a soul. The suits who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing must never be in a majority of those in charge. County cricket, if it is to remain in existence, must respect its history and its roots as it looks ahead. If it is not prepared to do that, then we may as well adopt a franchise system, and run a combined Kent/Surrey team (the Whitbread Flat Vowlers, perhaps).

In the meantime, I hope that it won’t only be the ghost of Jim Swanton who is huffing and puffing at the possibility of for-sale notices going up along the Old Dover Road.