Single wicket in Kent; single-minded from Boycott 3 – 9 June 1967

Middlesex v Kent 7 - 9 June 1967

England v India, first test, Headingley

Anybody in need of reassurance that the world is a better place in 2017 than it was fifty years ago need only read this report of a match between the England women’s team and the Lord’s Taverners, played at the Oval.

Where to begin? For a start it is in the news pages, rather than sport, a bit of colour at the bottom of page two. To add to the disappointment, it was written by Philip Howard, later a distinguished literary editor of The Times, and a fine writer for the paper until his death in 2014. He tries to be nice, but the allure of a rolling pin metaphor becomes too much. One might have expected more of a former women’s lacrosse correspondent of the Glasgow Herald. 

Perhaps most grating is his use of first names. Who would guess that opener “Enid” is Enid Bakewell, named by Wisden as one of the five best women cricketers for all countries? I expect that the bowlers were ungainly compared to Statham. Roughly 98% of male bowlers were, after all. And perhaps WG Grace would have been less scandalised by women playing cricket than Howard believes, given that the great man was taught the fundamentals of the game in the orchard at Downend partly by his mother, Martha.

In the first half of the week, for the first time this season, Kent had no fixture. But instead of a much-needed day off, the playing staff had to report to St Lawrence for a single-wicket competition. It was appropriate that Kent should participate in a revival of this once-popular form of the game as at its peak in the first half of the nineteenth century its most famous practitioners were all Kent players: Alfred Mynn, Nicholas Felix and Fuller Pilch. Perhaps the most famous contest of all took place at Lord’s in 1846, a two-innings contest. There were just two fielders available to the bowler, but no runs could be scored behind square, and to score a run the batsmen had to make it to the bowler’s end and back. Shots had to be played with at least one foot behind the front crease. Felix batted first and was bowled for a duck. Mynn replied with five. In his second innings, Felix faced 247 balls from which he scored three runs (one a wide) before being bowled, leaving Mynn the victor by an innings and two runs. The crowd that packed Lord’s loved it.*

By 1967 the rules of single-wicket had evolved so that it more resembled a normal game of cricket. Each player had the full complement of fielders available and matches were limited to eight overs a player. But out was out, so when Derek Underwood was out for a duck, Alan Dixon scored a single to progress. Scheduling must have been a nightmare. 

As might be expected, the all-rounders Dixon and Shepherd got through to the semis, joined by fast bowler Alan Brown and batsman John Prodger, who was in his last season (though he may not have known that at the time) after ten years as something of a bit player. He was renowned as an outstanding slip fielder. In the final, Prodger made an unbeaten 41 in his eight overs, which Dixon overcame to win the competition. He would represent Kent in the national competition at Lord’s later in the season.

The following day, again at St Lawrence, Kent played the International Cavaliers, a match I was present for. As I have written before, the extent to which the Cavaliers have been forgotten is reflected in the fact that my piece on them comes up second in a Google search behind a brief Wikipedia entry. The Cavaliers played against counties and other teams on Sunday afternoons live on BBC 2. As can be seen from the scorecard, the Cavaliers consisted of a mix of the best contemporary players—Sobers, Close, Boycott, Gibbs in this case—some famous names in or near retirement—Evans, Bailey, Trueman—and a few others to make up the numbers. The Cavaliers opener C Smith is Cammie Smith, a Bajan who played one test and later became an ICC match referee. Mohammad Younis became better known as Younis Ahmed during a long county career.

It was cricket designed for TV, a progenitor of World Series Cricket and T20 and it packed out Canterbury that afternoon as it did around the country every Sunday. The world’s best cricketer dominated the game: Sobers four for 18 and joint top scorer with 33 against Kent’s modest 120.

It was an unpredictable week in the Championship. Champions Yorkshire lost twice, and badly at that, at Lord’s and Bath. The top two, Hampshire and Leicestershire, both lost but kept their places. Tom Graveney “struggled” to a century against Warwickshire, according to the headline. Graveney struggling would be a better watch than most batsmen at their best. Middlesex followed their victory against Yorkshire by clinging on against Kent thanks to a two-and-a-half hour unbroken seventh-wicket partnership from Eric Russell and Harry Latchman. Mike Denness scored his first century of the summer, but it was an innings from Colin Cowdrey that had Vivian Jenkins purring in The Times.

Jenkins was a Welsh rugby international and former Glamorgan cricketer who had covered the MCC tour of Australia in 1946/7 and was rugby correspondent of the Sunday Times for many years. He was sensible enough to spend his retirement winters in New Zealand according to his obituary in The Guardian.

Cowdrey was, unusually, not in the test team for the first test against India at Headingley. It was the scene of Geoff Boycott’s most notorious innings, one that John Woodcock laid into in his report.

Nobody, I am certain, has scored more than Boycott’s unbeaten 246 and then been dropped, as he was for the second test.

The Middle East had descended into what we know as the Six Day War, the short duration measuring the degree to which the Arab alliance underestimated the Israeli military. Israel took over the Sinai, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Arab sector of Jerusalem, all of which except Sinai and Gaza it continues to control to some degree to the present day. Reporting from Beirut for The Times was Norman Fowler, still claiming expenses half a century on, now as Lord Speaker, having spent much of the interim as a leading Conservative politician.

*This account of Mynn v Felix is based on John Major’s More Than a Game. Major may not have been much of a prime minister but he’s a cracking cricket historian.

The 1966 West Indians

Cohen, 1966.

Play word association with that, and most will say: George Cohen, doughty Fulham full back, and one of the most famous set of names of English sporting history. A hero of Wembley, 30 July 1966.

Very few will respond as My Life in Cricket Scorecards does: Rudolph Cohen, fast bowler, member of the 1966 West Indian touring team to England. Did not play a test.

The World Cup triumph has been widely and rightly remembered over the past few months, fifty years on. But by the time England kicked off against Uruguay in the tournament’s opening game, My Life in Cricket Scorecards was taking the 1966 Kent CCC Annual to school as his reading book. To him, “Hunt” was not Roger of Liverpool, but Conrad of Barbados, spelt with an “e”.

For cricket people, 1966 was a shaft of Caribbean sunlight in a dull decade. The previous season was described by Wisden as “mainly disappointing”. As for 1964, the recitation of Tom Cartwright’s figures in the Old Trafford Ashes test tell you all you need to know: 77-32-118-2. As a first step in cricket it would have been like giving a child War and Peace as their first reader.

There are some ultimate truths that can be understood as well by a seven-year-old as by anybody. Though, I was far too young to articulate it, at some level I appreciated that the West Indians were playing cricket as a form of self-expression, which is usually when the game is at its best. My attention was grabbed with the first ball of the series, square cut for four by Conrad Hunte. Here was a team that played without reticence or constraint. Hunte finished with 135, though he was dropped on seven by Ken Higgs at long leg. Norman Preston in Wisden provided the fielder with an excuse that would be without credibility almost anywhere but Manchester in summer, namely that he had sighted the ball “very late against the distant background of dark-coated spectators”.    

That day I was freed of an emotional dependence on England winning; I must have realised that it was probable that my cricket watching would be less traumatic if this was not so, a view that continued to enrich my spectating experience through the years.

Garfield Sobers made 161 in that innings at Old Trafford, the smallest of the three centuries he made in the series, which he finished with an average of 101. Then there were 20 wickets, second only to the great off-spinner Lance Gibbs, who took only one more. Against Kent at Canterbury Sobers took his career-best bowling of nine for 49. It is likely that I saw the first two of these wickets taken at the end of the second day; I was there after school for the last part of the day and have Sobers’ autograph in my 1966 Kent CCC junior membership card (cost: one guinea) to prove it, but have no specific recollection of his bowling that afternoon.

I wasn’t particularly lucky watching Sobers. The best I saw him play was at Lord’s in the first day of the final test of 1973 when he came in late in the day and made the 31 not out, carrying on the next day to 150 without any sleep in the intervening period, or so legend has it. But I did see him play, and he was the greatest player of my lifetime, so that’s something.

In 1966 Sobers also scored a Lord’s hundred, saving a match that appeared lost with an unbroken partnership of 274 with his cousin, David Holford.

The strength of the West Indian middle order was the basis of resounding victories in the following two tests to seal the series. England took a 90-run lead in the third at Trent Bridge, but in the second innings a double century from Basil Butcher, supported by fifties from Rohan Kanhai and Seymour Nurse and 94 from Sobers, took the game well beyond the home team.

There was then a month’s break in the tests so that the cricket would not distract people from the World Cup. A different time. Of course, the tour went on. Eight matches were played in the interim, including that game at Canterbury. There were 28 first-class fixtures on the tour itinerary. This would be untenable today, but it did mean that the whole party had the opportunity to become at ease in the conditions. New Zealand’s recent trouncing in India has again illustrated how a side can flounder without that opportunity. Making it compulsory for touring sides to play three first-class games before the tests would do more to make test matches more competitive, and therefore attractive to spectators, than any number of marketing gimmicks.

Here is a Movietone News report on the fourth test, at Headingley. West Indies racked up 500 in the first innings with big hundreds from Nurse and Sobers against an England attack that included the debutant Derek Underwood. The scorecard suggests a mental running of the white flag up the flagpole, with the two innings totalling 55 short of the West Indies’ one. Nurse is rarely mentioned as a significant figure of the great West Indian era, but he averaged 48 with six centuries in 29 tests, so he should be. Here in New Zealand people remember his 826 runs in the three-test series in 1969, when he had already announced his retirement.

It would be wrong though to give the impression that the attraction of that series rested only with the West Indies. For a start there was Colin Milburn, whose presence in the attritional England side of the mid-sixties was as incongruous as Falstaff would have been in Cymbeline. He batted in colour in a black-and-white world. Ninety-four at Old Trafford was followed by a blistering hundred at Lord’s.

Milburn is the subject of a new play written by Douglas Blaxland, the nom de plume of the former Kent all-rounder James Graham-Brown (there have been a few Kent players who might have been well-advised to live out their lives under a false name, but Graham-Brown isn’t one of them). The PCA has imaginatively arranged for the play to tour the county grounds. Expect the ECB to announce that a lavish musical will play the test grounds only on the same dates.

Milburn inspired a love of cricket in those who saw him, notably Matthew Engel. Backwatersman too. And me, though I don’t think that I ever saw him play live.

Tom Graveney was recalled for the second test. He was as old as my Dad, which for a seven-year-old meant that he was as old as Methuselah, but 96 at Lord’s was followed by a century at Trent Bridge, and he smiled as he played.

There was Basil D’Oliveira too. Children have a robust understanding of what is fair and unfair, so I understood with absolute clarity that it was outrageous that D’Oliveira was not allowed to play for South Africa because his skin was too dark. This, along with the brilliance of the West Indians gave me lifelong immunity from the prevailing nonsense of the Alf Garnett-Enoch Powell era.

Then there was Alan Gibson’s Old Bald Blighter, Brian Close, drafted in to lead the side in the final test at the Oval replacing Colin Cowdrey. He brought with him hard-headed professionalism in the form of Edrich, Illingworth and JT Murray. But halfway through the second day, with England 166 for seven in reply to 268, it appeared that Close had made no difference whatsoever.

One of the great rearguard actions then began, led by Graveney and Middlesex keeper JT Murray, who took my eye at first because he wore his cap at the same angle as Norman Wisdom. They put on 217 for the eighth wicket, even now the seventh-best in test history.

On the Saturday I had my first experience of the joyful anarchy of a decent last-wicket partnership, this one between John Snow and Ken Higgs worth 128. I have clear memory of accompanying my father on his grocery delivery round on a sweltering day while following the partnership on my transistor radio, re-tuned for once from Radio Caroline, which broadcast from a ship just over the horizon in the Thames Estuary. The commentators were Robert Hudson, Roy Lawrence and John Arlott. A first chance to listen to Arlott was not least among the influential experiences of 1966.

West Indies were happy enough to let England have the consolation victory, so the series wrapped up on the fourth day.

The thought that, were it not for the talented exuberance of Garfield Sobers and his team, this blog might be called My Life in Football Programmes brings a shudder to the soul.

Finally, a pop quiz, based on a Pathé newsreel coverage of the opening match of the tour, Duke of Norfolk’s XI v West Indians.

1. Who is the Norfolk XI’s keeper?
2. Who is non-striker when Sobers is bowling?
3. What position links him and Sobers?
4. Who is the bespectacled umpire?
5. What was his link with the England team of 1966?

By the way, the West Indian opener Michael Carew was more often known as “Joey”.