14-20 June 1975: Swing it like Happy Gilmour

 

Public interest in the World Cup was increasing as it moved towards its climax. Its success was clear. On Saturday New Zealand beat India to take what would become our traditional semi-final spot. India’s respectable 230 was passed with an over to spare thanks to Glenn Turner’s unbeaten 114, his second century of the tournament.

East Africa continued with their strategy of making the (sparse) crowd regret that they had paid good money to go to the cricket. They took 53 overs to make 92 in answer to England’s 290. John Snow took four for 11.

Sri Lanka weren’t much different: 138 in 51 overs chasing (or not) Pakistan’s 330.

Even though it meant nothing in terms of qualification, the game of the day was Australia v West Indies at the Oval, with immense interest in how the Caribbean batters would face up to the sensation that was Lillee and Thomson. The prospect was sufficiently intriguing to tempt Hugh McIlvanney into a rare visit to the cricket. His report in The Observer demonstrated an insight beyond that of most regular cricket correspondents and shows why he was widely regarded as the best sports writer of his era.

 

It was the West Indian quicks rather than the Australians who won the day. Kent’s Bernard Julien—I’d forgotten what an striking loping run he had—, Keith Boyce and Andy Roberts reduced Australia to 61 for five, with the help of a brilliant run out of Walters by Greenidge at mid-wicket. When an RAF flypast connected with the Trooping the Colour ceremony was seen at about this point Richie Benaud said that it was to mark the first Australian boundary.

Edwards and Marsh put on 99 before the second batch of five wickets fell for 32, leaving the West Indians with an obviously inadequate target of 193. After losing Greenidge early, Fredericks and Kallicharran put on 124 for the second wicket. The Warwickshire left-hander carried his fine county form into the World Cup and took it to Lillee in particular, with four fours in one over, leaving the great fast bowler with one for 66 off ten overs.

Anybody younger than 40 would not understand how difficult it was to keep up with this game. Because of the pageantry at Horseguards there was no live coverage for the first hour or so. Thereafter, the Oval game had to share space with the England match, racing from Bath and show jumping from Hickstead. There was sparse radio commentary, and it was pre-teletext, so basically a live-scores Stone Age.

Their defeat meant that Australia faced England at Headingley while the West Indies played New Zealand at the Oval.

For the Australians, it was a return to Headingley where they had been defeated in three days on a fusarium infested pitch perfect for DL Underwood to run through them, which is exactly what he did. To this day, mention Headingley ’72 to any Australian and they will slam their glass on the table and allege conspiracy and chicanery. It must be on the Australian schools curriculum in the Wrongs Done to Us section given roughly equal weight with the Japanese bombing of Darwin. What unfolded that Wednesday was seen as payback, as the Leeds gloom provided perfect conditions for Gary Gilmour’s left-arm swing.

Gilmour’s career consisted of dramatic entrances that created expectations that he did not come close to living up to. A century on debut for New South Wales; 52 and four for 75 on Test debut against New Zealand. Then the World Cup semi-final at Headingley. A late selection to replace Ashley Mallett when the Australians saw how grassy the pitch was, he took six for 14 as England were rolled for 93, then shared a partnership of 55 with Doug Walters to take Australia from 39 for six to a four-wicket victory. As we will see, Gilmour had another good day at Lord’s in the final, but there was hardly any more. Not quite a one-match wonder in the manner of Bob Massie, but not that far off. Unfulfilled promise for a player who the great left-armer Alan Davidson thought was a better player than he had been early in their careers. Gideon Haigh's profile of Gilmour for CricInfo suggests that a "light-hearted" approach to training did not help.

It could have been even worse for England on one of those Leeds days when the grey Yorkshire skies allowed the ball to go in any direction bar straight; they subsided to 37 for seven. Skipper Mike Denness top scored with 27, sporting a resemblance to the captain of the Titanic stoically on deck after iceberg Gilmour had holed his craft with irrevocable consequences. Only Arnold joined him in double figures. When Australia lost four wickets for seven runs the home side briefly became unlikely favourites, but Walters and Gilmour saw them home, helped by the first sight of the sun that day.

The other semi-final was much more prosaic. New Zealand’s 158 was about a hundred short of what was needed against the confident West Indian batting. Julien was agin in form with four for 27. A second-wicket partnership of 165 between Greenidge and Kallicharran settled it.

On the Sunday of that week I was at St Lawrence for the 40-over game against Worcestershire, one of the better examples of the genre. The visitors made what by the standards of the time was a massive 231 for four, Alan Ormrod batting through the innings for an unbeaten 110. How we missed the restraint that Derek Underwood imposed. Kent were 184 for one (Luckhurst 53, Johnson 88) but had fallen behind the clock. Four wickets fell quickly and things seemed hopeless when Colin Cowdrey, greeted as a hero after the announcement of his retirement, came in at No 6. Cowdrey was nobody’s choice for the improvised slogging that appeared to be Kent’s only hope, yet when John Inchmore dug one in Cowdrey swivelled inside the line and casually flicked the ball among the benches by the white scoreboard. A repeat and the game was Kent’s but Cowdrey was bowled by Inchmore and Worcestershire won by two runs.

The Sunday game interrupted a Championship match at Maidstone against Sussex, which Kent won on the third morning thanks to one of the greatest all-round performances by a Kent player. John Shepherd bowled unchanged through the first innings, finishing with eight for 93. He then made 52 in a sixth-wicket partnership of 122 with Dave Nicholls before taking seven for 54 to finish with 15 for 147. It seems that only a late change stopped him from becoming the first Kent bowler to bowl unchanged through both innings since the First World War. It was the first time since Dave Halfyard in 1959 that a Kent man had taken 15 in a match, Only Mohammad Sami and Martin McCague have done it since.

It was timely that Henry Blofeld interviewed Shepherd for The Guardian after this game.

 

One curiosity of that match was that it featured Norman Graham and Kevin Jarvis in the same Kent XI. Cricket scholars have long debated the question of which of these two was the worse batter. Their respective final career averages were 3.88 and 3.59. Graham’s seniority promoted him to the unexplored heights of No 10.

Gregory Armstrong, another young Caribbean fast bowler referred to in the Shepherd interview, was taking plenty of wickets, and creating a fair amount of mayhem, for Glamorgan. Surrey won the game at Cardiff but captain John Edrich (the “He” quoted in the following report) was not happy.

 

 

Wilf Wooller could always be relied upon for a pointed or splenetic quote. There are many stories associated with him. One of my favourites was his response to Jim Swanton’s letter requesting information about a young Glamorgan player. Swanton, often accused of focusing too much on the south-eastern counties, enclosed a stamped-addressed envelope for the reply. When it was returned a few days later it was found to contain only a copy of the London to Cardiff train timetable.

At the end of the week Hampshire remained on top of the County Championship while Clive Lloyd and Derek Underwood led the first-class averages.

 

There was a century by David Steele of Northamptonshire, an innings that was of much greater significance that anybody could have imagined.

The Second XI scores record nineties by T Chappell of Lancashire and Gower of Leicestershire.

 

At the end of the week your writer is preparing to go to Lord’s for the World Cup final. It was to be the biggest week of his cricket-watching life, and remains that to this day.

Daily updates on Twitter/X at @kentccc1975 and Bluesky at @kentkiwi.bsky.social

How Green Were My Pitches: 19 to 25 August 1967

The issues of the week were the England captaincy and the race for the County Championship. Kent had a double-header (as it was not known then) against Glamorgan, first in Gillingham and then in Cardiff. Yorkshire played Essex at Scarborough, finishing on Tuesday, then started a game against Sussex at Eastbourne on Wednesday morning, suggesting that the fixture schedulers lacked basic knowledge of the country’s geography (or that they all had chauffeurs). 

Kent and Yorkshire started the week level on points. Kent went ahead after a last-gasp win at Gillingham, while Yorkshire lost from a winning position at Scarborough. But resounding wins for Glamorgan at Cardiff, and Yorkshire on the south coast put Yorkshire on top by four points with a game in hand at the week’s end.

Bert Lock had a busy week. He was the groundsman who had restored the Oval after it had been a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. After retiring from Surrey he became the counties’ pitch inspector, in which role he visited both Kent v Glamorgan games this week. Lock could do little more than offer groundsmen sage advice after the event. There were no sanctions at his disposal other than recommending a ban on the venue for the following season (a sanction already imposed upon Hesketh Park, Dartford, though why that ground was singled out from minefields on which Kent played in 1967 is unclear). 

Both matches were played on pitches that would be inconceivable these days, particularly that at Gillingham. I have watched cricket at the Garrison Ground, Gillingham, a Sunday League game in 1972. I don’t recall much about the ground, but it must have been a squeeze to get 10,000 in. “The whole of Kent seemed to be there” according to John Woodcock, who was enjoying his work at last. Stoics they were, with a scoring rate under two an over across the game as a whole, but when 26 wickets fall in a day, as happened on the third day, it wasn’t unrelenting dullness. Derek Underwood took 11 wickets and the win came in the final half hour.

Modern crowds wouldn’t tolerate such laborious scoring, but would they have to? Players of that era say that those pitches created superior techniques. Of course, today’s batsmen would be at sea on pitches foreign to them. But, knowing that their lifespan would be short, they would not be prepared to wait cowering in the crease for the bullet with their name on it, but would have a go at charging the machine guns. A bold, edgy 30 would have won several games this week.

It was Sophia Gardens’ first season as a first-class venue, Glamorgan having moved from Cardiff Arms Park over the winter to make way for the redevelopment of the rugby ground, so the pitches were still bedding in (well enough for the home side to make 353 for nine, bracketed by Kent collapses). It was a homely, pleasant ground whenever I visited; since then it has been turned into an arena, no less, taking much of the charm away in the process, I would think.

DJ Shepherd took 15 wickets in the three innings he bowled in that week. Fifty years on, he is being mourned with affection, having passed away six days after his ninetieth birthday. I saw him play, but remember him more as a superb radio commentator on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday afternoons, which I would listen to in Bristol in preference to the inferior local offering.  Shepherd and Edward Bevan would have adorned Test Match Special had they been given the chance; thus his career off the field mirrored that on it in its lack of just national recognition.

Just as Don Shepherd is most people’s pick as the best bowler not have played a test for England, so Alan Jones is the best batsman in that deprived position. Jones has the sweater and the cap, but not the test status, which was removed from the England v Rest of the World series retrospectively despite it being as high a standard as any tests before or since. This week, he made 44, Glamorgan’s top score at Gillingham, and 60 at Cardiff, both innings worth centuries in their contexts. Alan Jones often did well against Kent; I saw him score centuries in Canterbury Week 1972 and again ten years later

Welsh folk might have hoped that the easier access to the valleys offered by the opening of the Severn Bridge the year before would bring the selectors to Sophia Gardens and St Helens more often, but this does not seem to have happened. Tony Lewis tells the story of Wilf Wooller, Glamorgan’s secretary, manager and self-appointed patron saint, receiving a letter from EW Swanton of the Daily Telegraph requesting information on the form of certain Glamorgan players and enclosing a stamped, addressed envelope for the reply. Swanton was hugely influential at that time, widely regarded as a fifth selector. When the returned envelope was opened a few days later it contained only a copy of the London to Cardiff train timetable.

Don Shepherd was not Glamorgan’s most successful bowler this week. Left-arm paceman Jeff Jones took 16 wickets, including six for 27 in the first innings in which he and Tony Cordle bowled 16 overs each, unchanged. Jeff Jones is best remembered as father of 2005 Ashes winner Simon Jones, who inherited his old man’s ability to bowl quickly as well as a frame that did not bear up well to his doing so.

Yorkshire also had a mixed week, but in reverse order to Kent’s. At Scarborough they contrived to throw away a lead of 127 to lose by nine runs to Essex, who were second-bottom. Spinners Hobbs and Acfield took eight between them, and bowled 52 overs for 68 runs, illustrating my earlier point about the general timidity of batsmen in those days. Batsmen sharing a car with Fred Trueman would have spent an uncomfortable eight hours or so on the way to Eastbourne

There was redemption at the Saffrons, with (speaking as we were of very good players who did not play for England) Tony Nicholson taking nine for 62

England were building a good lead at the Oval in the third and final test, but the press and public focus was on the Close question. On Wednesday the England captain was “severely censured” by the Advisory County Cricket committee (copying The Times’ deployment of the upper case) for his leadership of the go-slow against Warwickshire the previous week. The Thunderer thought the matter worthy of a leader, which came down on Close’s side for the captaincy to the West Indies, but unenthusiastically so. By Friday, down the front page was the headline “Things look black for Brian Close”. As chance would have it, Boycott’s late withdrawal from the test due to illness meant that Close opened with Cowdrey, the only alternative after the retirement of MJK Smith.

Times' leader

Kent all-rounder LJ (Leslie) Todd died this week in 1967. I knew the name but not much else. His obituary in Wisden is an unexceptional, largely statistical, record of a career that lasted from 1927 to 1950. Over the years, one has rarely turned to the Kent Annual for good writing, but Todd’s obituary in the 1968 edition is a cracker.

It was written by JGW (Jack) Davies, an off spinner who was a Kent contemporary of Todd’s. However, Davies was a jazzhat summer-holiday amateur of a kind that pros like Todd (especially Todd, it may be inferred) held in some contempt. It should be noted that Davies’s profession was psychology. The result is an obituary that tells us what sort of man he was, as well as what sort of cricketer.

Bong! Two centuries for Majid Bong! Boredom at Neath Bong! News at Ten Begins: 1 to 7 July 1967

Kent v Pakistanis 1 – 4 July

It was a week off for Kent, in Championship terms at least, though the first half of the week was occupied by a game against the second touring side of the summer, the Pakistanis. Unlike the earlier game against the Indians, the opportunity was taken to rest three bowlers: Graham, Sayer and Dixon. David Nicholls came in for his first game of the season. A punchy left-handed batsman, Nicholls started with a roar in 1963 with a double century, but had not reached three figures since. He made a duck in his only innings in this match and might have been contemplating the possibility that this would be his last season, but an opportunity for a change of role was about to present itself that would keep him in the game for another 13 years.

Majid Jehangir scored a century for the tourists. We know him better as Majid Khan and he was to make another hundred in the second half of the week, against Middlesex. John Arlott-Silchester described him there as a “pleasantly extrovert batsman”. Unfortunately, Majid also opened the bowling, revealing that Pakistan would be no more able to field an opening attack of test class than India had been. At Lord’s Eric Russell and Mike “Pasty” Harris rattled up a Middlesex first-wicket record of 312 against them. The most significant action of the game at Canterbury was a breezy 41 from Majid’s new ball partner, one Asif Iqbal. That day may have been when the idea germinated that here might be a player who would enhance the Kent team and please its crowds when the overseas player rules were liberalised for the 1968 season.

Majid Khan became as popular at Glamorgan as Asif Iqbal was to be with Kent. They could have done with his strokeplay to liven up proceedings at Neath this week. As was so often the case, Alan Gibson’s report contained more to please than anything that happened on the field of play. 

On this occasion the Glamorgan secretary Wilf Wooller did not take to the public address to offer spectators their money back as he was to do on a later occasion when Brian Close was captain of Somerset. The game looked a certain draw when Tony Lewis put himself on and won the game with a little filthy legspin.

The big match of the week was at Grace Road where Championship leaders Leicestershire hosted second-placed Yorkshire, who reclaimed what everybody from Middlesbrough to Sheffield believed was their rightful place on top of the table. Ray Illingworth took 11 in the match to follow 14 over the first two tests, though John Woodcock was about to describe him as having a “limited future” as a test cricketer. Mike Brearley is the standard example of a player picked as a captain rather than on his own playing merits, but Illingworth would do just as well. Leicestershire were to wait another eight years for their first Championship, led by Ray Illingworth.

John Newcombe became the last amateur men’s singles champion at Wimbledon with an easy victory over Bungert of Germany. The men’s final was always played on a Friday in those days, with Ann Jones to play Billie Jean King in the ladies’ final on Saturday.

The first News at Ten was broadcast on ITV on 1 July 1967 presented by Alastair Burnet and Andrew Gardner. This was the first nightly news programme that had the space for longer reports and analysis, with journalists, rather than announcers, as presenters. It began the golden age of ITN during which it set the style of British TV news with the BBC catching up as best it could. 

Of course, news and current affairs were regarded as altogether different things then, and the BBC still had the lead in the latter field. Panorama was presented by Robin Day with a reporting team that included Richard Kershaw, James Mossman and Michael Charlton (who had been the guest Australian radio commentator on the 1956 Ashes series). The nightly Twenty-Four Hours programme was delivered by as rich a collection of presenting and reporting talent as there has been in a British current affairs show: Cliff Michelmore, Ian Trethowan, Robert McKenzie, Kenneth Allsop, Julian Pettifer, Fyfe Robertson, Michael Barrett, Leonard Parkin, and even the young Michael Parkinson (it was of Fyfe Robertson that Clive James once wrote “he described himself as an intelligent man in the street, which he proved half right by standing in a street as he said it”).

The reviewer of the first News at Ten in The Times was Michael Billington, also deputy to Irving Wardle as theatre critic. In 1971 Billington became the Guardian’s theatre critic, a position in which he serves still. Few have spent the half-century more enjoyably than Michael Billington.

This week, Leo Abse’s private member’s bill that decriminalised homosexual activity between consenting males over the age of 21 completed its passage through the House of Commons. It was read a third time at 5.50 am after eight hours of filibustering from the backwoodsmen, mining deep into their considerable reserves of malice and ignorance to keep proceedings going. Some of these splutterings might seem amusing now, but this week in 2017  here in New Zealand the House of Representatives passed a motion of apology to those men convicted before our law was changed, almost twenty years later than in Britain. The debate reminded us that thousands of decent men lived their lives in secrecy and fear because of the kind of ridiculousness that these fools expounded. So not funny at all.

Even Roy Jenkins, the epitome of the liberal Home Secretary whose initiative the bill was and who ensured that it was given sufficient parliamentary time to pass, referred in his third reading speech to “those who suffer from this disability” showing that the passing of the bill by the Commons was a beginning not an end.