Maidstone week: 22 to 28 July 2017

Kent v Hampshire, Maidstone, 22 and 23 July 1967

Kent v Surrey, Maidstone, 26 to 28 July 1967

Maidstone week was always a highlight of the Kentish season.  I wrote about cricket at Mote Park a couple of years ago. It was at Maidstone that writers could bring out the thesaurus of high summer: shimmering…baking…sweltering, cricket played to the sound of eggs frying on the pavement. Much of this is nostalgia cleansing the memory of course; it was as likely to pour down there as anywhere else, but for many of us Maidstone week was the first element of the holy trinity of cricket watching in Kent, along with the weeks at Canterbury and Folkestone that followed, though in 1967 it would be another five years until I watched cricket at the Mote.

It was a cracker of a week, with an exploding pitch and a match-saving last-wicket stand. The week began with Kent making 296 in the first innings against Hampshire. John Shepherd was now established at No 3, and followed his semi-final 77 with 72 here. Shepherd remained at No 3 for the rest of the season, but never batted as high thereafter. He had the talent, but it was to be his lot to carry the seam attack for the next decade and more, so he usually found himself down at No 8, which was something of a waste.

On Sunday, 10,000 crammed into a ground that had reasonable seating for no more than a tenth of them; this just a few days after almost 17,000 had gone to Canterbury for the Gillette Cup semi-final. What a time, when everybody wanted to be at the cricket, and what a day they saw. There was a large worn patch at one end that Derek Underwood could use as a torturer uses a rack. He took seven for 35 in the first innings as Hampshire were skittled for 95. Their day got worse. The last six wickets in the second innings all fell at 31, the last five partnerships contributing not a single run. Nobody got into double figures. Underwood took five more, and Alan Dixon got four.

Hampshire captain Roy Marshall (six and one) fumed, describing the pitch as “an absolute disgrace to county cricket” saying that he had seen only three worse (oddly adding that they were all in the west country, as if in mitigation) in 15 years.

Charles Bray in The Times reports that Underwood made the ball “kick shoulder high”. It might be that these days the match would have been called off; anyway, the chances of a pitch being that bad are remote. We are worse off for this. It took a fine bowler to make the most of that rough patch and with 28 games in a Championship season the competition could indulge the odd piece of negligence by a groundsman here and there. 

Expecting more turn on another part of the square for the second part of the week, Kent brought in Graham Johnson for John Dye (Norman Graham and David Sayer were still injured). Against Hampshire, Underwood and Dixon between them had 17 for 73, not appearing in obvious need of assistance.

It was back to go-slow cricket on the first day as Surrey crept to 233 for five, finishing on day two with 354 from 155 overs, Underwood four for 100 from 63 overs. Yet it was not Underwood, but another young spinner, Pat Pocock, who had the better day, with six for 43 that made Kent follow on. Four of his victims (and two of Stuart Storey’s) were caught in the leg trap (do they still call it that?). 

Pocock was having as good a run as Underwood and was spoken of as the new Laker, an albatross to hang around anyone’s neck. It was him, not the Kent player, who was selected for the tour to the Caribbean the following winter, but in the long term Underwood  (297 wickets in 86 tests) did better than Pocock (67 wickets from 25 appearances). Given more opportunities, Pocock would have become a notable test bowler, but was not well treated by the selectors. Ray Illingworth’s tenure of the captaincy excluded him for four years, and later they favoured Geoff Miller and John Emburey, both inferior bowlers to Pocock but better batsmen.

At half past two on Friday afternoon Kent’s last pair, Alan Dixon and Alan Brown came together. No doubt some people were already making their way to the car park or to catch the earlier train. Yet, with the help of an hour’s rain break, they were still there at the end, having saved the draw and the two championship points that went with it. Dixon was having a brilliant season with bat and ball. Brown was a very capable batsman, but a hitter, so his restraint was all the more meritorious. The partnership was the stuff of legend, so I am surprised that I had never heard of it until excavating the archives this week.

With five weeks to go, Kent were top of the Championship and in the Gillette Cup final, and the word “double” was being whispered around the boundary.

The second test series of the summer began this week, against Pakistan at Lord’s. A better contest than that against India was hoped for, in vain it appeared at the end of the first day with Barrington and Graveney putting on 200. Kent people who so enjoyed Asif Iqbal’s batting over the following 15 years may be surprised to be reminded that his main role on that tour was as an opening bowler. On the second day he took three wickets, as did Mushtaq Mohammad and Salim Altaf. England lost eight for 86, but were back on top by the end of the day thanks to three wickets from the restored Ken Higgs. This was the last time England took the field in a test match, home or abroad, without a Kent player until the first test in Pakistan a decade later.

Elsewhere, the BBC announced that the reconstructed radio network would go by numbers: Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4, while solemnly promising that Radio 1 wouldn’t be too “mid-Atlantic”, which is precisely what had made the pirate stations so successful. They needn’t have worried. Needle time—the agreement with the musicians’ unions that restricted the number of records that could be played, thus guaranteeing work for their members—meant that in the early years the station was more perm than perfumed garden.  

1967: Setting the Scene

Almost every Wednesday and Saturday from late April to early September a new round of County Championship matches would begin. Three-day games of course; another two decades would pass before a fourth day was added, even tentatively. The seventeen counties (no Durham as yet) each played 28 games, so would meet 12 opponents twice, and four just once, an imbalance reintroduced into division two of the County Championship in 2017. That all counties played the same number of matches was a recent development; as late as 1962, some had played 32, some 28. Gaps in the schedule might be filled with games against the touring teams or Oxford or Cambridge universities.

One-day cricket remained an afterthought. The Gillette Cup—60 overs a side—was a straight knockout; Kent played only four games to win the competition. But a quiet revolution was taking place on Sunday afternoons. The International Cavaliers played a 40-over game each week, live on BBC 2. The Cavaliers are a neglected part of cricket history, as proved by the fact that a Google search has a post from this blog, written in 2010, as the leading source of information on the Cavaliers apart from a brief and inaccurate Wikipedia entry. The Cavaliers are cricket’s North-west Passage, the missing link between the game as it had always been played and the brave new world of limited overs, world cups and Kerry Packer.

Cricket was not entirely the staid Victorian relic that it is often thought to have been at this time. Nineteen-sixty-seven was the second season with Sunday play in some games. Cricket was the first professional sport to toy with the wrath of the Almighty in this way. This was the last year of the old-fashioned points system, with eight for a win and four for first-innings lead. Bonus points came in 1968 and have been with us in one form or another ever since. It was also the last year in which no overseas player was allowed to play for a county without serving a residential qualification period.

Kent played at home on nine grounds (and the second XI on three more, including two in Sittingbourne). Most counties were peripatetic to some degree; only Middlesex and Leicestershire remained at headquarters for the duration. Among other places, Kent would visit Brentwood, Peterborough, Southport, Hastings, Leyton and Burton-on-Trent during the season. The intervening half-century has seen a slow but unstoppable move away from truly county cricket, culminating in the Birmingham Bears and the 2020 20/20 franchises.

Like most who watched county cricket at that time, I regret the end of the caravan era, but nostalgia makes the memory selective; some of the outgrounds were hardly up to staging a village fete let alone a professional sporting fixture. The pitches were of mixed quality too, though this was not a bad thing. What eventually did for three-day cricket more than anything else was that the pitches became too good, using the batsmen’s definition at least. By the mid-eighties the norm had become a two-day phoney war to occupy the time before a chase for an agreed target. Cricketers of the sixties will tell you that developing the survival skills necessary in such conditions made them better players

It was the time of uncovered pitches too. If the rain fell after play started, the pitch (but not the run-ups) would not be covered until the abandonment of play. This seems entirely counter-intuitive, incomprehensible probably; but if you watched cricket on a drying pitch you regret that the experience has gone. Snoozing old cats of pitches would become spiteful tigers while their fur dried out. It was another dimension to the game, and helped move three-day games along.

Yorkshire started the season as county champions, having won two more games than any other side in 1966. The playing staff (“squad” was not yet in cricket’s dictionary, let alone “group”) included nine England players and five more who would be. The restrictions on player movement and overseas players gave Yorkshire an advantage, though they did their bit to nullify that with their insistence on allowing only players born in the Ridings to wear the Yorkshire cap. They were led by the Old Bald Blighter (as Alan Gibson called him) Brian Close. Those who don’t know of Close should picture a rhinoceros charging a machine gun post to get a flavour of the man. He was the England captain and was to have a very strange 1967 indeed.

Kent were on the up. After a dismal 1950s during which they only once (and just at that) made it into the top half of the table, they had risen from 13^th in 1963 to seventh, fifth, and fourth in the following years. Leslie Ames must be given be given the bulk of the credit for this. He was appointed manager at the start of the sixties and as one of the county’s most famous players was the only man who had the reputation and character to assert professional competence over the amateur meddling of the committee. Colin Cowdrey had been captain for a decade, but was away with England for almost half of the Championship programme most years. 

Kent had seasoned professionals such as the South African batsman Stuart Leary and the vice-captain Alan Dixon, an all-rounder who could bowl seamers or off spin, and a group of talented younger players headed by the openers Mike Denness and Brian Luckhurst. And two of the all-time greats starting out: Derek Underwood and Alan Knott. It was a good time to start watching cricket in Kent.

Six test matches were scheduled, three against India and three against Pakistan, neither team expected to offer the excitement or quality of the West Indians of the previous season. England (or rather MCC) had not toured over the winter, though an under-25 team including Knott and Underwood went to Pakistan. It was captained by Mike Brearley (who was 75 yesterday). Near the top of the list of cricketing days I wish I’d seen was that at Peshawar on 1 February 1967 when Brearley scored 312 in a day, like one of those flowers that blooms once every fifty years. Alan Knott opened with him and scored his maiden hundred as they put on 208. According to Wisden, Brearley “annhihilated a fair attack which had little support from the field” (Intikhab Alam bowled more overs than anybody and he was a very good bowler).

There is much more to say about cricket in England 50 years ago, and about the world that it was played in. Stay tuned, as they used to say on the Light Programme.