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.

The Green Pitches of Dover: 26 August to 1 September 1967

Kent played their final two Championship games of the season at the Crabble in Dover, as attractive as any ground in the county. It has not hosted county cricket since 1976, but on a visit to England in 2011 I returned there for a look around: In Search of the Crabble.

Kent finished on the charge, with two wins, the first with just two minutes remaining, the second with a day and a half to spare. We will begin with Peter West’s report on the half day’s play that ended the week. 

It’s funny reading that report now, fifty years after I watched West write it. As recorded in the earlier piece, that day the Crabble became the second ground on which I watched county cricket. With game over in mid-afternoon and my Dad not picking us up until later (in our brand new Ford Cortina: I had watched him write a cheque for £700 for it at the start of the month and could barely believe that there was so much money in the world), hanging about for autographs passed the time satisfyingly. Norman Graham signed after passing a hundred wickets for the season while taking 12 for 80. Bob Wilson also did so, but was rueful when asked by another hunter if he was playing at Lord’s in the final on Saturday. “I don’t know” he said, but he did, and he wasn’t. In fact, a second-innings duck in the Warwickshire game had been the last of 647 innings that brought just short of 20,000 runs with 30 centuries.

With the players gone, my attention turned to the press box, a standalone hut on one of the terraces, painted in green and white stripes. West politely rebuffed someone trying to have a chat, explaining that he had a report to write. So I observed as he wrote the piece in longhand, then listened as he phoned it through to the copy desk at Printing House Square. Work done, Peter West (one of television’s best-known faces in 1967) was happy to add his name to the autograph collection (which I still have but can’t find). 

The thing that did for Dover in the long-term, besides the reduction of Championship fixtures, was the poor quality of the pitches. West’s judgment that the pitch for the Essex match “cannot have failed to implant a sense of insecure tenure” identifies him as the Ishiguro of the sports pages in his use of understatement. Its nature may be gleaned by the fact that Underwood—the country’s leading wicket taker—bowled not a single ball in the game. Six of the second-innings wickets that I saw fall on the second day were caught either behind or at first slip as the ball seamed as if from Saville Row. Not many matches are won by as comfortable a margin as nine wickets by a team that has not scored 200 in the match. 

The pitch for the Warwickshire game was also green, more of a risk when the opposition included Tom Cartwright, who duly took ten in the match. A fine 86 not out by Mike Denness got Kent home. The schedulers were, as discussed last week, either sadists or geographical ignoramuses; Warwickshire finished at Dover later on Tuesday afternoon then had to drive to Middlesbrough to start a new game against Yorkshire the following morning.

Leicestershire also won twice this week to finish their season, but in vain as Kent’s extra win kept them ahead with the teams level on points. Alan Gibson described them as the team that had most the most of its talent, thanks to the captaincy of Tony Lock, who bore a strong resemblance to Brian Close, both physically and in his bugger-them-all approach. Lock did not return in 1968, but Leicestershire made another from the same mould when Ray Illingworth joined them in 1969. 

Yorkshire’s draw at Trent Bridge early in the week mean that Kent finished the week at the head of the table, hoping either that bottom-of-the-table Gloucestershire would gather themselves for a redemptive win at Harrogate the following week or, more likely, that the northern weather would wash the Championship pennant to Canterbury (a pennant was all the winners got, by the way; there was no trophy then). 

Brian Close’s 98 put Yorkshire in a winning position against Warwickshire in their second game of the week, a heroic performance on the day that he was defrocked from the England captaincy. If a Times leader couldn’t sway the establishment in his favour, nothing could. Later in the week one of his businesses went into liquidation.

Given Colin Cowdrey’s fortuitous inheritance of the captaincy it is odd that The Times ran this headline on Wednesday:

It is interesting that the selectors supported Close, but it was the MCC Committee—a body including six knights of the realm, two of whom were generals—who signed the execution warrant, declaring the future MCC President as his successor. Amateurism may have been abolished on the field, but it remained the creed of the committee room, in all its senses.

Derek Underwood was the surprise omission from the touring party, despite taking eight wickets at a cost of 16 each in the two tests in which he had played. Titmus, Pocock and Hobbs were the selected spinners. Perhaps Underwood suffered from being regarded as not a proper spinner. John Woodcock continued to him as a cutter, and EW Swanton was forever saying that he should give the ball more air. A season’s haul of 136 wickets at 12.39 were not enough. Geoff Arnold’s fine performance in the final test was also ignored.

The final day of the test series produced the most entertaining international cricket of the season: a joyous world-record partnership of 190 for the ninth wicket between Asif Iqbal and Intikhab Alam. I recall watching this on television and wanting it to go on and on. It was the first time I watched Asif’s Road Runner footwork, enjoyed from slip by Colin Cowdrey. So when it became known that each county would be able to recruit an overseas player without a qualification period for 1968, it was Asif Iqbal that Kent went for, and joyously so.

Outside cricket the story of the week was the death of Brian Epstein at 32. 

The letter of the week in The Times (for me anyway) was this reminiscence of WG Grace:

And so to Lord’s for the Gillette Cup Final.

England v Australia, Fourth Test, Old Trafford, 23 – 28 July 1964: A Cautionary Tale

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/26/26958.html

To be born at all is to pick a ticket in a lottery. Land in one place and time and history leaves you alone to get on with life and make it what you can; a few years or a few hundred miles different and it intervenes with a black hand. Think of being a boy of 13 as opposed to 17 in much of Europe a hundred years ago and the difference that would have made to your life expectancy.

I had a lucky escape. As I have written before in these columns, my formative cricket year was 1966 when Sobers, Kanhai, Butcher and Hall came to England to intrigue and captivate a receptive young mind. Two years older and I would have been trying to drink in the desert of the 1964 Ashes series, and might well have fled parched from cricket into the arms of that temptress association football.

The ’64 Ashes was the love child of Sir Geoffrey Howe and the speaking clock, plain to look at, wet and desperately dull. Almost 15 hours were lost to rain during the first test, at Trent Bridge. With the scoring rate struggling to keep above two an over during both sides’ first innings, spectators will have welcomed the respite.

The rain and the funereal scoring at Lord’s led to a second draw. At Headingley, 160 from Peter Burge helped Australia to victory and the run rate to a heady two-and-a-half an over. How selection policies have changed over the years. Fred Trueman and Les Flavell were England’s only fast bowlers, so after Flavell was injured, Ted Dexter—brisk but very much a batsman who bowled—and Fred Titmus shared the new ball with Trueman.

And so to Old Trafford, the setting for our cautionary tale. In tune with the attritional attitudes of the day, Australia’s captain Bobby Simpson was solely intent on avoiding defeat, thus retaining the Ashes. On Thursday morning he won the toss, opened the batting and was still there on Saturday morning when a bit of late hitting took the strike rate to a pulse-threatening 2.56 an over, having not been much above two an over for the first two days. Simpson’s 311 remains the second-highest maiden test century after Sobers’ 365 and the second-slowest test triple hundred after Hanif Mohammad’s 337, both in the 1957-58 series in the Caribbean.

For real empathy with the hapless folk who paid money to watch this, look at the bowling figures of Tom Cartwright: 77 overs, 32 maidens, 118 runs, two wickets. Cartwright (then of Warwickshire, later of Somerset and Glamorgan) was a medium-pacer who could bowl with unequalled accuracy and with just enough variation to make batsmen even more risk-averse than usual in those cautious times. In first-class cricket he took 1,536 wickets at under 20 and at only a smidgen over two an over.

As I have written before, my Blean correspondent and myself frittered away our best years picking made-up cricket XIs. Our most debated and proudest effort was the All-Time Boring XI. Cartwright led the attack, which excluded truly fast bowlers, masters of swing and, obviously, spinners as being too intrinsically interesting. Cartwright’s selection was a compliment, a reflection that he did what he set out to do—to wear batsmen down by the relentless tedium of nagging medium-pace accuracy—better than the hundreds of other English county bowlers who have set about the same endeavour over the years.  Other bowlers were Derek Shackleton of Hampshire, cut from the same cloth as Cartwright, and GG (Horse) Arnold. The latter was a controversial choice, as Arnold could be quite interesting as a bowler, but was favoured as being most likely to induce boring batting in the opposition.

Three members of the batting line-up played at Old Trafford fifty years ago. Bill Lawry placed his position in doubt by hitting three sixes, and by being run out, always an interesting way to go. However, 106 at two an over despite the sixes supports his retention.

Geoffrey Boycott, in his debut test series, set the tone of the reply with three fours in three hours. Ken Barrington made 256 from 624 balls, though he did take an hour-and-a-half less than Simpson to reach 200.

Players with reputations as dashers were brought down by the miasma of the pervading torpor. Ted Dexter went no faster than Barrington in scoring 174. Jim Parks spent more than three hours over 60 against a tired attack. In went right down the order. Opening bowlers John Price and Fred Rumsey faced 51 balls between them for four runs.

England’s defence for imposing this inertia upon the paying public would have been that the Australians started it. There is something to this; with no chance of victory why risk defeat, however remote the possibility? Yet for the past 30 years at least, the rearguard action would have been conducted with a bit more style and awareness that people had paid money to watch and should not be sent home contemplating a call to the Samaritans.

The 1985 Ashes was a milestone in this respect. On the face of it, it was an unremarkable 3 – 1 win by a superior England team. But look closer. Two of England’s victories were concluded in the final session of the fifth day. England’s scoring rate for the series was close to four an over, and Australia’s was well clear of three. At 1960s scoring rates there would not have been sufficient time for the games to have finished and the series would have been drawn.

It is much more difficult to draw a test match these days for reasons beyond a more positive attitude. Fields drain quicker, covering is better, artificial light fills in when natural light is inadequate and some lost time is made up.

But let us not be complacent. For much of the current series in England (I write after the third day at Lord’s) progress has been pedestrian, the scoring rates inflated by some tailend bashing. At Trent Bridge, as at Old Trafford half a century ago, spectators turned up for the third and later days pretty sure that they were watching a game that was going to end in nothing but a draw.

This report from the 1965 Wisden—unusually trenchant for the time—captures the futility of the events at Old Trafford fifty years ago this week:

http://www.espncricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/story/152824.html