24 – 30 May 1975 A Good Week for Mike Denness

 

24 – 30 May 1975

This was the first week of the 1975 season that followed the pattern familiar to followers of county cricket in the seventies: three-day games beginning on Saturday and Wednesday with a 40-over game interposed on Sunday. For spectators it was a brilliant arrangement, particularly in Kent where the season was divided largely into cricket weeks, each at a different venue around the county: Canterbury, Folkestone, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells.

For the players, it looks like madness, more a motoring rally than cricket season, particularly the year in question when it was decreed that counties should play different opponents on Sunday to those they were against on Saturday and Monday. So this week, Yorkshire had to drive down to Edgbaston from Manchester for the Sunday game, returning to resume the Roses match on Monday; Northamptonshire went from Leicester to Bristol and back (this on a bank holiday weekend).

The present-day schedule is much more forgiving, allowing time for travel and preparation (the latter in 1975 probably being a euphemism for extra drinking). The English season has been stretched into the extremities of April and September to accommodate this. Yet still the players complain that there is too much cricket in too short a time. I have less sympathy than for their (much lower-paid) predecessors. Obviously, the workload of fast bowlers must be very carefully managed, like lead pitchers in the MLB, who play once every four or five days. Counties have a duty of care for all their players, and any deserve a break when their physical or mental health demands it.

The larger squads that counties have these days should make that possible without reducing the number of fixtures. I cannot accept that having to play T20 games on successive days once or twice a season is an intolerable burden. Even with a generous margin for wides and no balls, that adds up to no more than 60 balls for a bowler, about what our baseball pitcher would expect to throw in a game.

There were hundreds this week for stalwarts of the county game: Roger Tolchard and Jack Birkenshaw of Leicestershire; Jack Hampshire of Yorkshire; Peter Graves of Sussex, Dudley Owen-Thomas of Surrey, Phil Slocombe and Brian Close for Somerset; Alan Jones (not to be confused with Alan Lewis Jones) of Glamorgan; David Turner of Hampshire; Jim Foat, a folk hero in Gloucestershire (his maiden century); and Bob Woolmer and Graham Johnson of Kent. Johnson had a fine season in 1975 with 1300 runs and 36 wickets. Had England toured that winter he might well have been selected. It remains a minor scandal of that time that Geoff Miller of Derbyshire, a similar player, appeared in 34 tests, while Johnson played in none. His best form never coincided with a vacancy.

Alan Gibson was at Bristol for the Jones hundred.

 

As ever, Gibson reported on what happened around the ground as well as on the field. He came across the injured David Shepherd (later a famed umpire), who, he tells us, “was wearing a sweater of violent purple as though contemplating applying for a job on The Guardian”.

There were also centuries for Barry Richards and Alvin Kallicharran, both more than stalwarts. Richards was reeling them off, and was well ahead of rivals at the top of the batting averages. And one for Mike Denness, who had whose 171 against Derbyshire ended a run of indifferent form.

Bowling performance of the week was by Worcestershire’s Brian Brain, eight for 55 against Essex. “He looked like a young sociology don at Harvard” wrote Gibson. Despite this career-best, 34-year-old Brain was released by Worcestershire at the end of that season, but took a further 316 wickets in six years with Gloucestershire. His diary of the 1980 season Another Day, Another Match was an outstanding example of the genre (if anybody has a copy I would be happy to pay the postage to New Zealand). John Arlott’s brief review in the 1982 Wisden said that it was “an account of pleasure and pressure; a blend of shrewd and thoughtful observation; of humour and anxiety; the story of one man’s job – but a job that is lit by the romanticism which is in every full-time cricketer”.

The same match saw an achievement that surpassed even Brain’s. Essex leg-spinner Robin Hobbs took his thousandth first-class wicket. “No other leg-spinner, I am afraid, will do it again” wrote Gibson, echoing the universal view that leg-spin was on its way out as surely as black-and-white televisions and half-day closing. You want to reach back through the years and say “there’s this five-year-old in Melbourne…”. Of course, as far as English leg-spinners go, it was a point well-made, though in all forms of the game Adil Rashid is well clear of a thousand, including, I was surprised to discover, 512 in first-class cricket. For comparison, there were 18 players listed in the 1975 Playfair with a thousand wickets at the start of the season. Only Jimmy Anderson is past the mark in this year’s edition.

It was a good week for Denness, who was confirmed as England captain for the World Cup. John Arlott’s Monday commentary in The Guardian tells us that the decision was not straightforward.

 

Some of the criteria that got Denness over the line tell us a lot about English cricket at that time: “well turned out…good manners and bearing.” A curiosity is that this was the first time that the selection panel consisted entirely of ex-professional players.

In The Times, John Woodcock had the inside line on the selection meeting. Reporting that Charlie Elliott (a test umpire for many years, including one at Lancaster Park, Christchurch in 1971) and Ken Barrington favoured Greig, while Sir Len Hutton and Alec Bedser backed Denness. Woodcock favoured Greig, despite his established reservations about the Sussex all-rounder and his acknowledgement that others may be relieved that they did not lead MCC in Australia. He is interesting on Boycott, who announced his unavailability for England selection hard upon the confirmation of Denness. The claim from the Fitzwilliam Firebrand that he has found “peace and contentedness” with Yorkshire is hard not to smirk at when hindsight gives us knowledge of the blood letting that characterised Yorkshire cricket over the following decade or so. Here is Woodcock’s Monday commentary in full:

 

As well as being cricket correspondent of The Guardian, Arlott was also its wine writer. This week he offers advice on cooking with wine. He always followed his own advice that “it is better to be generous than cautious”.

Headline of the week, from The Times, is as applicable now as it was then:

Why Kent take so long to bowl out the opposition on good pitches.

Today, the old county languish at the bottom of Division Two and my Blean Correspondent and myself fear that it could be the worst season since the annus horribilis of 1980.

The 1975 season had been scheduled as a one with a full tour by South Africa. The World Cup and four-test series with Australia came about with the continued suspension of cricket with the apartheid state. Those who thought that sport was separate from politics might have asked themselves how that could be conceivable under a government that enforced laws in the manner reported by Stanley Uys in The Guardian. Uys, by the way, was described by a minister of the Vorster Government as "probably the most unscrupulous liar in South Africa and a self-confessed traitor", a badge of honour indeed. 

 

 

 

17 - 23 May 1975 The Appeal of the Shoreditch Sparrow

This week in 1975 was given over to one-day cricket, with the final two rounds of the zonal stage in the 55-over competition and the Sunday League. Again, the scoring was generally as modest as a Jane Austen heroine. Minor Counties (North) were dismissed for 67 (Nottinghamshire’s left-arm quick Barry Stead five for 26), MC (South) for 94 and 83, Oxbridge for 93. Worcestershire fell 49 short of Northamptonshire’s 152. Another left-arm seamer tending to the portly, John Dye with five for 30, was central here too.

At Lord’s, Kent made just 137 for nine in 55 overs, of which John Shepherd contributed 96, a Bannermanesque[1] proportion of the total. Otherwise, only Underwood made double figures. Shepherd came in unusually high at No 5 here, which is where he would have batted regularly for most counties rather than his perennial No 8 for Kent. There are any number of similar examples of Shepherd making runs when others failed. His three for 21 ensured that his runs were just enough for Kent to win. No player contributed more to Kent’s success in the seventies than John Shepherd.

Alan Gibson was there. I do agree with him that low-scoring one-day games are the most interesting kind. It is a measure of the financial development of the game in the subsequent half-century that now it is the fast bowlers who break down. Then it was their cars.

 

Later in the week Gibson was at the Oval for Surrey versus Gloucestershire, which meant that he was sure to report on the performance of one of the main players in his repertory company, Robin Jackman aka the Shoreditch sparrow.

 

Jackman was a magnificent appealer, quite the best of his generation. With a noise sometimes mistaken for a passing aircraft he would turn, throw his arms in the air and continue backwards down the pitch, finishing close enough to the batter to shake hands, this after a run up double of the length that the subsequently generated pace suggested it should be. That his dash to the boundary did not prevent an all-run four was no shame; the Oval field in those days was vast, barely contained within a single postal district.

In a footnote to Gibson’s account it was reported that in the 52^nd over of Surrey’s reply umpire Peter Rochford failed to add an extra ball to the over for a wide. The match finished with the scores level but with Gloucestershire the winners having lost fewer wickets. These days, even in a non-televised match, such an error would be picked up by the match referee and communicated to the middle. In the past, counting mistakes were more frequent than might be thought, and, like other umpiring decisions were more widely accepted as part of life’s rich tapestry.

At Chelmsford, Brian Edmeades of Essex was caught on the boundary, but fielder Roger Marshall told the umpires that he could not be sure that both feet had remained inside the boundary (I’d bet that it was marked by a painted line rather than a rope). Edmeades was reprieved, and was unbeaten at the end of the innings. When the numbers were crunched at the end of the day that one wicket enabled Middlesex to qualify for the quarter-finals at the expense of  Sussex. Perhaps Sussex skipper Tony Greig had renounced the law of the jungle as urged by John Woodcock (see last week).

More slow scoring in the Sunday League. I was at Canterbury for the visit of Yorkshire, another game that fails to register in the memory, but the scorecard attests that I was there. 

The Times reporter was Michael Horsnell, at the beginning of three decades as a staff reporter. He covered crime and other issues rather than sport, possibly the result of his experience at St Lawrence that day.

 

Derbyshire had a bad week. On Saturday they lost to Lancashire by 67 runs. “Since for them any total over 150 constitutes and unseemly run orgy, it was clear that Derbyshire would have to rise above their usual mundane level with the bat to win” wrote Derby-based reporter Michael Carey (later to be come cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph). Later in the week Brian Bolus resigned as skipper, to be replaced by Bob Taylor.

Trawling the archives provides a reminder of stories that took up a lot of space at the time, but are now forgotten. One of these was the question of whether Montreal’s the new Olympic stadium would be ready for the 1976 summer games. Such was the level of doubt that this week Mexico City offered to dust down the 1968 stadium as an alternative.

The upcoming referendum on membership was the biggest continuing story. Like referenda on anything, the protagonists presented their view as the universal elixir while the truth lay ignored halfway between them.

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[1] In what is now regarded as the first test match Charles Bannerman, who faced the first ball, went on to make  167 out of a total of 245, which remains the highest proportion of an innings contributed by one batter in a test match (67.35%). Shepherd’s innings was 70.07% of the total. 

10 - 16 May 1975 The Good and Bad of Geoffrey Boycott

 

Geoffrey Boycott was the focus of much attention this week, as he was so often in these years. Against Worcestershire, he made an unbeaten 152 and thus became only the third Yorkshireman (after Sutcliffe and Hutton) to register a century against the other 16 counties also his fiftieth in the cause of the white rose. Wisden said “Few of these previous efforts can have been technically better”. Nobody else passed fifty, except a bludgeoning Chris Old when the game was dead on the third afternoon.

The excellence of Boycott the batter was universally acknowledged, even by those who thought that he might speed up in his interest of his team from time to time. The following day the praise turned to blame, as it so often did. Boycott refused to respond to Norman Gifford’s declaration 101 in arrears by setting a meaningful target, an approach that John Woodcock did not care for:

 

These were more cautious times; later in the season I was at Canterbury when Richard Gilliatt of Hampshire was booed off the field for failing to set a target in similar circumstances.

Boycott had not yet answered the question of the day: would he play for England this season? As Woodcock records, he had been absent more than present for several years.

 

The great man’s reluctance to don the England cap has sometimes been put down to a reluctance to face the fast bowlers of the time. This is unfair. He had dropped out after the first test against India the previous year when there were runs to be harvested despite his habit of falling to the pedestrian left-arm seam of Erinath Solkar. When he pulled out of the tour to Australia in the winter Lillee was widely considered to be finished because of his back and Thomson was never mentioned. It was because Denness (and before him Tony Lewis in 1972/73) had been preferred to him as captain. Had he grimaced and borne it, Boycott, rather than Greig, would probably have succeeded the Kent man in 1975. Woodcock had a bit of a blind spot re Greig, even pre-Packer, but his appraisal of the Sussex captain’s chances of leading the national team: “His appointment would have to be conditional upon his renouncing altogether the law of the jungle” would have been widely shared in the St John’s Wood area.

The only opener who might claim more renown than Boycott was Barry Richards, probably the best in the world in 1975. His unbeaten 96 took Hampshire to victory and the top of the Championship table. Alan Gibson was at St Helen’s to rhapsodise.

 

I was at Canterbury on Saturday to see Kent lose to Sussex in the 55-over competition, a vengeful John Snow (11-4-11-3) keen to demonstrate to Denness the foolishness of his omission from the winter’s tour. I recall a spectator who was right behind the arm describing on the bus home the late swing of the ball that trapped our beleaguered leader lbw for one. Snow was at the crease to guide Sussex home in the 55^th and final over. Two hundred and fifty-two runs in 106 overs would have the marketing people these days phoning the Samaritans, but the low scoring games are often the most fascinating. “Kent’s golden touch has deserted them” wrote former Kent player Tony Pawson in The Observer. This was to be the case for most of this season, the worst of the seventies for Kent.

Sunday saw fewer overs but more runs, including a record aggregate for the Sunday League with Somerset’s 270 topping visitors Gloucestershire’s 255 at Bristol. Here, it was the other great Richards, (IVA), who set it up with 126 not out (six sixes and 13 fours). Sadiq Mohammad made 131 in reply, but with insufficient support.

Who said “there’s a mistake there, Gloucestershire would be at home in Bristol”? Not so. This was at the Imperial Ground in Knowle, south of the River Avon that marked the historic boundary of Somerset. I watched a Sunday League game there four years later.

That Sunday I was at Folkestone, or at least assume that I was, though I recall nothing of the game, even after reading the report in The Times by Gerald Sinstadt, better known as Granada TV’s football commentator. He highlights two things: the cold, but there have been so many cold days at the cricket that they stick to each other like buns too long in the freezer, one no more memorable than another. Also the running between the wickets of Mike Denness and Brian Luckhurst. When I see murmurations of  starlings performing their swooping impeccably synchronised displays, I think of Denness and Luckhurst stealing singles with wordless understanding.

 

Off-the-field cricket news concerned the standoff between the BBC and the TCCB (forerunners of the ECB) over the TV rights for the four test matches against Australia. The BBC had increased its offer to a “final” £116,000 (the equivalent of about £890,000 now according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator). The ECB’s current arrangement with Sky TV for all cricket is said to be worth £220 million a year. Of course the BBC had an effective monopoly. ITV, now with a daytime schedule, would not contemplate a rival bid.

The Godfather Part II was released that week. “Few movie sequels are as good as the films they follow and even fewer have about them an air of necessity. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is a rare exception” was the verdict of Philip French in The Guardian.

Most chilling headline of the week: “Inflation in Britain running at over 30%”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3-9 May 1975: Boyce and Lloyd a class above the rest

Saturday was FA Cup final day, an all-London affair between West Ham and second-division Fulham. A measure of what a big occasion it then was is that three of the 55-over group games were postponed from Saturday to avoid clashing with the big match at Wembley. TV coverage started mid-morning, giving the producers of Grandstand and World of Sport four hours or so to fill before kick off, something they did with various degrees of desperation. It’s a Cup Final Knockout was a perennial lowpoint in this regard.

As so often, the game failed to live up to the hype. David Lacey wrote that “It was as if the floats of the Lord Mayor’s Show had preceded merely a man in a taxi, in a grey suit, anxious not to be late for work”. East London triumphed over west two-nil, both goals by Hammers’ striker Alan Taylor. It was a curiosity that he also scored a brace in both the quarter and semi finals, but that is all he is remembered for. Bobby Moore and Alan Mullery both wore the white of Fulham.

The headliners in the 55-over games were Combined Universities, who bowled out Worcestershire for 92 to win by 66 runs. To be accurate, it was the combined Oxbridge universities that were on the field here. The result is not as surprising once we read their team list, which included Imran Khan, Peter Roebuck and the great CJ Tavaré, as well as others who had briefer county careers such as Chris Aworth of Surrey and Steve Coverdale of Yorkshire (and later CE of Northamptonshire). Vic Marks was absent, whether from injury or form isn’t clear. Imran took four for four against his own county, and Andrew Wingfield-Digby had three for 28. Wingers-Diggers, as he was later known, became both an Anglican clergyman and one of Alan Gibson’s repertory company of characters who would be guaranteed a mention regardless of how many runs and wickets they notched up. He also had a spell as chaplain to the England team, one of Ted Dexter’s ideas, and one of the more noble acts of self-sacrifice of the modern Church.

Again, the moderate nature of the scoring in this round is striking (or, rather, not). In addition to Worcestershire’s capitulation, Nottinghamshire were all out for 94 against Lancashire, Leicestershire amassed 148 for nine off the full 55 overs (it took Warwickshire 52 overs to overtake them), Middlesex bowled Sussex out for 101. At Bristol, Hampshire’s 129 was enough for a 67-run win. Essex’s 212 versus Kent was the highest score of the round.

The County Championship continued in midweek. In an attempt to shove the quart that was first-class cricket into the pint pot of three days, there was a rule for several years that the first innings of Championship games closed after 100 overs. I had forgotten this until I came across innings that were not all out but not recorded as declarations. These days, the last ten overs or so would be a slogathon, but the figures and my memory suggest that any increase of pace in the pursuit of runs in the final stages was usually barely perceptible, lest the decorum of first-class cricket should be compromised.

There was fast scoring at Chelmsford where Keith Boyce, Essex’s Bajan all-rounder hit a century against Leicestershire in 58 minutes, the fastest hundred in the Championship for 38 years. In the field, he took 12 for 73 as well as two catches, all on what Wisden describes as a spinners’ pitch. In June he would make a quick 34 and take four wickets in the World Cup final, but this is too often overshadowed by the memories of Lloyd’s batting and Richards’ fielding that day (I had forgotten and I was there). Essex folk of that era will never forget him.

“Clive Lloyd played one game yesterday and everyone else another” wrote John Woodcock of Lloyd’s century at the Oval. In the time that he made 109 , the other batters accrued 24. Worcestershire’s two New Zealanders made hundreds, Parker in the first innings, Turner in the second. Twenty-five years later I eavesdropped as they reminisced about their New Road days in the press box at Seddon Park, The other centurion in this round was the promising young Nottinghamshire batter Derek Randall, after a first innings 70. 

At Northampton, Alan Gibson was cold. You would not read a report on a cricket match like this now, and you wouldn’t have done so then by any other reporter.

 

I have a subscription to The Times, and, for the purposes of this exercise, have taken one to The Guardian archives (which also include The Observer). This was about the time when I began to read the broadsheets (as they then were) regularly, and trawling through them fifty years later reminds me how much they inspired a love of knowledge and writing. What writers there were. In The Guardian James Cameron, Barry Norman’s weekly column, Nancy Banks-Smith on TV and David Lacey on football, to name just a few. The Times had Bernard Levin (from whom I learned that you don’t always have to agree with someone to admire their writing) and Woodcock and Gibson on cricket. Above all, a Sunday morning walk to the newsagents to buy a copy of The Observer became a regular thing about now for, among others,  Nora Beloff, Levin (again) and AJP Taylor reviewing books, Hugh McIlvanney, Russell Davies, and, above all, Clive James on television. What a shame he wasn’t interested in cricket. Russell Davies is on Twitter. I posted a copy of one of his football reports. He responded, saying that he usually used fictional bylines for his football pieces as some readers did not approve of arts writers cheapening themselves in the sports section.

Here, from this week, is a typical opening to a Levin book review. You will notice the absence of a full stop. The sentence is just getting under way as we leave it.

 

In the pages outside the sports sections two of the continuing stories were the European referendum and the elusive John Stonehouse. In a month, Britain was to vote, in its first national referendum, to decide whether to stay in the EEC (as it was then known). This was Harold Wilson’s masterplan to resolve internal division in his party. The political skill necessary to execute this successfully was not fully appreciated until David Cameron tried the same thing forty years later and stuffed it up completely.

Wilson’s calling of a general election in the previous October had delivered a three-seat majority, which took considerable managing in a 635-seat Commons. This got more difficult a month later when John Stonehouse. Labour MP for Walsall North, went missing from a Miami beach, presumed drowned. He turned up, alive and well, in Melbourne a few weeks later. The Victorian police thought that they had caught Lord Lucan. Stonehouse explained that he was on "a fact-finding tour, not only in terms of geography but in terms of the inner self of a political animal". This week in 1975 the House was deciding whether it could expel him from its membership.

Headline of the week, in The Guardian:

Daily updates on Bluesky: Cricket1975 @kentkiwi.bsky.social and Twitter (or whatever) kentccc1975 @kentccc1968

 

  

1975: The Season Begins

 

Saturday 26 April 1975 – Friday 2 May 1975

There was no Cowdrey Stand; the white scoreboard and the lime tree would be a surprise. The incongruous brick dressing rooms between the pavilion and what we called the wooden stand would offend the eye. But take anybody who knows the ground only in the present back fifty years and they would recognise St Lawrence straight away. It is there that you find me, huddling for warmth in the wooden stand, as the 1975 season gets under way.

Anticipation of first day of the season kept us going through winter, which in cricket terms was longer then, beginning in early September and ending only now, in the last week of April. The season opener was not worth the wait: the Minor Counties (South) visited for the first of four zonal games in the 55-over competition. They were one of three teams included to make up a round 20, along with their northern counterparts and a combined Oxbridge side. The only opposition player with significant first-class experience was Keith Jones, who had a few years as a trundling lower-order all-rounder for Middlesex.

Put in by Mike Denness (who got into a putting-in habit that was to lead him into trouble  a couple of months down the line) the  MC South team were about grim survival, as if they were the inhabitants of a besieged town who had eaten the cats and dogs and were rounding up the rodents for stewing. They achieved their goal by being nine down after 55 overs, but for a total barely more than two an over. At first, Kent went about the pursuit with “aggravating patience” (The Observer), 44 ground out of 23 overs.  After tea Graham Johnson took things in hand, and finished with 85 while Brian Luckhurst stayed in low gear with 30 as Kent won by ten wickets with almost 20 overs to spare. Having spent the winter being pummelled by the Australian quicks, Luckhurst might be forgiven for wanting to face as much tepid trundling on a sluggish pitch as possible.  

Though the scoring rate at Canterbury was the most egregiously slow, it was not exceptional. Only Lancashire, against Yorkshire, scored more than 200. None of the 16 teams in action that day reached the stratosphere of four an over.

The innocuous three-day friendly between Oxford University and Sussex was deemed worthy of reports in the broadsheets (as they then were), and by two of the leading writers of the day, both of whom we will hear much more from as the weeks go on. Those familiar with Henry Blofeld only in his my-dear-old-thing mode may be surprised to learn that in the mid-seventies there was no writer who wrote better reports on a day’s cricket if what you were after was an account of what happened combined with perceptive analysis of why. In 1975 Blofeld was No 2 at The Guardian to John Arlott. If you wanted to be entertained, details of the cricket not compulsory, you went to Alan Gibson in The Times, for whom the play was incidental to the journey to the ground, the people he ran into, and any other tangential fun that was to be had. 

The County Championship began on Wednesday. Only two matches resulted in wins. Lancashire polished Warwickshire off in two days, Lancashire quick Peter Lee had the game of his career, taking 12 wickets including the extraordinary second-innings figures of 9.2-6-8-7. Lee was one of those players who, with better luck, would have played a few tests and could have done well.

Hampshire beat Essex. Barry Richards made 72 and 94. John  Woodcock, still the cricket correspondent of The Times described Richards’ batting in the first innings as “exhilaratingly good” and in the second “it was the batting of Richards that dwarfed all else”. Opening the bowling for Hampshire was Andy Roberts, who Woodcock tells us that in the year since Roberts made his debut for Hampshire had taken 207 wickets (though it was the more mundane Mike Taylor who took six in the second innings to seal the win). Gordon Greenidge was Richards’ opening partner. What a time it was for county cricket.

Woodcock notes that the 21-year-old Graham Gooch made 50 of a partnership of 67, but describes him as “heftily built (unless he takes care he will be vast before long)”. Perhaps it was these words that spurred Gooch to become a famously dedicated runner and trainer.

World news was dominated by the fall of Saigon, allowing a united Vietnam to rule itself for the first time in the twentieth century. The western consensus was that this was a domino falling and that the red menace would be as far as Singapore within months. Half a century later, Vietnam is still ruled by the Communist Party but you wouldn’t know it from photos of downtown Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon became), which is as full of the logos of the multinationals as anywhere else outside the communist world. I saw a TV report the other day that said that Vietnam’s young population is largely unaware of the victorious Vietnam War, on which the country does not dwell. Britain might follow this example.

Another contributor to The Times was Kim Il Sung, leader of North Korea. For reasons that remain unclear the comms team of the Democratic People’s Republic considered it worth paying for the Great Leader’s speeches (on Wednesday it was the one on education) to be reproduced in the newspaper of the British establishment, in the hope that its readers would cast aside their bowler hats and umbrellas and devote their lives to the revolution. Now, as regular readers will know, their main outlet for misinformation is the Basin Reserve scoreboard, which has been under their surreptitious control for some years.

 

1975: Setting the Scene

Eight years ago I retrospectively chronicled the English cricket season of 1967 as it unfolded, a half century after it happened. Daily posts on Twitter, as if it had existed in the time of flower power and Tom Graveney, were supplemented by weekly blog posts using hindsight to the full. The cricket was placed in the context of events of the day. This was great fun to do and attracted favourable reviews, notably from Brian Carpenter’s annual round-up of the cricket blogs in Wisden (sadly missing from the 2025 edition). 

I have not repeated the exercise since, largely through lack of time. For six of the intervening years I was House advisor to the New Zealand government of Labour PMs Ardern and Hipkins, responsible for wrangling the government’s programme in Parliament, which kept me busy. The result of the 2023 general election reversed that role into one of undermining the government. Happily, the new administration is doing such a fine job of that themselves that I have been able to cut my hours, and have the time to repeat the exercise in cricketing retrospectivity, this time looking at the cricketing summer of 1975.

Why 1975? It continues the fifty-year-anniversary theme. But mostly, it was a great summer, both for cricket and the weather. There was the first World Cup, the Ashes and county cricket everywhere, all the time. And the sun shone through high summer more than any other in my life to that point (but not as much as the following year).

English cricket began the season in a state of shock following the drubbing received over the winter at the hands of Australia in general and Lillee and Thomson in particular. Kent’s Mike Denness was the incumbent England captain, but it was not yet confirmed that he would still be when the World Cup started in early June. Hampshire’s Richard Gilliatt led MCC in the season opener against champions Worcestershire. The obvious successor was Tony Greig, an option found distasteful by the cricketing establishment mostly because of Greig’s brash approach to cricket and life. His close-of-play riot-provoking running out of Alvin Kallicharran at Port-of-Spain the previous year was still held against him.

The County Championship of 1975 was a contest of 20 three-day matches per county. A possible 60 playing days was only four more than the current programme of 14 four-day games offers, though the Championship then was for high summer not the scrag ends of the season. The 55-over competition started with a group stage of four games a side preceding the knockouts. Sundays were for the 40-over league, and the 60-over knockout took place over the second half of the season.

I am always suspicious of people who proclaim their youth as the best of times. Usually, they are merely regretting that they are no longer young. Nevertheless, I contend that the mid-seventies were a golden age for county cricket. Every county (except Yorkshire, for self-imposed reasons) could sign a world-class player or two. This meant that young English players could learn by bowling to the likes of the Richards, or facing Andy Roberts or Sarfraz Nawaz. Paying at the gate to watch a county game came with a virtual guarantee that an international star or two would be on the field, and, with four trophies to contend for, every county had a chance.

As before, I will mix the cricket together with news and events of the time, one generally regarded as low point in modern British history, with inflation rarely used without its companion adjective “runaway” and strikes, be they lightening, wildcat or other dominating the news. Two of the most prominent television news journalists were Peter Sissons and Ian Ross, industrial correspondents of ITN and the BBC respectively.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson struggled to maintain a bare majority in the Commons, a battle brilliantly recounted in James Graham’s play The House, and one that fascinated me as I was drawn into the world of parliamentary process and procedure as I had been into the world of cricket a few years before. For Christmas that year I asked for the first volume of Richard Crossman’s Diaries of a Cabinet Minister to sit on the shelf alongside Wisden.

Internationally, as the first balls of the season were bowled thousands of Vietnamese associated with the collapsing government of South Vietnam struggled to escape as Saigon fell. Gerald Ford (another Republican who we now view with unexpected nostalgia) was President of the USA; Giscard d’Estaing led France; Gough Whitlam was Australian PM, but was to fall to the Governor-General’s DRS later in the year; Labour’s Bill Rowling was New Zealand’s PM, but was gone by the end of the year.

One change from last time: daily social media updates will be on Bluesky rather than Twitter. I can be found there as @kentkiwi.bsky.social with username Cricket1975. As with 1967 eight years ago, the dates fall conveniently on the same days of the week as they do in the present.

I’d welcome contributions from others with memories of the summer of ’75.

The CricInfo Years 2000-01

 

The speed of the communications revolution around the turn of the century was astonishing. In 1997 it was potted scores in the stop press. By 2000 satellite TV was bringing us games from across the globe and I was clicking instantaneous news of cricket in New Zealand by return. The contrast between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries could not have been sharper. 

It emerged that CricInfo was to set up an operation in New Zealand with a good slice of funding from New Zealand Cricket, who were concerned at the decline of press coverage and did not want to miss out on the dotcom explosion. Lynn McConnell, one of New Zealand’s most renowned sports journalists, was appointed New Zealand editor. I let him know about my recent work for CricInfo and that I was available throughout the summer. In return I received an offer of 20 (later increased to 24) days’ work as a reporter, filling in across the middle of the North Island when nobody more reputable was available. The pay was $150 a day, which was ok for 25 years ago, with generous expenses for overnight stays and mileage.  

There were two CricInfo representatives at each fixture. As the reporter my job was to write a series of up-to-the-minute reports through the day. For a first-class game this would be a morning preview followed by reports at all drinks breaks, lunch, tea and the close, with a wrap on the day to follow embellished by a few quotes from coaches and/or players. This was demanding, but easy compared to the ball-by-ball scorer, who had to record and briefly describe each delivery, a heroic feat of concentration over a full day. I was fortunate to work mostly with Gareth Bedford and a Canterbury University student called Dean, whose surname I can’t remember. Both were extremely capable and very good company. One day Gareth went a bit quiet, and in response to enquiries revealed that he was live scoring not only the game we were working on in Hamilton, but also the one in Dunedin, 1200km away. I began to suspect that scorers were recruited from another planet of superior lifeforms. Few of the live reports survive. Here is one, from a 50-over game.

Cricket Max was to T20 what Cro Magnon Man is to Homo Sapiens, though Australopithecus might be a more appropriate comparison, given its southern hemisphere origins. It was the invention of Martin Crowe at the behest of the new Sky TV company here in New Zealand. The network wanted some cricket to retain subscribers through the oval-ball free summer, and to establish a foothold in the cricket market with an eye to nabbing the rights from TVNZ a few years down the line. 

There has been a recent spike of interest in Cricket Max, with articles in both The Cricketer and The Nightwatchman. Both acknowledge the inspiration it offered for the development of T20. By the time I encountered it, most of the fripperies—the earliest iterations had a fourth stump—had been removed. It was a 20-over game of cricket, but divided into four innings and still with the double-scoring max zone between long on and long off. 

By 2000 Sky had a satellite and the rights to cricket on both sides of the Tasman, so had no further use for Cricket Max. New Zealand Cricket recast it as a curtain-raiser to the season played mostly in small towns. So it was that my career as a professional cricket writer began in the unlikely surrounds of Albert Park, Te Awamutu, a pleasant town in the southern Waikato that has plenty to offer except, on that occasion, a cable long enough to connect the press tent to a phone socket. So once again, I had to speed back to Rotorua to file my reports.

My debut as a reporter providing live updates came a few days later at Rex Morpeth Park, Whakatane, on the Bay of Plenty coast, another town getting its first and last exposure to provincial cricket. CricInfo’s view of the game was through a slit in the wall in the hospitality area of the pavilion. Despite the testing surroundings I managed to file a report within seconds of the end of each innings and felt quite pleased with my efforts until I discovered that I had missed a hat trick. In my defence, everybody else had missed it too, including the scorers (who found it during their post-match checks) and the bowler himself, Simon Doull. It was spread over the two innings, effective camouflage in the frenetic surrounds of Max. Doull also registered a king pair, all within three hours. 

That summer I reported from six other locations around the North Island. The ground I spent most time at was Seddon Park (then WestPac Park), Hamilton, Northern’s HQ. It had the best media facilities, with a press room with a great view of play, and a fridge with an endless supply of refreshments. Not only was I paid to watch and write about the cricket, I was also given a free lunch everywhere. It was what heaven must be like. 

At first, the presence of we amateurs in the press box was greeted with polite suspicion by the professional journalists, but we were accepted once we showed that we could do a reasonable job. The two reporters with whom we shared the Seddon Park press box most often were Terry Maddaford of the New Zealand Herald and Ian Anderson of the Waikato Times. Newcomers were invited to guess the date on which Terry had last not gone for a run. It was sometime in the early 60s. “What happens if you get a cold?” someone once asked. “I go running everyday so I don't get colds” was the reply.

It was in Hamilton that I reported on first-class cricket for the first time, in what was called the Shell Trophy, the Plunket Shield with a whiff of the forecourt about it. Auckland were the visitors. The national team were in South Africa, losing all but one of the six ODIs and one of the three tests, but there were plenty of familiar names left at home, careers in ascent or decline, Lou Vincent, Dion Nash, Doull and Bruce Martin among them. 

Only the report on the second day appears to be accessible. I made full use of ongoing disputes about who had actually won the 2020 US presidential election.

This was a day so tense and full of unexpected twists and turns that it would have been no surprise had Al Gore turned up to demand a recount…With thirteen wickets having fallen on the first day the batsmen had as much trust in the pitch as in a Florida election official. 

Who would have thought then that we would come to feel nostalgic about the presidency of George W Bush? 

I also covered domestic four-day games at Owen Delany Park in Taupo and at McLean Park in Napier. The latter, between Central and Northern, was the best contest I reported on in the Shell Trophy that season. The daily wraps are here (but the scorecard and heading that it is under relate to a different match altogether: the CricInfo archive is chaotic). Central’s Craig Spearman made chasing 290—by 70 the highest total of the match—look simple. 80 of his 90 came in boundaries. On his day Spearman looked a world beater as Gloucestershire supporters were later to discover.

At the conclusion of that match I drove to New Plymouth on the other side of the North Island to cover a four-day game between the under-19 teams of New Zealand and South Africa, the final contest of a three-match series. The venue was Pukekura Park, quite the most beautiful cricket ground I have ever seen. On three sides there are grass mounds shaped like ziggurats with room for just one row of seats on each level. The fourth is open, giving a view of the Tasman Sea, which generally has the aesthetic decency to shimmer with a deep blue hue. If ever a cricket ground deserved a pavilion with a thatched roof it is this one, but its only disappointment is the nondescript building that serves this function. Happily, we were stationed therein, so did not have to suffer a view of it to spoil the idyll.

New Zealand’s captain was one Brendon McCullum. This was my first look at a player who became one of my favourite cricketers. My report on the first day shows that I liked what I saw, but as McCullum had scored a century in each of the first two games of the series and repeated the feat here, it did not require profound insight to identify his promise. What impressed me most about McCullum’s innings here was not his aggressive strokeplay but his reaction to getting out for exactly 100. It was reasonable to expect that a young cricketer who had just made his third international century in three games might return to the rooms sporting a satisfied grin at the very least, but McCullum was furious, his ire directed only at himself for giving it away.

Ross Taylor was in the New Zealand XI, at sixteen, three years younger than most of the rest. He knew scorer Dean, so spent a bit of time with us and impressed with his composure. The other big star of the future in this game was Hashim Amla, who completed his third half-century of the series. My assessment: “Amla is a fluent timer of the ball and particularly strong on the off side” was on point, but again no more than a statement of the obvious.

The second and third days of the match were washed away by the rain. A family of ducks moved from its pond to deep mid-wicket as it was wetter there. I had several chats with the South African coach Hylton Ackerman, who was gratified that I remembered him playing for Northamptonshire and the International Cavaliers in the sixties. With Ackerman’s approval I turned these conversations into a feature.

I also covered three ODIs between the two teams, two at Owen Delany Park and one at Eden Park No 2 in Auckland. I was again impressed by Hashim Amla:

 

But it was the batting of 17-year-old Amla that really took the eye. He seems to have the right shot for every delivery and all the time in the world to play. His fielding is somewhat short of the rigorous standards demanded by the modern game, but if he has the temperament to go to the top, he surely has the class.

There was a flash of Bazball too:

 

McCullum threw it away by hitting Botha straight to Zondeki at mid off. His 44 came from 23 balls, and included six fours and two sixes. McCullum's innings was glorious, but his departure meant that a New Zealand batsman was out in the forties for the fifth time in the series.

Most of the players in that series went on to have solid careers in domestic cricket, notably Wellington’s Luke Woodcock. A few, besides those previously mentioned, performed well on the international stage, intermittently, at least: Ian Butler, Jesse Ryder, Johan Botha (then a notably ill-tempered quick bowler; the transformation into a dodgy-actioned spinner came later)  and Monde Zondeki. For a few, this was their zenith, though Taraia Robin can be satisfied that he was the inspiration for my best headline: “Batsmen and Robin Rescue New Zealand”.

In those pre-T20 days it was the 50-over Shell Cup that occupied the holiday weeks of high summer. Northern’s home opener in Hamilton saw CricInfo’s reporter in sardonic mood:

 

In an age when cricket scores and other, less important, information, can go round the world in the blink of an eye, it is amazing that communicating a simple decision over the length of a cricket pitch can sometimes prove so,,  difficult. Yet this was the downfall of Central Districts in Hamilton today, as five batsmen were lost to run outs.

The highlight of this game, and of several others over the next couple of seasons, was the reinvention of Simon Doull as a pinch-hitting opening batter.

The week between Christmas and New Year took us to Blake Park, Mt Maunganui, adjacent to where the Bay Oval now stands. The media facilities here consisted of a truck with one side opened up. I had a dodgy back at the time, and the pained manner in which both I and Radio Sport’s Kevin Hart went about boarding it caused one of our colleagues to claim that they had reported two beached whales to the SPCA.

The first of two games provided controversy for the tyro reporter to sir up. What should have been a brief interruption for rain was prolonged because of a tear in the covers. This meant that play extended into a gloomy evening, causing the umpires to agonise over whether there was threat to life from medium-pace bowling on a slow pitch. Repeated conferences on this matter occupied time in which the game would otherwise have finished, until the Northern batters were finally given the option of going off, an offer that, nine down but ahead on Duckworth/Lewis, they were quick to accept.

The lead umpire (but you have already guessed this) was Billy Bowden, who CricInfo held chiefly responsible for the day’s perplexity. This was the start of 25 years of gentle fun that I have had mocking Billy’s propensity to discover reasons for preventing cricket from being played. The live reports for this game survive. The unusual ending was discussed on Radio Sport the next day, in reaction to which I wrote an opinion piece that was appropriately mocking in tone.

The reporters were expected to embellish the close-of-play wrap with a few quotes from those involved, usually the coaches. This example, from a wet day at Cornwall Park in Hastings, has contributions from Dipak Patel of Central and Tony Sail of Auckland. Patel was always good value, offering honest and interesting views, delivered in a New Zealand accent that suggested he was a born-and-bred Kiwi. Yet fifteen years before I had had  a chat with him in the Bat and Ball Inn opposite the St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury when he spoke with the brogue of the West Midlands in which he was raised. As someone who has tried and failed for almost 30 years to acquire a New Zealand timbre, I remain envious of such linguistic adaptability.

Other coaches were less loquacious and needed a bit of help. For one I adopted the practice of saying “would you agree that” followed by a take on the day’s play. The interviewee would consider this for a few seconds and then say “that sounds about right”. My words would then be attributed to him in the report.

What a summer it was. Being paid to travel round one of the world’s beautiful places to watch and write about cricket with free accommodation and food. My work had been judgesdsufficiently satisfactory for me to be first call for anything south of Auckland and north of Wellington in the following season.

The CricInfo years: 1999-2000

In 1999 I turned 40. It seemed as venerable then as it does youthful now. I had lived in New Zealand for two years, a big jump that had paid off royally. It was time to take another. I resigned from my teaching job to have a go at making my living more creatively, particularly through writing.

I bought a computer, complete with TV-sized monitor, and connected it to the new wonder of the time, the internet. My email address was simply my initials, pph@... There are plenty of things in my past that show how much the world has changed in my lifetime. When I was a child I had measles. Learning to drive involved mastering the choke if you wanted the car to start on a cold morning. And, when I moved to New Zealand in 1997, if I wanted to know how Kent had got on overnight I had either to ring my mother and wait for her to find the right page on Ceefax or hold fast for 24 hours for the potted scores in the New Zealand Herald. The full scorecard was not available until the following Thursday when I would buy (and in itself this shows how a desperation for information can erode all standards of decency) the international edition of the Daily Express.

So the first website I looked at was CricInfo. I had heard about this. A place where you could access the latest scores of matches around the world, sometimes ball-by-ball as they were played and run by cricket enthusiasts much like myself. It was almost time travel. I noted that the daily global email newsletter contained little or no New Zealand content and saw an opportunity as I strove to conjure up a freelance existence.

Over the next few months I sent in articles on domestic cricket such as regular round-ups of domestic matches, relying heavily on the comprehensive radio coverage then (but no longer) provided by Radio Sport. Of the pieces that survive online, the earliest is this one, an untypical contribution putting the possibility of an Indian victory after a low first innings score in the test match being played at Chandigarh in historical context. It may be surmised that the bar for accepting contributions was set barely off the ground. There is also a piece reflecting the “outrage”, real or imagined, of the South Island at being denied international fixtures in the forthcoming season. 

The West Indians toured in December and January. I submitted a preview. They were to play New Zealand A at Owen Delany Park, Taupo, an hour south of Rotorua where I lived. My offer to provide a daily report (unpaid, as was all my work that summer) was accepted. So began my career as a cricket reporter. In the following years I joined the rest of the media in the press area at the back of the stand at Owen Delany Park, and was appreciative of the free lunch, perhaps the finest on the circuit. But in December ‘99 I was unaccredited and still apprehensive about masquerading as a journalist in the company of professionals, so I wrote from the anonymity of a garden chair on the grass bank that surrounded most of the field. The same diffidence inhibited me from approaching Viv Richards, briefly West Indies’ coach, when he paused close by as he prowled the boundary. I was yet to appreciate the credibility, deserved or otherwise, that a byline could bestow.

“Wrote” is a precise description too. Wifi was not in anybody’s vocabulary and laptops were as exotic and expensive as they were unreliable, so the reports were compiled with pen on paper, constructed in fragments during the day, and stitched together in the last hour, the aim being for the last full stop to coincide with the final delivery of the day. Then it was into the car for the drive against the clock back home, where I would key the piece into Word, click on the internet connection, hoping for the reassuring four notes followed by white noise, and off it would go at 56kb/s, if I was lucky. Several hours later the daily CricInfo newsletter would make the return journey with my name over the report. I found this unreasonably exciting. Each day’s report is still listed on CricInfo but all the links lead to that for the second day (which reads as if it is incomplete). They were also carried by the Barbados Nation, whose reply to my invoice I still await. 

The match was dominated by a double hundred by Shiv Chanderpaul. It was not so much the work of an artist as that of an efficient painter of walls and ceilings. Of batters since, only Steve Smith has equalled Chanderpaul in scoring massive amounts of runs in such an aesthetically unsatisfying manner. 

It was a pleasure to once again watch Courtney Walsh, having done so throughout his Gloucestershire years. With the possible exception of his predecessor Mike Procter, nobody has offered more value as an overseas player than Walsh. There is an excellent interview with him in the latest County Cricket Matters by the wonderful Annie Chave (subscribe if you haven’t already). He speaks of the value to West Indian cricket that the county game offered and of his enjoyment of the “family” of Gloucestershire. Another time. 

I watched most of the first test, played in Hamilton just before Christmas, though I wasn’t reporting. It was a good match, mostly remembered for the statistical anomoly of the highest first-wicket partnership for a losing team: 276 by Adrian Griffiths and Sherwin Campbell in the first innings. That this was so was largely down to Chris Cairns. He top-scored with 72 in the first innings, coming in at No 8 with New Zealand 107 behind, out when the lead had been achieved. This was followed by one of the finest bowling performances in test cricket for this country: seven for 27 to rout West Indies for 97 to set up a comfortable nine-wicket victory. Cairns is the forgotten man of New Zealand’s cricket history, but is our greatest all-rounder, capable of seizing any match of whatever format and transforming it with bat or ball, or, in this case, both.

The only other match that wrote a report on that summer was the second of five ODIs against the visiting England women in Hamilton, once again composed from a garden chair on the bank followed by a foot-down drive back to Rotorua and more frantic typing. 

The best thing that has happened to cricket in the intervening quarter-century is the revolution in the funding and status of women’s cricket. There was no TV coverage of this series and radio coverage, at a time when there was extensive commentary on men’s domestic matches in New Zealand, was limited to brief reports. There was no English media presence (apart from me, I suppose). Women’s cricket was making its first tentative steps into the professional era. England had Paul Farbrace and Graham Dilley as coaches. I had come across New Zealand’s bowler of the day, Rachel Pullar, a year or so before when she and Chris Harris visited the school I was teaching at, both employed to run a series of coaching sessions, one of the first opportunities that women players had to earn a living within the game (and showing that the men were not rolling in it either). Pullar and Harris were both superb, by the way. None of those playing in Hamilton that day would get rich from playing cricket at that time. 

Both teams had suffered a clean sweep in ODIs in Australia before this series. England’s response was to change captains mid-tour, reportedly in response to a threatened mutiny against Karen Smithies, who quit, handing over to Clare Connor. My most prominent memory of that game in Hamilton is not of the play, but Smithies walking a lonely, forlorn circuit of the ground having been dropped from the playing XI. New Zealand’s resounding win was the fourth in a five-match sweep, led by Emily Drumm, one of those leaders who you could tell was in charge from her demeanour even if you were looking down from space. Drumm, together with her predecessor as skipper Debbie Hockley, were among the initial inductees to the New Zealand Cricket Hall of Fame recently. She led New Zealand to victory in the World Cup later in 2000, a team that contained eight of the players in the XI at Hamilton. 

The other international visitors that season were the Australians, who played three tests, six ODIs and two other first-class games. I did not report on any of these contests, but did provide a preview or two, which have not survived on CricInfo’s database. Chris Rosie, a very nice guy who had recently retired from the New Zealand Herald, but who had not been a sportswriter, covered the test series and the game against Northern Districts, but there are no reports on the ODIs. Apparently, it did not occur to me to offer to write reports while watching the TV coverage. Not the done thing at all. Now (and starting only two or three years after that) most CricInfo content is written by people watching the telly.

I was there for most of the test match and provincial game at Seddon Park, Hamilton (though it was then masquerading as WestPac Park). By the turn of the century warm-up games for tourists had lost their allure in most parts of the world. When we lament their disappearance from the schedule it should be remembered that the failure of home teams to provide the best available opposition was a factor in their decline. Not so in New Zealand at that time. Northern Districts put out their strongest team, one that contained nine past,  present or future internationals. Justin Langer and Damien Martyn put on 197 to set up a comfortable five-wicket win. 

Two memories from that game. Brett Lee, presumably at the receiving end of an untypically churlish remark from one of the batters, went “through the crease” and unleashed one of his thunderbolts from about three yards short of the traditional 22. Colin “Funky” Miller, he of the electric blue hair, bowled off spin to the left-handers and seam up to the right-handers, swapping as many times as was necessary in the course of an over. Maybe this was not unprecedented; but it would have taken a Sobers or Barnes to do it, and it was the first time I had seen it. 

Australia returned to Hamilton a few weeks later with the series already in the bag after two wins. Though culturally disinclined to remove the foot from the Kiwi  throat, they teetered at 29 for five in reply to New Zealand’s first innings 232. Adam Gilchrist was next in and ignored completely the constraints that the situation would conventionally impose. His 75—64 of them in boundaries—took just 80 balls, secured a first-innings lead and provided the basis of Australia’s for a six-wicket win. Bazball is really Gillyball recycled. McGrath and Lee took 14 of New Zealand’s wickets between them and Langer made another Hamilton century. 

In May 2000, Dave Crowe, father of Martin and Jeff, passed away. He was the New Zealand correspondent of The Cricketer at the time, so, with my freelancer’s instinct to sniff out possible work overcoming natural reticence, I emailed the magazine to offer my services. They replied thanking me for my message, saying that they were wondering why they hadn’t received Crowe’s copy for the next edition. Bryan Waddle was appointed as his successor. However, the dotcom boom was on and CricInfo was taking a greater interest in New Zealand…