The Greatest Test of All

The BBC Radio iPlayer has some interesting cricket material available at the moment, inspired by the happy confluence of the thirtieth anniversary of Headingley '81 with the 2,000^th Test, currently in progress at Lord's.

Two programmes are devoted to the considerable task of choosing which of the 2,000 Tests was the best. The first is a 90-minute discussion between Jonathan Agnew, Simon Hughes and Chris Broad (with a contribution from Tony Cozier) with the aim of selecting a shortlist of three (they settled on four in the end). Such a format depends on the panel's knowledge being deep enough to do the subject justice. This group did a reasonable job, though their lack of awareness of Test cricket's early days was exposed. The Oval Test of 1882 and the Sydney match of 1894 were mentioned only because a listener emailed suggesting that they should be, though both are clearly worthy of consideration. A cricket historian such as David Frith or Gideon Haigh would have filled the gap well.

The Oval game was the one that gave rise to the Ashes legend, with the publication of an obituary for English cricket being published in the Sporting Times (“...and the Ashes will be taken to Australia”). Fred “The Demon” Spofforth, the first great fast bowler, took 14 wickets for Australia, who won by 7 runs. At least Simon Hughes knew the story about the spectator so caught up in the tension that he chewed through the handle of his umbrella, though he wasn't sure whether it was supposed to have occurred in 1882 or 1953.

Hughes also suggested that Headingley 1981 was the first occasion on which a side had won a Test after following on. Not so. That was the significance of Sydney 1894, a game that had everything that a great game should have. Besides England's great rearguard, Syd Gregory hit Test cricket's first double century and slow left-armer Peel bowled a match-winning spell. It should have been seriously discussed, at least.

Old Trafford 1902 was not mentioned at all. Australia won a classic by three runs. Victor Trumper and FS Jackson both scored hundreds, and Hugh Trumble and England's less well-known Bill Lockwood took ten and eleven wickets respectively. Debutant Fred Tate of Sussex had a nightmare in his only Test match. He dropped Joe Darling in the deep and was last man out with four still needed. Legend has it that he as he left the ground he said something along the lines of “I've got a boy at home who will make up for this for me”, the boy being Maurice, who lived up to his father's promise by becoming the best fast-medium bowler of his time and taking 38 Test wickets in the 1924-5 Ashes series.

A winner was chosen from the shortlist by a different panel during lunch on the second day of the Lord's Test. Agnew again, but this time accompanied by Geoffrey Boycott, Michael Vaughan and Steve Waugh, who ruefully noted that the choice appeared to consist of games that Australia had thrown away. They went for the Calcutta Test of 2001, another won after following on:

http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/current/match/63920.html

VVS Laxman's monumental 281 led the way, supported by Rahul Dravid's 180, which was no doubt as silky as yesterday's century at Lord's.

These programmes are best accessed through the podcast pages of the BBC website, where they will available indefinitely.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/5lspecials

There is some interesting archive commentary in the first programme, including Alan Gibson on the final over at Lord's in 1963, with Colin Cowdrey, arm in a plaster cast, at the non-striker's end, and some vintage John Arlott.

And the Archive on 4 series featured an hour on the 1981 series, presented by the Great Alchemist himself, Mike Brearley. I will write a more detailed post on this series soon, but this is a treat, with a revelation thrown in: the selectors almost went along with the wishes of most of the cricketing public, myself included, and omitted Bob Willis before the game. Fortunately for posterity, they changed their minds at the last moment.

This programme will only be available for a week or so, so get in quick:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b012qlbx/Archive_on_4_The_1981_Ashes_Series/

The third World Cup Final: India v West Indies, Lord's, 25 June 1983

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/43/43681.html

There are two things that should be recorded about the third World Cup final. First, it was the most important game of cricket ever played, and second, it was quite dull.

As expected, the West Indies reached the final for the third time. The team was at its formidable peak by now, enhanced by the addition of Malcolm Marshall, perhaps the greatest of their fast bowlers, and Jeff Dujon, a good wicketkeeper and a batsman of international class. It had won all its group matches, and the semi-final against Pakistan, by resounding margins. Except one. We might have paid more attention to that exception, as it was against India in the first group match, the West Indies falling 34 short of India's 262, Roger Binny's wobbly seamers accounting for Lloyd, Richards and Dujon.

India almost went down to Zimbabwe in the improbable surroundings of the Nevil Ground, Tunbridge Wells (why Kent chose to stage its first ODI there, rather than at Canterbury, is a mystery). At 17 for five all seemed lost, but captain Kapil Dev came to the rescue with 175 not out, six sixes re-arranging the rhododendrons. It remains the highest one-day score made in Kent. His team went on to beat a strong England side in the semi-final.

Even so, as we gathered at Lord's on the morning of the final there was a feeling of inevitability about proceedings, and disappointment when Clive Lloyd put India in, a decision that seemed likely to deprive us of a repeat of the Caribbean run fest that we had so enjoyed in the first two finals.

Indeed, the Indian innings proceeded as we expected. Andy Roberts, with three for 32, was the most expensive of the quicks, though Larry Gomes went for 49 from 11 overs, but also took two wickets. Kris Srikkanth (a prototype Sehwag in his approach to batting) was top scorer with 38, and the last wicket partnership of 22 between Kirmani and Sandhu was the fourth-highest of the innings.

The result being certain, the main interest between innings was on whether Viv Richards would get in early enough to complete his usual Lord's final century (two more had followed that in the 1979 final). Sure enough, Greenidge went early and in strode the Great Man, nobody more certain than himself that he was about to rescue our day with something wonderful.

Richards attacked from the start, and we got ready to relish the next 90 minutes or so. Of his first 33 runs, 28 came in boundaries, to all corners of the ground. In his Guardian report, Matthew Engel described Richards as playing “a sophisticated form of clock golf”. Madan Lal, from the Pavilion End, had the temerity to attempt a bouncer. Richards hooked, and as it came off bat the question was would it land in the Mound or Tavern Stand, or perhaps even the St John's Wood Road?

But it had come not from the middle of the bat but from the top edge, and the trajectory was steep. The ball was still heading in the direction of the mid-wicket boundary, but would it reach? Kapil Dev was the nearest fielder and for a moment was as uncertain as most of us as to the ball's flight path. He began to move towards the boundary with eyes fixed upwards. Then his hands moved up to his eye level, which told us what we needed to know. The catch was a good one, taken over the shoulder, and Richards turned away, towards the pavilion.

Nobody at the ground saw it as a match-winning catch though. Gomes was next in, but we did not want his brand of cautious accumulation to take the West Indies home. The hope was for a reprise of Clive Lloyd's 1975 innings, in so far as the target of 184 would allow. But both fell with the score at 66, and Faoud Bacchus followed ten runs later.

Dujon and Marshall (a capable batsman) steadied things and looked very comfortable against India's trundlers, who were less threatening than half the county attacks of the time. With the required run rate low enough not to be a factor it appeared at 119 for six that, though excitement that we hoped for was absent, sensible batting would bring the West Indies home.

So certain were we of the invincibility of the West Indies that there was curiously little tension. I have never been in a crowd which so misread what was happening in front of it, me as much as anybody. It would have been much more exciting to have been following the game on the radio on the streets of Calcutta and Bombay (as they then were), where people knew exactly what was going on, that every wicket was taking India nearer to a famous victory. At Lord's only when Dujon, Marshall and Roberts were out in quick succession to leave the last pair, Garner and Holding, to chase the 58 still needed did the penny finally drop. Holding was lbw to Mohinder Armanath to give India a 40-run victory.

So why was it the most important game ever played? Because it was the day that South Asia in general and India in particular awoke to the possibilities of one-day cricket, a form of the game that had been scorned in that part of the world up to that point. I have written before about the time on the same turf just eight years before when Sunil Gavaskar disdained a target of 334, the compromises to his art that it would necessitate being too much for him to bear.

http://mylifeincricketscorecards.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-i-cant-take-sunil-gavaskar.html

Test matches, even torpid ones on flat, slow pitches were everything. From September 1979 to February 1980 13 Test matches were played in India, not an ODI in sight. By 1986/7 there were 17 ODIs in an Indian season, and in the next the hosting of World Cup was shared with Pakistan. In a sense the IPL, or at least the mindset that spawned it, was born that June day at Lord's, of all places.

Even so, it was a poor game of cricket. The World Cup final has usually been a stage for a memorable performance from a great player. Lloyd, Richards, Wasim Akram, da Silva ( a Kent player, by the way), Warne, Ponting, Gilchrist, and a brilliant losing century by Jayawardene this year. The Man of the Match that day? Mohinder Armanath, not even a proper bowler, for little seamers so modest that they wore a veil. India did not even pick a proper spinner.

That was my third, and probably last World Cup final, the prices being what they are these days, though we look forward to 2015 when the event returns to New Zealand and the West Island. We are staging a World Cup in another code as practice for it here this year, so everything will be ready.

NB. Birthday today. Got a card from Stephen Fleming.

In the Footsteps of Giants

Author's note: apologies for the small font size, which it is beyond my technical ability to enlarge. I advise readers having difficulty reading this post to buy a bigger screen.

As part of the desecration redevelopment of the St Lawrence Ground a walkway is to be built honouring twelve of the county's great players, chosen by a panel comprising Kent's long-serving statistician Howard Milton; Derek Carlaw, who has been contributing erudite and interesting features to the Kent annual for many years; and Tony Rickson, a journalist unknown in this part of New Zealand. A shortlist of forty was published in local papers and Kent followers were invited to nominate their chosen dozen, but this was purely advisory, and rightly so. A comprehensive knowledge of two centuries of cricket was needed to do justice to the task.

And justice to it they have done, selecting a twelve that tells the story of cricket in Kent as well as celebrating some of our finest. Of course, this task is easier than picking an all-time Kent XI, because so many of the county's great names were wicketkeepers or slow bowlers. Eleven of the names are the same as my selection, and I have no great quarrel with the twelfth.

But I do have a couple of small gripes about the shortlist of forty:

http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Kent-Legends-Walkway-choose-favourite-cricket/story-12002825-detail/story.html
First, Richard Ellison (11 Tests) or Mark Ealham, (eight Tests and 64 ODIs) would be a better representative of the 80s and 90s than Steve Marsh, who was, by our high Kentish standards, a mediocre keeper. What about Neil Taylor, who scored more centuries for Kent than Bob Wilson, Brian Luckhurst or Mike Denness? Or Dean Headley?

And what's this? No CJ Tavaré? David Gower was good on Tavaré during the recent Lord's Test, describing how the batsman who would block to order for England was known to the Kent membership only as a carefree shot player (Gower should be on the list too, having been educated in Canterbury, but he was allowed to slip away to Leicestershire).

Of the twelve, nine are obvious choices. Taking them chronologically:

Alfred Mynn

When John Woodcock (editor of Wisden and cricket correspondent of The Times for more than three decades; known to Alan Gibson's readers as the Sage of Longparish) ranked his hundred greatest cricketers in the mid-nineties he placed Mynn third, below only Bradman and Grace, who was seen as the new Mynn early in his career. As well as being the greatest all-rounder of his day, Mynn – three times bankrupt and over-fond of his ale – was just the sort of dissolute character that the public likes to have as a hero. It is as well that he had finished before the county club was formally constituted. The sort of people who have run it for most of its existence would never have approved of him.

Colin Blythe

It is Blythe who is bowling in the Chevallier Taylor painting of the Kent v Lancashire game of 1906 that captivated Duncan Hamilton when he visited Canterbury at the end of his journey around England in 2009.

http://mylifeincricketscorecards.blogspot.com/2011/04/harold-larwood-and-last-english-summer.html
It would not have been right for another bowler to have been its focus. Blythe's slow left-arm was Kent's paramount advantage in the first golden era of four championships between 1906 and 1913. At Northampton in 1907 he took 17 wickets in a day, match figures beaten only by Laker at Old Trafford, and he was as lethal on drying pitches as Derek Underwood. Like Freeman, he did not not transfer his county prowess to Tests, and was said to have suffered from epilepsy, brought on by stress. He lost his life at Passchendale in 1917, and a memorial stands to him at the St Lawrence Ground, untouched, I trust, by the developers.

Frank Woolley

In the late sixties and early seventies there were still plenty of people around the grounds who had watched Woolley and they would go all misty-eyed as they told you that they had never seen better. As well as the sheer weight of runs – he is Kent's top aggregate scorer with 15,000 more than next-best Wally Hardinge – he batted with sublime elegance. Allen Hunt said that the young Gower reminded him of Woolley, also a left-hander. There is also the small matter of 1,680 wickets (mostly as a slow left-armer, though he was quicker as a young player) and 773 catches, another county record. I saw him when he visited during Canterbury Week one year, a tall agile figure, even in his eighties. Kent's best.

Tich Freeman

Freeman's bowling record tests credulity. With his leg spin he took more than 200 first-class wickets in eight successive seasons, 304 in 1928, more than any bowler before or since. Even in an age when hapless amateurs filled places in most county sides, ready for harvest by Freeman assisted by Les Ames behind the stumps, these figures are unmatched. His career aggregate is second only to Wilfred Rhodes, whose career was more than ten years longer. But Freeman was the Graeme Hick of his time: superlative domestic figures, but little impact in Tests, something I have never heard explained satisfactorily.

Les Ames

Ames was a cricketer eighty years ahead of his time, a top-class wicketkeeper who was a Test-class batsman, the best until Gilchrist. With Woolley and Cowdrey he was one of Kent's trio of scorers of a hundred hundreds. But his contribution to the county was as significant after retirement as it had been on the field of play. As secretary-manager (about 27 people are now employed to do what he did alone) he was more responsible than anyone else for building the great team of the seventies. A professional cricketer (in the best sense), he commanded total respect in a county where amateurs (often not in the best sense) dominated.

Godfrey Evans

January 1999, 5^th Ashes Test, Sydney Cricket Ground. I am sitting next to two sisters and the husband of one of them (it is impossible to tell which, as he is largely silent, through habit). They all in their seventies and straight out of The Sullivans. They are up from the country for a day at the Test, an excursion they have made since the forties. The talk turns to favourite players. “Godfrey Evans” says one of the sisters, the name echoed by the other at once, “he was our favourite”. Ten minutes later I point out a familiar side-whiskered figure who has appeared a few rows in front of us and for a moment their smiles make them young again. I saw him play for the Cavaliers, and for Old England at the Oval in 1980 when, aged sixty, he executed a stumping so quickly that the ground announcer thought it was bowled, and in a first-class match, against Yorkshire at Canterbury in 1967 when Fred Trueman dusted the crease with his cap as Evans came into bat (Alan Knott had been picked for England and Kent was without a keeper). Godfrey Evans enjoyed playing cricket and liked people to enjoy watching him.

Colin Cowdrey, Derek Underwood and Alan Knott

I take these three together because their places in the chosen twelve need little justification, and because each warrant more detailed attention at another time, so important were they to my cricketing education. Suffice to mention that it was not so much the runs that Cowdrey scored, but the way in which he scored them that made him special to a generation of cricket supporters, and not only in Kent, or England.

To the Kentish, Knott and Underwood belong together like Astaire and Rogers for the way in which their talents combined to produce something beautiful. To opposition batsmen a more lethal pairing – Smith and Wesson say – would be a more appropriate comparison. Neither ever gave less than their all for the county, even at the peak of their international careers.

Those nine names would be on the lists of all informed Kent followers. What about the other three? The two names that my selection have in common with the official choice both come from the glory days of my youth, and those of at least two of the selectors, I suspect. I don't think that this is sentimentality; simply a reflection that this was the county's high summer.

Brian Luckhurst and John Shepherd

Mike Denness could fill a spot, as a fine batsman and winner of six one-day titles as captain; but no championships. Bob Woolmer described Denness as the best one-day captain he played under, but insufficiently imaginative in first-class cricket. Woolmer himself warrants consideration for his contributions with both bat and ball to the winning teams of the seventies. He should have been captain at some stage. But somehow he appealed to minds, not hearts (and I've never forgiven him for denying me the autograph that would have completed my collection in the souvenir Gillette Cup final brochure in 1971). I'd a hankering to pick Alan Ealham, our last Championship-winning captain, and the best outfielder I've seen, but that would have been sentiment.

But the choice of Brian Luckhurst will produce collective nodding of heads from those who saw him play. He scored 39 centuries and almost 20,000 runs and was of those who became a better batsman because of the need to adapt to one-day cricket. Luckhurst was a key member of the Ashes-winning team of 1970-71 and deserved a longer international career than he had. But his record on the field is only part of the story. After his (premature) retirement in 1976, he held a variety of posts at Canterbury, from coach to indoor school bar manager. At one time he sold scorecards around the ground on Sundays, and did so with the same dignity and good humour that he brought to every other role. Of the professionals, only Les Ames and Claude Lewis gave the county longer service.

John Shepherd is the current president of the club. When he joined the staff in 1965 the idea of a black president would have triggered mass coronaries in the Band of Brothers tent. That nobody thinks it now worth mentioning is a pleasing reflection of how far we have come, and of the contribution made by the overseas players who have played such an important part in Kent's history over the past half century, John Shepherd first among them. It seemed to me that Kent captains had an easier job than those of other counties. They simply put Shepherd on at one end in April and took him off in September. He was a genuine all-rounder and would have batted much higher for any other county. Runs were made when the top order had failed (a century against Middlesex in the Gillette Cup in 1977 a prime example) and often spectacularly (24 off an over from fellow Bajan Hallam Moseley one sunny Sunday in 1973). He could throw the ball from fine leg to the bowler's end with a flick of the wrist. Shepherd has also served as captain of Herne Bay Golf Club, which would have seemed an even more unlikely prospect in 1965.

And so to the last place. The selectors have given it to Doug Wright, who kept a poor side going in the fifties with his quickish leg spin, which was good enough to take a world record seven hat-tricks. There is no disputing Wright's status among Kent's finest. My issue is that, while the great era of the seventies has been given due recognition, this is not the case for the other period in which the county was the country's best: the years before the First World War, during which Championships were won in 1906, 1909, 1910 and 1913. So a representative of these years besides Woolley and Blythe is needed.

But who? Having looked at the season-by-season records two candidates are pre-eminent: Kenneth Hutchings and Arthur Fielder. Hutchings was an attacking batsman, whose driving was particularly strong. His best three seasons were all Championship-winning years, though he had finished by 1913. Like Blythe, Hutchings died on the Western Front.

Fielder was a fast bowler. According to his obituary in Wisden, he could swing the ball away and bring it back off the pitch, which might explain how he took 1,150 wickets for Kent in not much more than a decade as a regular player. He contributed strongly to all for Championships, particularly the first in 1906, when he took 172 wickets. Fielder gets my nomination, if only because Kent is not known for its fast bowlers, but I'll celebrate Doug Wright quite happily.

I look forward to walking the walkway, even if it is likely to be a dull day in November when I next visit the frozen north. It is good to know that the desperate measures that the club's financial crisis requires have not meant that its history or heroes have been forgotten.

The second World Cup Final: England v West Indies, Lord's, 23 June 1979

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/39/39336.html

I'm not sure how much a ticket to the second World Cup final cost, but it was nothing that a first-year university student had to think twice about. Of course, in 1979 the State understood that providing the flower of its youth with the wherewithal to spend its summers at the cricket was a worthwhile long-term investment.

In addition to a grant (for the benefit of readers under the age of 40, that's a loan you don't have to repay), we were allowed to sign on the dole from June to September. In order to spare potential employers the embarrassment of having their kind offers of employment turned down, we thoughtfully omitted to enter our phone numbers on the forms. In four summers, the only job offer that came the way of my Blean Correspondent or myself was an opportunity for the former to be a roofer, a job for which he was the least suitable person in east Kent, your writer excepted.

So it was that I set off for Lord's on a bright June Saturday with a smile on my face and the taxpayer's pound in my pocket.

Much had happened in the four years since the first World Cup. Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket had challenged the assumptions upon which the game was run, for the better. Packer won the war; shortly before the start of the 1979 World Cup the Australian Board of Control gave the TV rights for cricket in Australia to his Channel Nine, which retains them to this day.

The World Cup did not escape the fallout from cricket's war. England and Australia did not select any World Series players, which meant that the Kent trio of Underwood, Knott and Woolmer were absent, which was England's loss (though Knott only played the first half of the season, keeping a place warm for Paul Downton, who was at Exeter University).

Australia went out at the group stage, but England reached the final to meet the defending champions. In a recent TV interview Clive Lloyd explained how much the West Indies had benefitted from World Series Cricket. Kerry Packer demanded fitness and a professional approach in return for his large cheques, and this got the most out of the abundant raw talent of the islands.

It helped that in place was the first version of the pace-bowling quartet on which the West Indies domination of world cricket for the next decade was based. The thinking speed of Andy Roberts and Mikey Holding was supplemented by Joel Garner, who that day revealed his ability to bowl yorkers to order, and Colin Croft, who made up for lack of art by giving the impression of being just a bit psycho.

England was fortunate that the loss of the World Series players had coincided with the emergence of the gifted trio of Gooch, Botham and Gower. And the captain was Mike Brearley, the cleverest man on the planet.

Things went well for England early on. The Nijinsky of the covers, Derek Randall, ran out Gordon Greenidge (whether the reference to Nijinsky is taken as being to the dancer or the racehorse, it is apt). A fine pair of bowlers, Mike Hendrick and Chris Old accounted for Desmond Haynes, Alvin Kallicharran and – a good low caught-and-bowled by Old – Clive Lloyd. Four world-class batsmen gone, and the West Indies had not reached a hundred.

But Viv Richards was still there, and it was his day. The young fielder who turned the 1975 final had become the finest batsmen in the world, the greatest I have seen. Today he would score the first of three centuries in Lord's finals. Richards batted there as if Thomas Lord had gone to the trouble of establishing his ground so that a couple of hundred years later Viv Richards would have somewhere worthy of him to play. That he was the last specialist batsman left was irrelevant to him. He settled in and began to play shots all round the ground.

At the other end was Collis King, an English sort of player in that he wasn't quite international class either as a batsman or bowler. In 1979 he was in the middle of an unremarkable career consisting of a handful of Tests and ODIs and a few seasons' county cricket with Glamorgan and Worcestershire. Nothing memorable, except for his innings today.

After playing himself in, King began to hit out, successfully and spectacularly, to the tune of 86 from 66 balls. As always when writing about the one-day game of this era the point must be made that there were no fielding restrictions whatsoever. There would have been seven boundary fielders once King got going, so hitting ten fours and three sixes past them took a bit of doing.

It was the only time I can recall Richards being outscored, a situation he accepted with sense and dignity, giving King the strike and licence he needed to make the most of his moment in the sun.

When King was out, caught on the boundary, Richards resumed, and it was batting of mass destruction. Watching the England bowlers in the last overs of the West Indian innings was useful for a history student as it provided an insight into what it must have been like for the Light Brigade as it rode stoically into the Valley of Death, its fate inevitable.

There's a wonderful piece of commentary by Richie Benaud on this stage of the game. Hendrick bowls and is still following through when he realises that Richards has driven the ball straight, very hard, and at head height. Hendrick's hand moves towards the line of the ball, but self-preservation kicks in and he ducks as the ball sears past, crashing into the pavilion fence a second later. “Very wise” said Benaud. “Who wants to be a hero at this stage of the game?”

I am second to none in my admiration for Mike Brearley's captaincy, but he was not infallible, and presumably had a hand in the decision to replace the injured Willis with an extra batsman and to try to get away with the trundling trio of Gooch, Larkins and Boycott as fifth bowler. They went for 86 between them and bore the brunt of Collis King's onslaught.

But Brearley did provoke a collective gasp as he ran 40 yards to hold on to a Holding skyer at full speed, a moment unfortunately omitted from the highlights package shown before the recent World Cup.

So England had to chase 286, a total rarely achieved even over 60 overs in those times, with Brearley and Boycott to open. Those were two names that could stand to represent the contrasts of English cricket. The southern gentleman and the northern player; the public school and Cambridge-educated captain and the graduate of the university of hard knocks senior pro. What they had in common was that neither of them could unshackle themselves from their orthodoxy to score at the rate required to make 287 achievable.

Both had had days where inhibition was lost. Famously, Boycott had lashed Surrey round Lord's for 146 in the 1965 Gillette Cup final. Captaining MCC Under-25s in Pakistan, Brearley scored 312 in a day at Peshawar in 1967, against an attack including Intikhab Alam (the Taleban still speak of it with wonder, as they sit around their camp fires up by the North-West Frontier). Not today though. Boycott treasured his wicket too much, and Brearley didn't have the technique.

There was no powerplay in those days, so the England supporters were at first sanguine at the slow start. But Boycott did not get into double figures until the seventeenth over, by which time the voices calling on the West Indies quicks to knock their heads off were as replete with plummy home counties vowels as they were with the cadence of the Caribbean.

At about the halfway stage a chance was offered to Clive Lloyd, which he juggled and dropped. The feeling on the day was that Lloyd – still one of the best fielders in the game – had spilled it deliberately so as to prolong the torpor. I was pleased to see on the recent highlights package that this was not so, as it took all of Lloyd's six foot five inches of athleticism to reach it, but it would have been a reasonable approach.

When the partnership finally ended almost eight an over were needed. A couple of weeks ago a writer (I forget who) discussed the composition of England's current ODI team. He argued that Cook and Strauss could not open together as “it would be too much like Boycott and Brearley”. The scars are deep indeed.

Randall and Gooch made a brave attempt to keep up, but Garner finished the match with five wickets for four runs in 11 balls and West Indies retained the trophy. None of us at Lord's that day would have believed that, 32 years later, the Caribbean islands would not have won a third time.

Professor Matthew Engel

Here's a treat:

http://www.matthewengel.co.uk/lectures/oxford/introduction.html

To his great surprise, Matthew Engel was invited to become the News International Visiting Professor of Media at Oxford University, in which capacity he delivered a series of lectures entitled Please, mister, can we have our ball back? Sport, the media, and the people earlier this year. The link leads to the text of the lectures.

I have made plain in other posts my admiration for Engel's writing. He became the cricket correspondent of The Guardian in 1982, after impressing on the county circuit (The Times for Gibson or The Guardian for Engel was a taxing choice for a young student in the early eighties).

From 1987 he divided his time between sport and the rest of the world, including a spell on The Guardian's Washington desk. He follows in the tradition of Cardus, Arlott and Alan Ross in being better known to some readers for his writing on other subjects, though he found time to drag the Wisden Almanack into the modern era. He edited 12 editions in two spells, and improved the quality of the writing in the good book considerably. Nowadays, his journalism is found in the Financial Times, which has a pay fence with lots of holes in it rather than a paywall, so it is easy enough to keep up with him.

So Engel is a splendid choice for an Oxford Chair, if unlikely one for a Murdoch-funded office. When I attended a sportswriting workshop Engel ran at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 1995 he was very much of the he-is-the-devil's-spawn school of thought on Murdoch and his influence on the British media. His view has mellowed into ambivalence: he is for paywalls and admires the success of the British version of Sky TV, while regretting the extent to which some sports administrators are in thrall to it.

Engel identifies other reasons for his being an appropriate choice for an Oxford professorship:

My hair is often rumpled, my clothes a bit askew, my jacket a bit shabby. I have a taste for obscure lines of enquiry. I am hopelessly absent-minded. I am secretly addicted to pointless political intrigues, which I’m told would make me feel at home in any senior common room in Oxford. And most of the time, nobody knows what on earth I’m talking about.

 In the lectures he traces the relationship between sport and the media from cave paintings onwards, outing Homer as a bad sports reporter along the way. He shows how mutually beneficial this relationship has been:

Cricket in particular was a media creation: newspapers, not the MCC, created the concepts of the County Championship, Test matches and the Ashes.

He reminds us how important the game was to the Murdoch when it appeared that Sky TV could bring News International crashing down in the early 90s. The first big spike in the sale of dishes preceded the beginning of football's Premier League by six months: it was the 1992 cricket World Cup. Engel quotes David Elstein, an early Sky head of programmes, as saying “that’s when Surrey discovered Sky”. Before then, a dish was not something that a respectable home would have attached to it.

Engel makes the point that cricket is ideally suited to pay TV, which has hours to fill, and less so to the constricted free-to-air schedules, which have so many demands upon them. Even so, he regrets that cricket, alone of significant British sports, has removed itself entirely from live free-to-air coverage. Evidence that he is right to worry about the consequences of this is already apparent. There was nothing like the public interest in the 2009 Ashes series that there had been in 2005, when key passages of play enthralled the country.

I suggest a solution that I have not seen proposed anywhere else: that play after lunch on the Saturday or Sunday of every Test should be shown on a free-to-air channel (probably the one showing highlights), along with a couple of ODIs every summer. That would allow the general public to recognise the players at least, but would not be enough to dissuade viewers from subscribing to Sky, so would not significantly reduce the amount on the Murdoch cheque.

Engel suggests that TV is responsible for sport being got out of proportion these days. He contrasts the response to the England football team's victory in the 1966 World Cup – which the country's biggest-selling newspaper the Daily Mirror did not feature on the front or back page on the following Monday – with the hysterical, see-pages-1-to-26 reaction to success or failure that is routine these days (he cites Paul Collingwood's MBE for 17 runs at the Oval in 2005 in support: case closed). He says that the recent experience of war 45 years ago meant that people had a sense of perspective and knew how unimportant sport actually was.

Use the link to enjoy the lectures.

There's another Matthew Engel piece that is required reading (but it comes with a resilience-required warning):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2005/dec/03/familyandrelationships.health

It is an account of the terminal illness and death of his 13-year-old son Laurie in 2005. Of course, a writer of moderate talent could produce a tearjerker from such subject matter; but only a great journalist could write a piece of such honesty, wit and humanity.

"Harold Larwood" and "A Last English Summer" by Duncan Hamilton

Duncan Hamilton has emerged as one of cricket's most important writers. Until four years ago he was unknown except to readers of the Nottingham Evening Post and the Yorkshire Post, the papers he worked for in a thirty-year career as a provincial journalist. For the former, he reported on Nottingham Forest FC for more than a decade, observing at close quarters the progress of the club's manager Brian Clough from eccentric genius to drunken legend. Hamilton's first book was an account of these years and it won the Sports Book of the Year prize for 2007.

He then turned to cricket (his first love, one suspects), but stuck with the theme of Nottingham heroes, with the 2009 biography of Harold Larwood, the great fast bowler. It also won the Sports Book of the Year Award, making Hamilton only the second double winner, after Donald McRae, who writes mostly about boxing. He followed Harold Larwood with A Last English Summer, a journey through the 2009 English cricket season.

Both books have been on my must-read list for a while and just when I was on the point of resorting to Amazon for one or the other I found both on the shelves of Wellington's splendid Central Library.

Harold Larwood tells one of cricket's most famous stories. Larwood came from the traditional source of fast bowlers in northern England: the pit. He became the fastest bowler in the country and led the attack in the Bodyline Ashes series of 1932/3. Others bowled bodyline – a systematic attack on the batsman's body, with a ring of close catchers on the legside waiting for a deflection as he fended the ball off – but Larwood did so with unequalled speed and accuracy, and that's what caused all the fuss. The Australians were outraged, the public schoolboys who ran the game in England, embarrassed. Larwood, who had simply followed the instructions of his captain Douglas Jardine, became the fall guy.

They even asked him to sign a letter of apology. His mother told him that he would never see her alive if he signed it, which he didn't, but the pressure weighed him down.He never played Test cricket again, and Hamilton shows us Larwood's torment as he spent the next decade or more hiding from the nonsense that Bodyline generated. Hamilton resists the temptation to express his own outrage at the injustices done to Larwood, but tells the story in an understated way that leaves the reader to become angry on his behalf.

The portrayal of incidental figures is strong. It was fascinating to learn how Nottinghamshire's coach Jimmy Iremonger turned the scrawny, five-foot-seven Larwood into one of the fastest bowlers the game has seen. With his strong emphasis on physical fitness, Iremonger was decades ahead of his time, except that his favoured energy drink came in pint glasses with froth on top.

The villains are Sir Pelham Warner and Sir Donald Bradman. Warner was the England manager and appears here two-faced and weaselling. He was knighted in 1937, as Larwood, who he had hung out to dry, faded from the game, to the relief of Warner's fellow Lord's grandees, who were pleased to be rid of an embarrassment.

Jardine (who Larwood revered to the end) adopted bodyline to nullify Bradman, who, alone among the bowler's Australian adversaries, remained cool towards him, and failed to offer any assistance to Larwood when he emigrated to Sydney in 1951. This was in contrast to Jack Fingleton, whose tracking down of Larwood to a backstreet Blackpool sweetshop I have written about:

http://mylifeincricketscorecards.blogspot.com/2010/04/brightly-fades-don-by-jack-fingleton.html

Hamilton says that the former Australian opener's intervention was more decisive than Fingleton himself described, suggesting that far from building upon an existing notion, it was this visit that set Larwood thinking about emigration to the place where he had been public enemy No 1 less than twenty years before, and where he lived happily for the last four decades of his life.

The book is meticulously researched and has not only a detailed index, but also (and I can't remember when I last came across one in a sports book) a bibliography (so does A Last English Summer).

For me, only David Foot's Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket had passed the ultimate test for a first-rate cricket biography: that it could be enjoyed by a reader without an interest in the game, but Harold Larwood does so too .

A Last English Summer was inspired by Geoffrey Moorhouse's similar account of the 1978 season The Best Loved Game, which I was rather underwhelmed by:

http://mylifeincricketscorecards.blogspot.com/2010/11/best-loved-game-and-wisden-cricketer-50.html

Hamilton's journey is much more to my liking, partly because he is about my age, and we share memories, such as watching Derek Underwood bowl out Australia in grainy black and white at the Oval in 1968. Both of us were drawn to the game by early exposure to the vibrant play of the West Indies. Like mine, his childhood was spent in the shadow of a speech impediment, and I suspect that for both of us cricket grounds were places of sanctuary.

Hamilton appreciates the importance of ritual in cricket. He gets the beginning and end of the season spot on, starting at Lord's for MCC versus the champion county (a game played in Abu Dhabi for the last two years, which alleviates the early-season frostbite, at least), and ending, as I so often did, at Canterbury.

At Lord's he captures the suppressed excitement of the devotee at the start of the season and understands that it is really relief at having made it through another winter.

In September at the St Lawrence Ground he ignores the meaningless 40-over game being played, finding more interest in the Chevallier Taylor painting of Blythe bowling to Tyldesley in 1906 that hangs in the pavilion, a copy now, as the original has been flogged off to ease the county's penury. Something that non-cricket folk do not grasp is how tangential to a good day at the cricket the actual game can be.

Each chapter is an essay replete with pertinent observation and fine writing. There are always two stories to be told: one on the field of play and one off, of which the latter is the more important. Thus a visit to the Cheltenham Festival becomes a polemic in favour of cricket at out grounds. Graham Onions is described as having the appearance of “an estate agent on his morning off”.

At first many of his opinions appear typical of a cricket person of his (my) age, but he is much more aware. He mocks the snooty attitudes of EW Swanton and JM Kilburn to 40-over Sunday county cricket when it appeared in 1969 – he enjoyed this form of the game as I did, even though we both appreciated its limitations – only to ingeniously turn his argument upon himself when he realises that the objections of the old men are precisely those he has against T20. Nevertheless, when he laments T20, he speaks for me.

I particularly enjoyed his dislike of the games of football that seem central to the warm-up routines:

I long for a Saturday afternoon when I turn up at Old Trafford or Anfield and watch Manchester United and Liverpool pitch two sets of stumps and arrange a 5-4 field in the penalty area for a half-hour of cricket before a Premier League game.

Everywhere he goes, Hamilton takes a sense of history with him. At Trent Bridge he begins with a photo of WG Grace and the England team taken during the Grand Old Man's last test, and finishes with a spectacular piece of fielding by Angelo Matthews of Sri Lanka in the World T20 game he is watching, barely twenty yards from the site of the photo. No game has changed more than cricket without becoming something else altogether. WG would recognise T20 as a game of cricket while being astonished at most aspects of it, notably the fielding. Hamilton skilfully celebrates the continuity that cricket sustains.

A visit to the Ashes test at Edgbaston begins miles away, at the grave of Edmund Peate, whose dismissal to a reckless shot concluded the Oval Test of 1882, England's defeat prompting the mock obituary in the Sporting Times which initiated the Ashes legend. He day he chooses to visit Edgbaston is wet, so he has plenty of time to regret that a day at the Test in Birmingham in particular is an occasion for drunks to behave objectionably.

I do have a gripe with the book, bearing in mind that it was written by an experienced sub-editor. There are too many mistakes that should have been picked up by proficient proofreading and fact-checking. Mark Wagh (the Warwickshire/Notts batsman, not the Australian), Sir Frank Worrell, Nigel Llong, Ed Giddins and Chris Gayle all have their names misspelled. He has Dominic Cork taking his Test hat-trick in 1993 (two years early), and Keith Miller scoring a double century at Worcester in 1952 (in which case he was playing for the Indians).

But these are trivial matters and do not impinge upon enjoyment of a substantial contribution to cricket literature. I look forward to much more from Duncan Hamilton in years to come.

Marcus Trescothick – Coming Back To Me

I usually avoid ghosted autobiographies but was intrigued by this one, which won the Sports Book of the Year Award in 2008 (the only only other ghost to win was the cyclist Lance Armstrong's).
For one thing, Marcus Trescothick is one of the best batsmen to have played for England in the past quarter century, with almost a thousand test runs a year over six years and 26 centuries almost evenly divided between tests and ODIs. What's more, they were scored in style, using a straightforward, attacking technique like a left-handed Graham Gooch.

For another, he's a Bristol boy, Keynsham born but raised in the city's eastern fringe. He went to the Sir Bernard Lovell School in Oldland Common when I was, with what I now see was undue optimism, trying to foster an understanding of Gladstone's domestic reforms just down the road in Kingswood. Indeed, the staffs of the two schools used to play cricket against each other, and he may have been one of the kids on the boundary, laughing at my field placings.

He was pointed out to me in the clubrooms of Keynsham CC in 1991. Half the people in the room were telling the other half that the tall, podgy kid at the bar would play for England one day.

Some of the book is much like any of the genre, a plod through the tests and tours, with plenty of anecdote, and a little insight. The impression that comes across confirms what I've heard about Marcus from those who know him and his family: that he is a decent, gentle person who is a credit to the game. He even asterisks out the swear words, which is rather sweet.

Of course, it is difficult, given the self-effacing conventions of the sportsman's autobiography, to do justice to the big moments. So the most disappointing part of the book is the rather rushed account of the 2005 Ashes series, the greatest of our time. In particular, there is no sense of how uplifting his opening partnership with Andrew Strauss was on the first day of the Edgbaston test, its commitment to attack a statement that, at last, England were not going to roll over after one defeat.

But there is enough to understand why the shy lad from the West Country was asked to join the tour committee on his first trip away as an England player, and we share his joy at those times when he is so confident and in command of himself and the bowlers that he can't see how he can get out.

But the reason why this is an exceptional book is not the story of the runs and the catches. It is the brutally frank account of how he was brought down by several waves of severe depression, which, to the great regret of cricket lovers everywhere, ended his international career many years prematurely.

The book opens with Trescothick sitting on the floor of a Heathrow Airport shop, sobbing with dread as the darkness catches up with him again as he prepares to leave for a pre-season jaunt to the UAE with Somerset in 2008. As his story is told, he spots portents of what is to come. Extreme homesickness on his first trip away from home, and feeling out of it at the start of every cricket tour (of which there were many from an early age). In New Zealand in 2002, the oddness was particularly sharp. I ran across him again at this time as CricInfo's man at the opening game of the tour, when he led England against Northern Districts:

http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/story/114062.html

As the press pack broke up I approached him to pass on greetings from a mutual acquaintance. I noted at the time that he seemed a bit empty behind the eyes, but put it down to jetlag and frustration at being asked dim questions by amateur journalists, and perhaps it was, but it was a look consistent with the emotions he describes having at that time.

It was in Pakistan in late 2005 that it first sunk its teeth deep into him. The trigger was a serious accident sustained by his father-in-law, who fell off a ladder while maintaining the Trescothicks' house. Marcus had to watch the accident, replayed from security cameras, on his laptop in a hotel room in Pakistan so that the details could be passed on to doctors in Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, an experience that would test anybody's resilience. He speculates that things might have been different had he gone home straight away, as he would have done had Michael Vaughan not talked him out of it (Vaughan was injured, and Trescothick was stand-in captain).

Hurried retreats from India and Australia followed over the next twelve months. That he is able to describe so clearly the hopelessness, the desperation, the confusion, the helplessness, the torment, the brief contemplation of the unthinkable, is cheering as it means that he has reached some understanding of what has happened to him. It will be grimly familiar to anybody who has stood by helplessly as a loved one is taken down by depression, and has done a great deal to help understanding of the illness.

Moved as I was, a reservation nagged away. Some of the writing, actually quite a lot of the writing, isn't very good. Peter Hayter of the Mail on Sunday is more a poltergeist than a ghost at times, though the chapters on the depression are better. But there's much too much like this, taken at random from a paragraph on the 2005 series:

And now Glenn McGrath didn't so much let the air out of the balloon as stamp all over it...he made Straussy and me look like camels in clogs.

This isn't Trescothick's voice. It isn't anybody's voice. I couldn't help thinking what a good job David Foot would have done here. Could such leaden prose really merit the Sports Book of the Year Award, however gripping and important its story?

Then, as I started to make notes for this piece, the news broke that England all-rounder Michael Yardy was leaving the World Cup because he is suffering from depression.

Like most sufferers, Marcus had to hide his condition and pretend that it was something else for a long time, which is exhausting and makes things worse. Yardy feels able to be straightforward about how he is, and does not have to increase his agony by pretending that it is otherwise. The cricket world (apart from the odious Boycott, who has passed his sell-by date going in the other direction), has reacted supportively and with some understanding.

That's because Marcus Trescothick told his story. This book, in a small way, has made the world a better place for others to live in, and how many sports books in any year have done that?

Chokers Wild

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/261/261464/261464_bbb.html

So the fishbone of fate lodges once more in the throat of South African cricket. I made it through to the early overs of the South African innings, around 2 am New Zealand time, propping the eyelids open long enough to see Hashim Amla out unluckily, caught by Vettori at slip (yes, at slip) off Brendon McCullum's boot.

I awoke a couple of hours later as Jacob Oram took an athletic catch on the mid-wicket boundary to dismiss Jacques Kallis (the feline abilty to wake just as something interesting is about to take place is something that you evolve when you have watched as much cricket as I have; happens all the time). Even then, surely not even South Africa could mangle this one, not with only 114 needed from 25 overs with seven wickets left.

But they could, and Mirpur becomes the next in the comi-tragic sequence that began in the rain at Sydney in 1992 (I watched that one in the Hammond Room at the County Ground in Bristol), and continued thus: Karachi in 1996 where seven wickets fell for 59; Allan Donald forgetting to run at Edgbaston in 1999; the failure to read a Duckworth-Lewis table properly at Durban in 2003; and gutless batting in St Lucia in 2007.

Today's debacle most closely resembled that at Karachi. Kallis' was the first of six wickets to fall for 38. No getting back from there.

Public acts of penance should be performed in the streets of Wellington by those who booed Jake Oram during the ODI against Pakistan at the Cake Tin in January. He has vindicated the selectors, who picked him because, episode of Casualty in human form though he is, he is one of the few players who can turn a game in the later stages of the World Cup, and that's what he did in Mirpur with four for 39 and two catches.

The influence of John Wright, the recently appointed coach, was apparent earlier in the day as New Zealand struggled to 221, the keystone partnership one of 114 between Ryder and Taylor. Both were subdued, suppressing their natural aggression to a large extent, having heeded Wright's call for patience. This was vital on a pitch which did not appreciate batsmen taking liberties. It resulted in a total that, though not what was hoped-for, was at least something. Kane Williamson's bright unbeaten 38 should also be noted. What a fine signing he is for Gloucestershire.

It was a good day for New Zealand's leadership altogether. Vettori handled his attack outstandingly, despite a gammy knee (hence the fielding at slip). He kept the pressure up well, and was prepared to keep effective bowlers going. Since one-day cricket began, captains have been too inclined to take bowlers off when they are at their most dangerous so that they have overs saved for later in the innings. Vettori was prepared to risk key bowlers not having overs left at the death, and it paid off handsomely.

As for South Africa...well, if they transferred the intelligence levels shown in the second half of their innings to everyday life, they wouldn't be safe crossing the road on their own. There were silly shots and poor decisions. The batting powerplay was a case in point. New Zealand rightly ignored their powerplay until the end of the innings, correctly diagnosing that it in the prevailing conditions the risk of losing wickets was greater than the opportunity to increase the scoring rate. South Africa, on the other hand, blundered into their powerplay when the eighth wicket fell, making it more difficult for Morne Morkel to score, with frustration the result.

This match provided the tension that the tournament has been lacking so far, as did the India v Australia game. There were some good contests earlier on (mostly involving England), but none that were must-win for both teams. The difference that makes showed in the eyes of Ricky Ponting on Wednesday and the later South African batsmen on Friday.

New Zealand have issues with World Cup semi-finals, having played in five, but in no finals.We are hoping that the old country comes through against Sri Lanka in the last quarter-final, as we reckon they would provide the lesser obstacle to further progress.

Update: some hope. It is hard to foresee an improvement by England in ODIs while 50-over cricket is not part of the domestic programme.

The first World Cup Final: Australia v West Indies, 60 overs, Lord's, 21 June 1975

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/35/35256.html

If ever there was a day on which all was right with the world, it was 21 June 1975. There was not a cloud in the sky, literally or metaphorically. I was almost 16 and off to London on my own for the first time to watch the first World Cup final. If I could live again through just one of the hundreds of days' cricket that I have seen, it would be this one.

I took my place in the bottom deck of the old grandstand, square on to the pitch, the last time I ever sat there. In later years I joined the rest of the cognescenti behind behind the arm at the Nursery End. I've no idea how much the ticket cost, but it wasn't much.

I bore a substantial bag containing the following:

• binoculars
• radio and earpiece
• cricket reference library (Wisden, Playfair, Kent cricket annual)
• latest cricket magazine
• newspaper, probably The Guardian (for John Arlott rather than ideological reasons)
• Russian textbook (O level exams in this subject and the equally impenetrable Additional Mathematics the following week)
• writing material
• salad, big
• sandwiches, numerous
• Scotch eggs, infinite
• crisps, large bag of (almost certainly Marks & Spencer's prawn cocktail flavour)
• cakes, Jaffa
• orange squash, large bottle of

It has taken me 35 years to whittle this down to a more convenient quantity that can, with a degree of effort, be forced into a smallish rucksack.

The crowd around me consisted largely of West Indians, mostly first generation immigrants to whom cricket was heritage and the match a chance to spend a day back in the Caribbean, in their minds at least. They drank a lot of rum, but displayed none of the boorish aggression that is characteristic of many English cricket crowds these days, and, unlike the fancy dressers, they were wonderfully knowledgeable about the game.

Starting with Roland Butcher, the sons of these immigrants began to appear for England in the eighties. It was assumed that this presaged a never-ending supply of British-born players from that community but this did not occur, and it is rare to see an Afro-Caribbean face at a test match in England, even when the West Indies are playing. That this is so, when most county sides take the field with at least one British Asian player, is an act of neglect.

Their West Indians were not yet the mighty team they were soon to become. Of the dynasty of great fast bowlers that was to rule the game for the next fifteen years or more, only Andy Roberts played here. The rest of the attack consisted of the proficient Keith Boyce, the steady Vanburn Holder, and Kent's Bernard Julien, full of unfulfilled promise (Kent's first mistake was to billet him in a pub). Of the batsmen, only Clive Lloyd, Alvin Kallicharran and Roy Fredericks were at their peak, though both Gordon Greenidge and Viv Richards were just twelve months away from slaughtering England. This team was to lose five-one to Australia in a test series the following winter.

The West Indians were all familiar to the English spectators; all eleven had played in county cricket, whereas only Greg Chappell of the Australians had done so (for two seasons with Somerset, in the late sixties). The fast-bowling partnership of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson that had blown the England batting away the previous winter was the big draw; it was the first time that I had seen either of them, not having attended the 1972 tests in which Lillee played (he did not appear against Kent). It's difficult to convey in the satellite age, when all sport is ubiqitous, how exciting it was to watch these two great bowlers for real, Lillee with his perfect, beautiful action, and Thomson generating such pace as a human catapult (and why has nobody ever tried to copy him?).

The West Indies batted first and the left-handed opener Fredericks soon started the dancing, hooking Lillee high into the Tavern Stand. The whooping soon descended into puzzlement, as it was realised that Fredericks was on his way back to the pavilion. This was my moment. From my square-on vantage point, binoculars deployed, I had seen what few others had, that, as he played the shot, Fredericks had slipped, his foot nudging a stump and dislodging a bail. A small crowd gathered round as I re-enacted events, excluding no detail.

At 50 for three Australia were ahead, but in came Clive Lloyd to take the game away from them, with the innings of his life, one of the finest ever played at Lord's, or anywhere else. Lloyd was the nearest to a superhero cricket has produced. See him arrive at the ground, or walk onto the field, and it would seem improbable that this gangly, bespectacled, plodding figure could be significant in the game. But when the ball left the bowler's hand a magical transformation occurred and he was invested with powers that allowed him as a fielder to stop and any ball hit between mid-off and point and throw down the stumps with it, and to bat with an unmatched combination of strength and grace. And that day he did it against two of the finest bowlers the game has seen at the peak of their powers, with first-rate support. 102 from 85 balls with no powerplays and no fielding restrictions.

One shot shines clear in the memory through the years. Lillee, from the Nursery End, unleashed a bouncer of the kind that had reduced England's finest to a shambles a few months before. It reared up towards Lloyd's unhelmeted head. He moved inside the line and hooked. I followed the ball's progress up and over the Tavern Stand as it disappeared into the traffic of the St John's Wood Road. On the radio John Arlott described it as “the shot of a man knocking off the top of a thistle with a walking stick”.

Lloyd was supported perfectly by Rohan Kanhai, who scored 55 in their 149-run fourth-wicket partnership. Just two years before I had sat in almost the same place to see Kanhai score a wonderful century against England. He was elegant, resourceful and not mentioned enough when great batsmen are being talked about, Wisden reminds me that he went 11 overs without scoring at one point, but, grey-haired and wise, he knew that what was happening at the other end rendered that unimportant.

West Indies finished with 291, an immense score for the time, even from the 60 overs over which the first three World Cups were played. At 81 for one Australia were well-placed, Ian Chappell in, Greg Chappell to follow. Viv Richards chose this moment to draw the spotlight to him for the first time at a Lord's final. It followed him ever after.

Ian Chappell turned the ball to the onside, Alan Turner hesitated briefly, and Richards ran him out with a direct hit. Moments later, more hesitation, another direct hit by Richards, this time to dismiss Greg Chappell. Ian Chappell became his third victim, this time with a Lloyd assist. That was as good as that.

Australia meandered to 233 when the ninth wicket fell, with 59 still required. Lillee and Thomson, having failed to take the World Cup with the ball now attempted to do so with the bat, and they came closer than anybody expected. At one point it was thought that a wicket had fallen, and half the crowd came on to the playing area. Nobody knew where the ball was, so the batsmen kept running. Order was restored and they were awarded three. Thomson fell 18 short of the target with eight balls remaining. It was 8.50 pm.

I watched the Duke of Edinburgh hand over the trophy to Clive Lloyd, and headed back to Victoria Station. I (just) passed Russian and Additional Mathematics, then forgot what little I knew about both for ever. Why they taught us Russian, I never knew. Maybe it was so that we could better plead for our lives when the red hordes swept into Kent. After the last exam it was down to the St Lawrence Ground for the last couple of hours of the first day of Kent versus the Australians. Later that evening Dennis Lillee stole my shoe. But that's for another day.

A Wellington XI v a Canterbury XI, T20, the Basin Reserve, 13 March 2011

A pleasant afternoon at a full Basin Reserve for a game between two XIs of old players in aid of the victims of the Christchurch earthquake, the sadness of which has pervaded every corner of these islands since it visited the crowded lunchtime streets almost three weeks ago.

All in the 9,000 crowd were there for the cause, but a fair number were also present to roll back the years, to see the heroes of their youth once more. The ground was full of middle-aged men looking wistful. The longer the time that has elapsed since retirement, the greater the nostalgia quotient. So the welcome for Ewen Chatfield, Bruce Edgar, Martin Crowe and Sir Richard Hadlee was especially warm.

But the big draw was Shane Warne, who changed plans at short notice to cross the Tasman in a good cause. He signed autographs all day, fielded on the boundary, choosing a different child each delivery to stand with him on the field, bowled an over at the Prime Minister during the interval, bore endless texting jokes with good grace, and impressed everybody.

A full complement of celebrities had turned out as well. Sir Ian McKellan, last seen in Wellington last July starring in a wonderful production of Waiting for Godot (by the first-class cricketer Samuel Beckett), was match referee. He is filming The Hobbit here in Wellington at the moment, and was joined by other members of the cast, including James Nesbitt and Martin Freeman. There were All Blacks, past and present, aplenty. Richie McCaw and Conrad Smith umpired, while Tana Umaga was a popular ringer for Wellington.

Martin Crowe's cousin, the actor Russell Crowe, was there, today embraced as a New Zealander, one of our own, just as he is when he wins Oscars. When he throws telephones at hotel staff, he is an Australian.

Over the years, I've seen a number of games such as these, the Old England v Old Australia match that preceeded the Centenary Test of 1980 being particularly memorable:

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/114/114225.html

Then, and today, the batsmen found it easier to give a flavour of what they once were than did the bowlers, whose arms and stomachs find gravity stronger than of yore. So in 1980 Cowdrey was elegant, d'Oliveira powerful, Simpson commanding. Barrington off-drove a six high into the stand next to the pavilion in the last game he ever played; he died while serving as England's assistant manager in the Caribbean little more than six months later. The keeping of Godfrey Evans, just turned sixty, was particularly striking. His stumping of Simpson was so fast that it was announced as bowled.

Here, Bruce Edgar was resolute and well-organised, Mark Greatbatch was as forthright as he was as the first of the pinch-hitters in 1992, and Nathan Astle looked as if he could walk back into the national team today. The bowlers all operated off short runs, though Ewen Chatfield was nagging enough to remind us of how important a foil he was to Hadlee. But it was fours and sixes that the crowd wanted, and the bowlers were happy to conspire to provide them.

Canterbury won, as if it mattered, more than half a million dollars was raised, and a good time was had by all. Why, I even set aside my customary lack of community empathy to participate in a Mexican wave (there are witnesses, but no photos).

Before play started, people went around the ground throwing chocolate bars into the crowd. Save for the presence of Helena Bonham Carter, or one of the former members of Pan's People, how could a day be more perfect?

How the ICC ruined the World Cup

If the ICC had been in charge of the Last Supper, 47 associate apostles would have been invited. The bread and wine would have been provided by an official supplier, with centurions on the doors to keep out non-approved brands. The painting rights would have been sold to a manga outfit, who would have offered their images of the occasion to subscribers only. It would have surprised nobody if the catering had been franchised to a bacon sandwich company.

 

This is an organisation with a talent for removing the joy from life unmatched since Oliver Cromwell was in charge.

 

It has followed the test of fortitude that was the 2007 World Cup – endless matches in empty stadia, culminating in the finalists being sent out to finish the final in the dark when the assembled suits failed to interpret the playing conditions correctly – with a misconceived structure that consigns the first month of the 2011 tournament to irrelevance, and threatens once again to make mockery of the entire event.

For the benefit of those who don't follow these matters closely, this is how they've managed it: 

• 14 teams are competing, at least four of which have no hope of seriously challenging the top eight (Ireland's wonderfully improbable win against England is no justification for this policy), resulting in a series of dire, one-sided games
• four teams from each group of seven qualify for the quarter-finals so most cricket fans could pick seven of the eight before the tournament started, and even games between the big teams are largely meaningless as both begin these matches certain to progress; going straight to semi-finals would have made almost every game in the group stage important
• two of the quarter-finals are under lights in Dacca, Bangladesh, where the side batting second has a huge advantage because of the dew that comes down at dusk
• the schedule is unnecessarily elongated, with one game on most days and two on some; on Monday 7 March, for example, the sole attraction is Canada v Kenya, a game without any interest whatsoever
• the rules said that the squads had to be be named a month in advance, while there was much ODI cricket to be played around the world; New Zealand, for example, are stuck with the out-of-form Jamie How instead of Rob Nicol, who was red hot in domestic cricket, and most teams are in a similar position (the reason for this was the need to print programmes – there's this thing called the internet...).

So for now I will ignore events in south Asia, and instead will post memories of the first three World Cup finals, all of which I had the pleasure of attending.