Skullduggery at the Basin as the North Koreans return

Wellington v Central Districts, Basin Reserve, 50 overs, 2 February 2024

Scorecard

We knew that it would rain. The forecast wes decisive. Yet still we turned up at the Basin. Rain is to cricket people what death is to everybody else. We know that it is inevitable, but we carry on as if it wasn’t there. This game at the Basin showed why we behave in this curious way.

The match was abandoned, as we always expected it to be, with the points shared. But we saw some fine batting and bowling, some terrible batting and bowling, collapse, recovery, and (possibly) skullduggery. A brilliant day.

Wellington won the toss and chose to bat, defying the convention that when Duckworth, Lewis and Stern are about you bat last so that they show you their working as you go. Central demonstrated later why that is a good plan. 

Nor did the top and middle order justify the decision. When the rain first came, after 20 overs, Wellington were 76 for six. There was some good bowling, notably from Basin Reserve anti-hero Blair Tickner who nagged away on an off stump line and conceded only eight from his first four overs. Central skipper Dane Cleaver (cousin of Kane Williamson) maintained attacking fields, thinking that rolling Wellington cheaply would be the best chance of beating the weather. 

This was the first round of matches in the resumed 50-over competition following T20s that started just before Christmas, but the home batters seemed unaware of the change of format, apparently competing in recklessness. There was Severin’s hoick to deep mid-wicket, Kelly’s shovel to deep third, McLachlan’s first-ball waft outside off and Smith’s catching-practice glide to slip (all of which can be viewed via the scorecard link, above).

The rain came first after 20 overs, causing an interruption of 70 minutes. As they resumed one of the Basin regulars asked which of us would take 130 as Wellington’s total. I was inclined to accept. Resuming for Wellington were Muhammad Abbas and Logan van Beek. Here, readers need to be aware of a backstory. A week before, Wellington played Canterbury in the elimination final of the T20 competition. With an over to go, Canterbury required 21 for victory. Van Beek was the bowler. He has been Wellington’s death bowler of choice, but the memory of his being hit for 33 off an over at the end of the match against Central a week earlier fluttered at the back of my mind. 

The first two balls both went for a single, so with 19 wanted off four, Wellington’s place in the final seemed booked. The trouble was that van Beek relied completely on yorkers, but could not quite land them, so it was all low full tosses, two of which Matt Henry hit for six, and as in that disastrous over at the Basin, there were a couple of wides. With just a single from the penultimate ball it was Zac Foulkes who faced the last, needing three to win. Another full toss was sent to mingle with the trees, and Wellington were out. So if redemption was available, van Beek wanted a share. 

In the T20s, 20-year-old Muhammad Abbas has made a name as a strokeplayer. Here he showed that judgment and the ability to bespeak his game to the occasion is part of his package. Van Beek matched him in restraint; no boundaries were hit, or attempted, in the first seven overs after the resumption. 

Gradually, they increased the pace. In the 30th over Abbas twice straight drove Small to the boundary. In the 41st, Abbas went down the pitch to hit slow left-armer Lennox for six over long on. Van Beek did the same from the last ball of the over, and hit seven more sixes in the remaining six overs. The Central bowlers, so disciplined and accurate earlier, now became the opposite. 

Abbas was out for 65 from 77 balls. His seventh-wicket partnership with van Beek was worth 159, beating the previous Wellington record of 130 by Bell and Mather against Northern at Blake Park, Mt Maunganui. I was there for that one, on New Year’s Day in my first summer in New Zealand. 

Van Beek was out in the final over, for 136 from 99 balls including 11 fours and eight sixes. It was the second-highest score ever made by a No 8 in List A cricket worldwide, beaten only by an innings in the domestic competition in Bangladesh. 

DLS got to work on Wellington’s 281 for eight, and reduced it to a target of 274. Usually an interruption to the innings of the team batting first results in an increased target, but the loss of so many early wickets meant that the algorithm determined that to have fewer overs in which to preserve scarce resources was an advantage. 

It was clear from the start of the Central reply that there was no chance of the innings lasting its course. It is essential in these circumstances that the players have accurate information about DLS targets; it is with regret, therefore, that I inform you that the North Koreans are once more in control of the Basin Reserve scoreboard. 

Long-time readers will recall that for some years the amount of fake news purveyed by the board led me to believe that Kim Jung Un and his mates were using it to undermine the moral fibre of the western world. It has improved more recently, but now they are back.

What do we ask of a board? The basics are the team score; who the batters are and what they have; and who is bowling. Only the first is consistently available at the Basin this season. Batters’ scores flash on for six seconds before disappearing; the bowler’s name does the same, except during the second half of the T20 innings when it was not shown at all. A miscellany  of other information is there instead, including what had happened earlier in the over, a comparison of progress in each innings (always a useless statistic), even how many balls were left after one over of the 47 had been bowled, and the weather in Pyongyang, all instead of what we actually wanted to know (I made the last one up, but the rest were there). At one point, the number of wickets lost was shown in three places, but the batters’ names nowhere. People who knew anything at all about cricket would not commit these atrocities of misinformation, so the North Koreans it must be.

In the circumstances the DLS target, updated every ball, would also have been useful, but this was left to the hand-operated board, and was changed only at the end of each over. With the rain getting ever closer, the Central openers, Boyle and Heaphy, made good use of this information, and made sure that they were ahead as they approached the 20 overs that are the minimum needed to allow a win by one side or the other. This is when the trouble started. 

The rain was timing its approach as precisely as the Central batters. As the 20th over began we were in the transition from damp to wet. Nathan Smith was bowling from the southern end, into the northerly (I had not mentioned that a gale was blowing at the Basin as regular readers will assume that). Three runs came off the first three balls. The umpires were starting to look at the sky, each other, and the sky again, but were prepared to stay long enough for the bowler to run in three times more to give us a match. The first of these was a legside wide. 

Smith ran in for the second time, only to pull out as he reached the umpire, protesting at the gale, the King Lear of the South. At the next attempt he managed to let go of the ball, landing it mid-pitch, then watched it bounce high and wide to the boundary for five wides. This was enough for the umpires, who called a halt, rightly given the strength of the rain. 

Words were exchanged between the teams, with Smith protesting that (and I remove a couple of adverbs here) the wides were not deliberate, and that the last one slipped. Here it is; decide for yourselves. Had the incident become more widely known, the keyboard protectors of the Spirit of Cricket would, no doubt, have had little sleep over the last few days. Up in the RA Vance Stand we thought it rather clever. Had a Central bowler done the same we would doubtless have been outraged, but so it is with most of these tests of the game’s tenuous morality. 

It was a good day at the cricket.

The Cricketer. December 1973 and January 1974

These days there is cricket everywhere you look. A few days ago here in New Zealand we could watch great finishes to simultaneous test matches overlapping with the finals of the domestic T20s (we are spared coverage of the franchise competitions in South Africa and UAE). 

It was not always thus. The Cricketer for December 1973 has virtually no cricket on which to report. The only account of a match is Alan Gibson’s on the final of the inter-diocesan Church Times Cup (triumph for the Gloucester diocese), though John Edrich files from South Africa on the tour of DH Robins’s [sic] XI of which he was a member. This report is notable for the absence of the word “apartheid”, a triumph of omission as striking as Basil Fawlty’s failure to mention the war, or the sabbatical taken by “sandpaper” during the recent canonisation of David Warner as he ended his test career, 

The magazine struggles to fill its 32 pages, and the grainy photo of Keith Fletcher is well below the usual standard for covers. The contents page contains promise, but this rarely translates into anything memorable. I was naturally  interested in Colin Cowdrey’s piece on Kent’s season, with wins in the 40 and 55-over competitions, but it was no more than an efficient summary that arranged the obvious into a cogent order. 

Much the same applies to Gordon Ross’s look at 11 seasons of the Gillette Cup, in which the first person singular shoulders far too much of the burden. 

There is a note from Australia on the waiting lists for membership at the MCG and the SCG, respectively 55,000 and 15,000 at that time. Those numbers have increased in the intervening half century; more than 200,000 now await their MCG member’s pass. A friend of mine had an application form for Melbourne Cricket Club membership filled in on his behalf as an infant, as so many Victorians do. Years passed. When he was 18 his mother rang him, distraught. She had found the application form, unposted, in a draw. This is the saddest story I know. 

There is poignancy aplenty in this edition. Jack Iverson’s death would feature in David Frith’s chronicling of cricketing suicides, but Frith does not mention cause in his obituary of the ultimate mystery spinner here. Sir Leonard Hutton contributes a coda in which he does not overwhelm Iverson with praise. The key, according to Hutton, was to play Iverson as an off spinner. He says that “most of our batsmen found themselves over-positioned to cope with this type of bowling” so does not appear to have shared this insight with teammates. 

David Frith interviews Colin Milburn, who had returned to county cricket in 1973, four years after the car crash that cost him an eye. The tone is optimistic, but there are enough portents that there would be no happy endings to the story of Milburn’s cricket, or his life. 

 

Back in the Northamptonshire middle order, there were a series of 30s and 40s, but not until the final game of the season did Milburn pass 50 for the first time, scraping an average of 20, which was double what he managed in 1974. He told Frith that batting at No 6 made things difficult and that he did better when opening because the shiny new ball was easier to see. In Perth when interviewed, Milburn hoped that the bright Western Australian light would have the same benefit and had hopes of playing in the Sheffield Shield, a fanciful notion even in a place where he was as much a hero as he was in Northampton.

Milburn was part of the BBC TV commentary team in 1969, when he must have still been in some sort of trauma following the accident, but was not asked back (though he was an occasional summariser on BBC Radio in the late 80s). At the time of the interview he was recently engaged, but that came to nothing. The considerable sum for 1973 of £19,000 from his testimonial was in trust: “on his own admission it would have been ‘chaotic’ to have given him the lump sum”, another sign of future troubles. 

In 1988, when I worked occasionally for Cricketcall (I had turned down the Gloucestershire contract, but that’s another story) one of my colleagues had recently worked with Milburn and reported that he gave the impression of having slept rough. He died in a pub car park in 1990, having inspired a love of cricket in so many so saw him play.

The January edition has tributes to Howard Marshall from EW Swanton and Alan Gibson, following a three-paragraph obituary in December. As Gibson says, had Marshall died in 1938 “there would have been a headline about him on the main page of every newspaper”. Marshall was then one of the BBC’s best-known voices, and was the leading commentator on cricket, rugby and ceremonial occasions. He was the first to give extended ball-by-ball commentary, famously on Verity’s match at Lord’s in 1934. 

Marshall devised the grammar of cricket commentary, and did the same for radio news reporting as the head of the BBC’s war reporting unit. He reported from the Normandy beaches on D-Day. But after the Victory Tests of 1945, and the occasional ceremonial commentary, he gave up broadcasting in favour of a career in commerce. He might have continued for another 25 years. 

Howard Marshall deserves a biography; he is important enough as a broadcaster and led an interesting private life. He left his first wife for the film critic Nerina Shute, who later deserted him with their French maid. 

The January edition is richer in content than its predecessor, and includes a couple of interesting investigations into cricket history. Gerald Brodribb, whose niche was the evolution of six hitting, questions the veracity of what the Guinness Book of Records and Wisden long accepted as the longest hit with a cricket bat, Walter Fellows’ 175-yard smite during practice at the Christ Church Ground in Oxford in 1856. Brodribb looks for evidence that the hit was measured properly and verified, and finds none.

David Frith’s ability to find sad stories in cricket’s past is further illustrated. Here, his subject is Billy Bates of Yorkshire and England. Bates toured Australia with great success. At Melbourne in January 1883 he made 55 at No 9, then took seven wickets in each innings as Australia followed on, taking the first English test hat-trick in the process. His name appears  on the Ashes urn, presented to the England captain, Hon Ivo Bligh, after on the tour. 

Bates’ first four tours of Australia were all successful. It was on the fifth that his life went suddenly wrong. He was hit in the eye in the nets, an injury that ended his career at the top level. There are parallels with Milburn here. The rest of Bates’ life was a struggle. He died at 44. 

On Scorecards, we have often talked about the Rest of the World series in England and Australia in this era. The January edition reminds us of a third, consisting of two matches in Pakistan to raise funds after devastating flooding. The World XI was a mix of English and West Indian players, topped up by a couple of locals. The Caribbean contingent were mostly world-class, or something near it, but has an unexpected opening partnership of Mike Brearley and Harry Pilling. Keeping was Keith Goodwin, then Farokh Engineer’s deputy at Lancashire.  

There were centuries for Brearley, Kallicharran, and Asif Iqbal, and two for Zaheer Abbas, as well as attractive innings from Clive Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai and Colin Cowdrey, though the fact that Cowdrey’s rarely seen leg breaks nabbed two victims suggests that the level of competitiveness waxed and waned. Pakistan won both games.

Early Adventures in the New Zealand T20

Circumstances have proscribed my cricket watching quite severely so far this season. I missed the first two Plunket Shield matches at the Basin for the best of reasons: we were in Canada with our new grandson (it was also a much better timezone for watching the World Cup). My sporting spectating was restricted to an NHL game between the Ottawa Senators and the Buffalo Sabres, a cacophonous experience that was the precise opposite of first-class cricket at the Basin Reserve.

 

Between Christmas and the New Year I had scheduled two days at the most beautiful ground I know, Pukekura Park, New Plymouth, but Covid caught up with me and my wife at last, so my cricket watching in the 2023/24 season thus far has consisted of three domestic T20 double-headers at the Basin Reserve. 

 

The first of these, just before Christmas, saw comfortable wins by both the men and women over Otago. The highlight of the day was 139 by 21-year-old Wellington opener Tim Robinson, the second highest score in New Zealand T20. Robinson has shown flashes of great promise, but this was the first time it all came together. For strokemaking, it evoked Martin Guptill at his best. Like Guptill in his World Cup quarter-final double hundred, Robinson was dropped before he had scored, but did not let it worry him. With Rachin Ravindra and Mohammad Abbas, Robinson comprises a batting trio that could produce sackloads of runs for Wellington and New Zealand over the next 15 years (and for franchise teams too numerous to mention, I suppose). 

 

On Saturday 13 January, Wellington’s double-header opponents were Central Districts. It was a day that produced more excitement, statistical landmarks and memories than you might reasonably expect in a season, or two—

• The second-best bowling performance in New Zealand women’s T20 cricket
• A spectacular opposition collapse, which is always fun
• A tie
• The best catch I have ever seen
• The most expensive over I have ever seen.

 

Wellington Blaze v Central Hinds

 

Despite their dominance of the competition, the Blaze have sometimes fallen short when batting first, usually to be rescued by the bowlers in general and Melie Kerr in particular. Against Central Districts, 82 for two from 15 overs turned into 109 for seven off 20. 

 

Central were cruising at 89 for three with five overs left. Perhaps it was disbelief at being on the brink of overturning the mighty Blaze, or maybe it was simply the sheer quality of Melie Kerr, but they collapsed as if Liz Truss was suddenly in charge: six wickets for nine runs. It might be added that a couple of the decisions looked dubious on the replay (there is no right of referral in domestic games, though umpires can check some things, as they did later with the catch of the century).

 

Kerr took five for 13. It would have been the best ever performance in women’s domestic T20 cricket, had it not been for her five for ten against Canterbury the previous week. She is the leading wicket taker in the competition this season, and, with four fifties, the second best runscorer after Suzie Bates. It could be that the Blaze are over-reliant on her; here she was out for 26. They miss Maddy Green, who has returned to Auckland, and Sophie Devine, who is not playing in this tournament.

 

The ninth wicket fell from the first ball of the 19th over, bowled by Xara Jetly, who celebrated with a double cartwheel. Twelve were needed from 11 balls. In came No 11 Claudia Green, none of whose previous 23 innings in this format had resulted in a double-figure score. 

 

From the first ball she faced, Green was almost caught at backward point, and almost run out as she hurtled half way down the pitch and back again. 

 

At which point Green discovered her inner Wallter Hammond. She danced down the pitch to Jetly’s next delivery, turning it into a half volley and driving it to the cover boundary. Down she came to the next ball, driving sweetly to long on for a single. From the non-striker’s end Green—the same Green who had reacted to the first ball of the over in the manner of Lance Corporal Jones—now called her partner for a sharp single when the keeper fumbled a legside wide as if there was ice in her veins. The transformation in the space of a minute from a player who couldn’t get away from the strike fast enough to one who demanded it was astonishing.

 

Down the pitch she danced again, hitting a full toss to the straight boundary to level the scores.

 

The normal rules that control the cricketing universe, having popped out for a moment, now returned and hurried to wipe up the mess. Green charged again, but this time was bowled and the game was tied. 

 

There was no super over. We don’t like them because of…you know.

 

Wellington Firebirds v Central Stags

  

What is the best catch you have ever seen? If pressed, I have always gone for Alan Ealham to dismiss Nirmal Nanan of Nottinghamshire in the Sunday League at Canterbury in 1973. The Times thought it worth the headline on its summary of the day’s games: Ealham’s catch keeps Kent at the top:

 

Nanan fell to a wonderful catch by Ealham, who ran nearly 20 yards round the long-on boundary to dive and take the ball low down, tumbling over and over.

 

Ealham was stationed near the lime tree and ran towards the sightscreen at the Nackington Road End. I’ll bet that he was also responsible for at least one of the run outs on the Nottinghamshire card that day. 

 

More recent contenders took their catches at the Basin Reserve, which is not surprising, given that is where I have watched the great majority of my cricket for the past 20 years, an era in which fielding standards have reached new heights. There was Kane Williamson’s three grasps to dismiss Angelo Mathews in 2015 that became ESPN’s worldwide play of the day. Trent Boult’s gymnastic removals of Ramdin and Rahane in 2014 and 2015. Also Logan van Beek’s successive pieces of invisible tightrope walking to defy the boundary rope in the 2020 T20 final.

 

Against Central Districts, Troy Johnson pulled off a catch that was better than any of them, the best I have seen. I was in the RA Vance Stand, right above where the catch was taken, a perfect view. In the video you see the full-length dive to take the ball coming down over the shoulder and the contortion necessary to avoid the rope, during which the ball was successfully delivered to Nick Kelly (who is therefore credited with the catch). What you don’t see is where Johnson started from—a few metres inside the circle—how much ground he had to make to reach the ball, and the fast pace at which he was moving towards the boundary rope. From the stand, there appeared to be no chance that he would get there until he did. Neither does it show how strong the wind was, more than enough to introduce an element of randomness into the flight of the ball as it fell. It was magnificent.

 

When Logan van Beek came on for the 17th over, Central Districts required 33 with six wickets left to pass Wellington’s below par 147 for eight. They were ahead, but it was still a contest.

 

No 18th over was needed. All 33 came off van Beek. I am pretty sure that I have not seen as many runs off one over before, the benchmark being 31 from Graham McKenzie’s disastrous 14-ball over in the Sunday League in 1971.

 

Van Beek’s was a mere eight deliveries, starting with a legside wide that went through to the boundary. The first legal delivery was a single to deep square leg, followed by another to deep mid-wicket. Continuing the short-ball strategy, van Beek got a next one wrong and it was called as a high wide. So far there had been eight from the over, with four to bowl.

 

The next was a slower, fuller ball that Doug Bracewell sent bouncing off the toilet block into the traffic around the Basin. In the time it took to bring out a replacement ball the umpires agreed that Wellington had had too many fielders outside the circle, and called no ball. Bracewell duly dispatched the free hit over the sightscreen. Another wait for a ball. 

 

The remaining 12 required were an administrative detail that Bracewell addressed efficiently with two legside sixes. 

 

This was the same Logan van Beek who had hit 30 off Jason Holder in a World Cup qualifier super over a few months ago. As far as I can tell, van Beek is the first to score, and be hit for, 30 or more in an over across first-class, List A and the T20 equivalent. 

 

All this was available free-to-air on TVNZ. New Zealand Cricket finds itself in the enviable position of having pay TV revenue and free-to-air exposure. In 2020 Spark (New Zealand’s leading telecommunications company) bought the rights to cricket in New Zealand for six years. However, the company was unable to obtain sufficient rights across sports, particularly for winter codes, to make its streaming sports service profitable, and pulled the plug in mid June 2023. Its cricket rights were divested to its free-to-air partner TVNZ, though Spark continues to pick up most of the tab. 

 

There is a black lining to this silver cloud. TVNZ could never hope to make a serious bid when the cricket next becomes available, which will leave New Zealand’s Sky TV as the sole bidder, unless there is an unexpected development in our small market. Sky has used this position ruthlessly of late; its recent bid for renewal of the rights to netball (a significant sport in the pay TV market here) was for about half the amount it paid for the current contract. 

 

My third day at the cricket had more disappointment for the men, who collapsed to 27 for six before partially recovering to 102 all out, a total that gave no trouble to bottom-of-the-table Northern Districts. The successive defeats cost Wellington automatic qualification to the final and the hosting rights that go with it. 

 

A seamless unbeaten 73 from Melie Kerr took the women to an easy win. They win the group and go through to the final, which will be played at Eden Park, Auckland, home of the men’s group winners.

 

The Cricketer, November 1973

 

The cover has action shots of two young cricketers who had done well in 1973 and were both off to the Caribbean with MCC and England. For Bob Willis, his home debut in the last test of the summer was an early step on the path to 325 test wickets, the England captaincy and Headingley ‘81. For Frank Hayes, the best was already past. His century on debut at the Oval accounted for almost half his test-career runs, made in nine tests, all against the West Indies. 

The November edition of The Cricketer was the Winter Annual, the centrepiece of which was always the Journal of the Season. Over the years, this was the work of, among others, John Arlott, Alan Gibson and Tony Lewis. In 1973 it was in the hands of Mike Brearley, in his second year as captain of Middlesex after returning from academia, and not yet the deity that he was to become. The rules for the Journal were its author wrote a weekly reflection on the cricketing events that were then posted to The Cricketer so as to prevent the application of hindsight.

Brearley isn’t quite in the class of those other writers as a stylist, but we go to him for insight, of which there is plenty, for example this analysis of Ray Illingworth upon his loss of the England captaincy.

He is very open, a lover of argument; he will have a dispute out with anyone, face-to-face. He supports his players, but expects 100% at all times. He is a devoted captain, never losing concentration, confident in his own ways; he has done marvellously at critical moments. He respects hard work in others, having worked hard himself. He has been a symbol for many cricketers and cricket followers in a still class-infected game.

Brearley, along with Peter Walker and Jack Bannister, had negotiated the first disbursement of TV rights money to the Professional Cricketers Association, all of £3,500 per annum for four years. More significantly, they persuaded the TCCB (the predecessor of the ECB) to initiate a non-contributory pension scheme for county cricketers. 

They were not afraid to deploy the confrontational approach to industrial relations typical of the seventies. 

,,,it was also decided, after a ballot of all members, that if we did not reach agreement we should take action to prevent televised cricket from being as attractive to the public as it normally is.

In this light, we must reassess the career of Geoffrey Boycott. We have clearly been wrong to see him as self-serving accumulator, grimly placing  his own average above the interests of team or paying public. In truth, this son of the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire was waging class war with the willow, making the bourgeoisie regret their colour TVs. 

Boycott is the recurring theme of the Winter Annual. Alan Gibson writes, in his Cricketers of the Year piece:

I cannot help wondering whether Boycott will ever make a good captain. He does not seem able to capture and control the inner man.

BI Gunatunga, on the letters page, disagrees, and thinks that Boycott, not Denness, should lead MCC to the Caribbean. Like many another fan of the Fitzwilliam’s finest, he does not go in for shades of grey in his assessment.

I consider Boycott to be a much-misunderstood cricketer mainly because he appears to be so different from other players. He is an immensely gifted cricketer, whose constant striving after perfection bespeaks a character well-suited to leadership. 

Geoffrey Boycott is the brightest star in the cricket firmament. Is it not, to say the least, a short-sighted act to deny the honour of leading England to a man whose present role in the England team has a classical parallel in that of Aenas in the destiny of Rome?

Mr Gunatunga wrote from Sri Lanka so may not have had his opinion tempered by the experience of watching Boycott bat too often. 

Boycott also turns up in Irving Rosenwater’s survey of 1973’s statistical oddities. During the second test against West Indies, he retired hurt from separate injuries from two successive balls, which Rosenwater thought to be unique. 

Back to Gibson, who was summoned for a nightcap with EW Swanton during the Headingley test.

This turned out to be a delightful occasion, though abstemious and informal. I am pleased to report that his theological position is still sound.

Gibson’s selections as Cricketers of the Year include a British Rail employee. 

…on a crowded train between Bristol and London, I was pleased, but surprised to find myself adopted by one of the buffet car attendants, who plied me with food and drink throughout the journey, when I never stirred a step from my seat. When I thanked him afterwards, he said, ‘Always a pleasure for you, Mr Arlott’.

There is an interview with Bishan Bedi, poignant given his recent passing. The tributes presented him as a man of firm views and strong principles, characteristics on full display here. 

Cricket should be an exciting game with batsmen playing their shots and bowlers trying to get them out. In England, however, too many captains want to keep the game tight. They keep the fielders back to save singles when they should have them up for catches. 

Bedi would have approved of Bazball.

On Sundays we see bowlers like John Snow bowling without a slip. This is ridiculous. Even I must have a slip. Sunday cricket is rubbish in my view. It is not real cricket. People come to watch it because it is Sunday and they have nothing else to do. It is not attacking cricket at all, but defensive cricket. 

No fines then for criticising the product (as he would never have called it). 

David Foot writes about Gloucestershire, focusing not on their Gillette Cup final win against Sussex, but on their Championship game against Glamorgan, a week later. I often finished the season at the County Ground in Bristol, and recognise it from Foot’s description.

It was the last afternoon of the season at Bristol, a ground which had been likened to a mausoleum a little too often for comfort, and more recently to the sands at Weston (by Somerset’s captain Brian Close). You don’t expect stirring sport on the final day. 

The home team were chasing a target of 267, but when the ninth wicket fell at 210 it seemed that the season’s end was only a few balls away. No 10 John Mortimore was capable enough, but he was now joined by Jack Davey, perhaps the only genuine challenger to Kent’s Norman Graham for the title of worst No 11 in county cricket. Davey’s 13 innings thus far in 1973 had produced 29 runs. Yet he had become something of a cult figure for the locals, particularly in the Jessop Tavern. Alan Gibson would leave the press box to shout “put them to the sword Jack” when Davey approached the crease. How fortunate that Foot was there to immortalise his heroics that day. 

The first one he received was right on a length, doing a bit off the seam. He stretched forward and pushed the ball back. The classic defensive forward stroke. Feet and bat positioned exquisitely, elbow up for the gods to see. The MCC coaches could have been inspired to poetry on the spot.

Davey equalled his career best of 17 in a partnership of 57 with Mortimore to take Gloucestershire to victory, and they “returned to an ovation as genuine as anything in the Gillette final”. The win moved Gloucestershire up two places to fifth in the table, but short of the prize of £500 for fourth place. It meant nothing, yet it meant everything and if any of the few that bothered to make their way to the cricket on a dank autumn day are still above ground, they will treasure the memory yet. 

The summarised scores of the Indian Schoolboys tour is replete with names that were to become familiar in the decade to come: Briers, Gatting, Hignell, Parker, Slocombe, DM Smith and the great CJ Tavarḗ,What a treat it would have been to be at Bristol to see 150 by VJ Marks. A King’s School batter name of Gower made 50 against visitors from South Africa.

Geoffrey Howard who was about to retire after a quarter of a century of first Lancashire, then Surrey, provides an informed summary of the changes that he had seen and, in some cases, instigated. More than that, he looks forward with some prescience, foreseeing—

• a sponsored, 16-match County Championship of two divisions (though he doesn’t approve of the latter; for some years he put together the fixture lists and says that this would become “a nightmare”)

• ODIs with every tour

• world cups in England

• neutral umpires.

Scyld Berry writes about lob bowling. I don’t recall seeing Berry’s name in The Cricketer before this, so it may have been the start of one of cricket journalism’s most distinguished careers. He gives us an entertaining history of the art of lobbing, which he suggests has some science to it, with greater variety than overarm can offer. After running through the options for seam, swing and spin, Berry lists more exotic alternatives. 

Then there is the second-bounce yorker, and of course the daisy cutter; the full toss straight to the shoulder…and as a first-ball speciality the harmless low full-toss to the off-stump that is tentatively driven to extra-cover.

GH Simpson-Hayward of Worcestershire took 23 wickets with lobs against South Africa in 1909-10.

With his low trajectory and ample turn off the matting he could not be “lofted” with safety or even driven along the ground with confidence; pushes and pokes were the best means of resistance. 

Did not Brearley once turn to lobs on the last afternoon of a county game? I suppose that Trevor Chappell might be regarded as the last international lob bowler if the daisy cutter is in the lobber’s armoury. 

What I miss about the seventies is how easy it was to infuriate those who deserved to be infuriated. Here is JF Priestly of Kent on the letters page.

I was appalled at the general turn-out of the two teams in the Varsity match at Lord’s. Only one Cambridge player was wearing his coveted light blue cap when fielding…one player had an unruly beard, long hair generally was the vogue, some of the players had not even bothered to clean their boots, flannels were different shades, and the only good thing to say about them was their good bowling and most excellent fielding.

No doubt when Mr Priestly went to the cinema he judged the film by the straightness of the ice cream seller’s tie. 

The Cricketer, September and October 1973

September’s edition includes accounts of two games at which I was present. The first was the 55-over final between Kent and Worcestershire. 

I have written about this game before, and recommend the YouTube highlights, in which the players glisten  like ghosts in their pristine white. 

I enjoyed watching Leicestershire’s win in the recent 50-over final. Harry Swindells’ century was as good a backs-to-the-wall innings as there has been in a one-day final for fifty years (see below), and the result was too close to call until the final ball. It is good that three provincial counties have won the competition since the final was moved to Trent Bridge, but that is partly because the Undead (as my Blean Correspondent perceptively calls it) has shorn it of its names. Fifty years ago, half of the participants were contemporary internationals, and four—Cowdrey, D’Oliveira, Knott and Underwood—were gods.

By the time of the second game to be featured in The Cricketer, the 60-over quarter-final at Hove, Kent had the Sunday League all but sown up, so we went to Hove expecting something in the nature of a formality, foolishly bandying about the word “treble”. I cannot agree with Gordon Ross’s assessment in his one-day round up that this was a “wonderfully happy day”. In fact, it was one of the more miserable that I have spent at a cricket ground. 

These were the days before the Ms 23 and 25, so our East Kent coach took a circuitous route across the North Downs and the Weald before becoming caught up in the transportation spider’s web that was the town of Lewes in those days. Lewes is now renowned for its excessive commemoration of Guy Fawkes, but that one visit to the town made me understand that time spent there would cultivate a proclivity to arson. Busses were to be trouble all day, as it turned out. 

We arrived shortly before the first ball was bowled, the only space available being an uncomfortably small area of grass with a limited view in the fifth or sixth row on the boundary at the sea end of the ground, on a sweltering day. It was from here that I watched Richard Elms open the bowling for Kent. 

Elms was a left-arm bowler of sharpish pace, and was a reasonable batter, but never attained a regular place in the team, largely because his control was not reliable. He was included here because Norman Graham was ill and Bernard Julien was on tour with the West Indians. It was the biggest game of his career, but he would not recall it fondly. Elms bowled four wides in the first over of the game, at a time when one-day wides were ruled much more leniently than they are now. 

The make-up of the Kent team was odd, and is inclined to generate retrospective sympathy for Elms. Now captains expect to have six or seven bowling options, and to use them (New Zealand in the current World Cup are an exception, and that worries me). But, as was the norm then, Kent used only five bowlers. Graham Johnson delivered more than 400 overs of off spin in the Championship in 1973, but Denness preferred to flog Elms even though it was obvious that his confidence was going out with the tide on Hove seafront. 

Ross’s report highlights John Snow’s pace, but the damage had already been done by the Sussex batters, with Roger Prideaux’s 79 leading the way. Prideaux was one of those players who could look terrific on his day, of which this was one. With a little luck he might have had a test career that stretched beyond three games. Instead, he is mostly remembered as the man who dropped out of the Oval test of 1968 to be replaced by Basil D’Oliveira, thus initiating the series of events that led to the cancellation of MCC’s tour of South Africa.

Sussex’s 263 for six was more than any side had successfully chased in the Gillette Cup, which was in its eleventh season. After Tony Buss had Luckhurst caught at slip, Snow, with an irresistible combination of pace and movement, accounted for Denness and Asif Iqbal, and at 14 for three that was about it. The great fast bowler finished with figures of 7-5-8-2. I wouldn’t swear to it, but the runs may have been two edged fours, so impossible did it appear to score off him. The trundling Buss brothers took five between them, three for Tony and two for Mike.

Sussex got to Lord’s, and as Gordon Ross reports in the October edition, again removed the top three quickly. But Gloucestershire were Proctershire.

[Mike Procter’s] technique is such that he needs precious little time to find his bearings and he launched himself immediately, seizing on two short balls from Michael Buss…and thumping them good and proper for six.

He followed his 94 with two for 27 in 11 overs as Sussex fell 40 short. This was after 101 and three for 31 in the semi-final against Worcestershire. It was like having a tornado on the team.

As I write this, the collar of my sports shirt is turned up, as has been my habit these fifty-plus years, in perpetual salute to Garry Sobers, who is pictured thus attired on the cover of the September edition. Sobers played for West Indies in the three-test series on which John Woodcock reports in these editions, though he had passed the captaincy on to Rohan Kanhai. 

I was present for the first day of the final test. Lord’s had a quality of light all its own on sunny days late in the season, particularly when watching from the grandstand side of the ground as we were that day. The lower sun combined with a bit of extra moisture to give the spectacle the air of a dream sequence, appropriately enough for West Indies, who were 335 for four by the end of the day, “as large a score from the opening day of a Test match in England as there can have been for some long time” according to John Woodcock.

That is from his report in The Times. Strangely, The Cricketer gave him only six paragraphs to sum up this excellent game, half the space allocated to each of the two ODIs that followed the tests, not enough to mention Rohan Kanhai’s 157, one of the finest test innings that I have seen in person. 

By this time, Kanhai had the statesman’s grey hair but still batted like matinee idol. There was plenty of stylish, aggressive support from his Guyanese colleagues Roy Fredericks (51) and Clive Lloyd (63), and at the end of the day from Sobers, who was 31 not out at the close. The great man went on to150 next day, notoriously having caroused through the night in the interim.

One of the things I like about John Woodcock’s writing is that you can always tell when he has really enjoyed himself. He is one of us, somebody who loves being entertained by the best players, regardless of who they play for. In the above extract he conveys something of the joyous atmosphere of a West Indian test match in London. The negligence shown by the cricket authorities in squandering this reservoir of knowledge and enthusiasm is one of the worst things that has happened to English cricket in the last half century. 

It was a match of many landmarks, such as Bob Willis’s debut home test. Woodcock describes the first over of the game as “the fastest over I have seen this season”. This validates the enduring image that I have in my mind of that morning: Willis storming in from the Nursery End through the morning shimmer. 

It was the game of the Saturday bomb scare with most of the crowd on the field and HD Bird initiating his own legend by perching on the covers on Grandstand. Later that afternoon Geoffrey Boycott was caught on the boundary hooking off the last ball of the day, something that many of us remember whenever he fulminates about the recklessness of modern batting. 

This was the last test match to be covered by EM Wellings of the Evening News, and Chris Martin-Jenkins’ first as a Test Match Special commentator.

It was also Ray Illingworth’s last test as England captain. EW Swanton sums up the selectors’ reasoning:

But when some decline in his own form, both as a batsman and bowler, coincided with the second of two shattering Test defeats it was clear that a new leader must be tried.

He reminds us that Illingworth’s selection to replace the injured Colin Cowdrey in 1969 had been a “surprise appointment”. He could have added “inspired”, given that Illingworth was to lead the Ashes-winning side in 1970/71 and hold them at home the following year.

Mike Denness was appointed as his replacement, the announcement tactlessly made while Leicestershire were playing Kent at Folkestone, causing, according to Barry Dudleston of the visitors, Illingworth to exit the dressing room via a window and drainpipe to avoid the waiting press. Appointing a captain from outside the team was not unusual; both Tony Lewis and Illingworth himself had recentlybeen given the job in these circumstances. But the selectors ignored two current county captains—Boycott and Greig—to do so. It was a decision that would lead to Boycott’s boycott. 

It also rekindled one of cricket writing’s great feuds. EW Swanton, in his Off the Cuff column, writes of a generally positive press reaction to Denness’s appointment:

…apart from some odious, sneering comment from a predictable quarter. I imagined that most people would at once identify Michael Parkinson, that caricature of a Yorkshireman who is guaranteed to glorify anything and anyone who comes from his own small corner of the world and to denigrate almost all else. 

He goes on to say that he does not regard Parkinson as a “bona fide cricket writer” before a big finish:

As I say, this sort of piffle no longer attracts intelligent readership. But how the great Yorkshiremen, from Hirst and Verity to Leyland and Rhodes must be turning in their graves at this travesty of the true Yorkshire spirit as it has served the county and England so well and for so long.

Parkinson replied in similar vein in his Sunday Times column.

Robin Marlar contributes an interesting profile of Derek Underwood. Marlar sees Underwood as a seam bowler playing a spinner’s role, and attributes  this down to his father laying a concrete pitch in the garden for the young Underwood to develop his skills upon. Good for seam, not for spin, apparently.

He presents this time, 1973, as a turning point in Underwood’s career. He says that a change in the lbw law, making the bowler pitch in line in all circumstances, had made things more difficult, though this had been reversed in 1972. There were other issues.

Derek Underwood has the action of a medium-pacer. It is a fine action. Rhythmic. Controlled. Plenty of body. It lends itself to accuracy. He also has stamina. He can bowl for hours. But now he knows that this is not enough. To be as great a bowler in cricketing annals and affectations as Wilfred Rhodes or Jim Laker or even Bishan Bedi he has to be able to get wickets all over the world and not primarily in England, the seamer’s paradise. What is he to do? Is he to change his action and become a spinner, pure and simple? Or is he to develop another action and operate in two distinct styles? Who will teach him to spin the ball? 

At this stage Underwood had taken 144 test wickets. He finished with 297, plus 16 more at 27 in World Series Cricket, which probably cost him anything up to a hundred more in his peak years. Overall, in Australia he took 50 wickets at 31, in India 54 at 26, all without making any apparent changes to his action or style. 

The same pattern occurred when uncovered pitches were done away with in 1981. That will sort Underwood out, they said. In the first two seasons under the new rules he took more wickets than anyone other than Malcolm Marshall and Richard Hadlee.

The cover of the October edition has Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge at Southampton. Richards was already acknowledged as a great player. Greenidge was not yet in the West Indies team, but within a few years these two would be opening for a putative World XI. With quicker thinking, England could still have picked him when the photo was taken. Yet at the time the presence of overseas players in the county game was widely decried. It was a golden age for county cricket, though we were slow to recognise it as such. The photo is of its time. Two kids, shirts off, ignorant of skin cancer (but nobody in shorts). The older guy to the right who would have seen Phil Mead play. The younger guy with the bad haircut and shades, who thinks he’s cool though he isn’t. If the photo had been taken at Canterbury that would have been me. Hampshire were county champions in 1973.