STAFFORDSHIRE'S 1001st GAME

At the end of August I pootled on down to a sun-baked Knypersley CC to watch the opening day of Staffordshire's fixture with Buckinghamshire, their 1001st game in the Minor Counties Championship. 

I was able to interview to a few people – Keith Stride and Sid Owen, as well as both coaches, Dave Cartledge and Simon Stanway – for my book about the Minor Counties' cult players, and I was able to chat to several people in a non-professional capacity. It was an enjoyable day, and I was able to write a piece for All Out Cricket magazine about it, with another due in the next issue of The Cricketer. 

The Manchester United of the Minor Counties 

 

WHEN MINOR COUNTIES HUMBLED THE AUSTRALIANS

OK, so I have blogged this piece in longform previously. However, this is the age of recycling, and if I can persuade The Cricketer to part with some cash in exchange for the simple expedient of turning it from a written-up feature to a collage of quotes, then why would I not want to, erm, help the environment...

Anyway, it was nice to earn a few quid for the hard yakka, but it was equally pleasing to have this story ('A Minor Triumph') reach a wider audience, especially for some of those whose finest hour it was, some of whom went out of their way to provide me with photos to pass on to Alec Swann, who had commissioned it.

I'm therefore grateful for the contributions of Mike Nurton (Oxfordshire), Neil Riddell (Durham), David Bailey (Cheshire), Doug Yeabsley (Devon) and Frank Collyer (Hertfordshire), but especially so to Stuart Wilkinson (Durham), Brian Collins (Hertfordshire) and the current Staffordshire President, Peter Gill. 

MINORS' STRIKE: WHEN SHROPSHIRE BEAT YORKSHIRE

For a while now I have been working on a book project about Minor Counties cricket, during the course of which I've spoken to many stalwarts and, yes, legends of this tier of the English game. A side project that's emerged during the course of my research has been the 'giantkilling' matches: the 10 occasions when an individual Minor County defeated first-class opposition in the Gillette Cup / NatWest Trophy; the six games in the Benson and Hedges Cup when the Minor Counties XI managed the same feat; and the eight games when an international side were upset by the MC's Rep' XI.

These are great underdog stories, of course (one of which I told here), but tracking down participants is a lengthy process. Nevertheless, I was lucky enough to spend 25 minutes chatting to Geoffrey Boycott in 2012 about the two occasions in which he was part of a Yorkshire team tipped up by Minor County opposition: in 1973, against Durham, and 11 years later against Shropshire. He was surprisingly gracious about the games ("we were roobish; best team won"), and courteous in answering my questions.

The second of these games was the subject of a feature in the latest Cricketer magazine, for which I also managed to speak to the former Yorkshire and Shropshire batsman Kevin Sharp, as well as six of the successful Shropshire team: Rotherham-born skipper, Steve Johnson; John Foster, whose sons have both played for the county; Steve Gale, currently a first-class umpire; Andy Barnard, whose sons have recently played for England U19s; all-rounder Brian Perry, Man of the Match against Somerset the year before; and the former Liverpool, Shrewsbury Town and Coventry City goalkeeper, Steve Ogrizovic. I'd have loved to have spoken to Man of the Match on the day, Mushtaq Mohammad, the former Pakistan batsman-leggie, and to Malcolm Nash, the left-arm medium-pacer most famous for being the hapless bowler when Garry Sobers hit his 6 sixes in an over at Swansea in August 1968, but it wasn't to be.

Even so, it was one of the more enjoyable pieces I've done, although I wasn't initially sure it would ever be published. I'd offered it to All Out Cricket first, but they said finding images was proving too difficult. Then a couple of snaps emerged and The Cricketer took it (publishing it under the headline: 'Down the Salopian Tube'!!) – pleasing for me, but especially so for the players involved, whose moment in the sun deserved such recognition.

Here is the text I filed:

---

Oggy

It may be stretching things to call Yorkshire’s 1984 season ‘Orwellian’, but the eighties had seen something of a permanent war up there in that most politically totalitarian of cricketing shires. While you didn’t need Orwell’s foresight to predict Scargill and the Miners’ Strike, no-one, but no-one foresaw witnessing Shropshire’s Minors strike. Yet that’s exactly what happened when David Bairstow took his team to St George’s, Telford for the first round of the that summer’s NatWest Trophy, the annual banana-skin ordeal faced by the first-class counties right up until 2005. In the Shropshire ranks was Steve Ogrizovic, an FA Cup-winning goalkeeper with Coventry three years later who would also feel the wrong end of a giantkilling.

Ogrizovic: Sutton United beat us in 1989. When you’re used to playing at Old Trafford, Anfield, Highbury, to suddenly go and play on a non-league ground is difficult. It’s exactly the same for county cricketers. Not just the pitches but the facilities.

John Foster (Shropshire): The dressing rooms were barely big enough for three or four coffins. It wasn’t a pretty ground – more a social club in an old mining area. Cricket is an afterthought and only a tiny portion of the pavilion building. If you were to ask any player in the league at the time, it was probably the least favourite places to play. But when it was decked out for NatWest it was totally different.

Yorkshire’s apprehension – they were coming off an innings-and-153-run home defeat to Essex, the heaviest for 11 years and worst ever at Headingley – was perhaps indicated by their decision at the toss. Shropshire sensed vulnerability.

Brian Perry (Shropshire): We had a good side. Well balanced. We believed in ourselves. Usually when you play a side that’s a lot stronger than you, you put them in so at least you have the 120 overs. I was a bit surprised they put us in, to be honest.

Foster: They were going through one of their flat spells. Although they had Boycott opening the batting, the rest of the side was steady county cricket rather than exceptional, so we always thought we had a chance – if they had an off day and we played exceptionally well. We always put up reasonably sound performances but never actually got particularly close to an upset.

Yorkshire batsman Kevin Sharp, who would later both play and coach Shropshire, was adamant there was no complacency.

Sharp: You were playing against some good players, some quality league cricketers, and if you’re not on your game an upset can happen. Yes, it was a no-win situation for the pros but there was no real nervousness. You played a lot of cricket. It was just another game. It was a matter of treating it with respect. We’d all been around long enough to know that these things happen.

Steve Gale, with David Bairstow looking on

Foster and skipper Steve Johnson fell cheaply. At 62 for 3, the innings was rescued by a 105-run partnership between Mushtaq Mohammad (80) and current first-class umpire, Steve Gale (68).

Johnson: Bryan Jones started it, then Steve Gale joined Mushtaq and played probably his best ever innings for Shropshire. He did bat well, and obviously Mushy was an outstanding cricketer.

Gale: We were three down for 60, so possibly in a bit of trouble, and what you don’t want is to get bowled out for 100 or thereabouts with a big crowd on. I think Graham Stevenson had a terrific shout for lbw against Mushy that looked … well, it looked very close. He used to sit on the crease a bit, Mushy. After that I thought, ‘it might be our day, here’.

Andy Barnard (Shropshire): Steve had limited shots but had a gameplan that he used week in, week out, that got him runs, particularly on those slowish surfaces. He had a good record against the first-class sides.

Geoff Boycott: It was a goodish pitch, but slow. But that was okay because Mushy was brought up on good pitches which are slow. He was wristy. He manoeuvred the ball well. A fine player. If you were picking a best Pakistan team of all time, I would put him in my team. And I did.

Foster: Great bloke, Mushy. Always willing to share his knowledge and put his sixpence in. You couldn’t wish for a better bloke in the dressing room.

Johnson: That partnership set things up, then Brian Perry chipped in in his inimitable way and that gave us a reasonable total of 229, which doesn’t sound much in this day and age.

Shropshire were happy with runs on the board.

Barnard: We felt that was a good score. They didn’t really have any people in form and we had a good bowling side, so felt we’d do well.

Johnson: The one person I thought would be okay was Steve Ogrizovic, because of his football experience, but he did seem nervous and sprayed it about a bit. He did manage to strangle Martyn Moxon, caught at square leg by Mushtaq.

Ogrizovic: The year before, I actually got Viv Richards, but it was a no-ball. I’ve got a picture of his leg peg cartwheeling out of the ground. But Geoff Boycott, along with John Snow, was my cricketing hero growing up, funnily enough.   

The consensus was that the battle between Geoff Boycott and Malcolm Nash would be pivotal.  

Johnson: Boycs was very circumspect. It was, in some ways, quite amusing. There was no way Malcolm Nash was going to give Boycs any width. There was no way Boycs was going to get himself out to Nash. I don’t know whether there was any history there, but Nashy was a bit of a wind-up character, in a nice sort of way. He’d got quite a brain on him.

Barnard: Nash and Boycott seemed to just play out some sort of ‘Well bowled, mate’, ‘Well played, mate’ first-class scenario. All Boycott was worried about was not getting out to him. He was a good bowler but he wasn’t as good as figures of 12-6-16-1. Clearly, Geoffrey paid him a lot of respect that day and unduly put pressure on the rest of the team.

Malcolm Nash

Foster: The mindset in those days was completely different. Nobody went out to target a bowler, they just went to play an innings. Nashy bowled straight at him, wicket to wicket, and Boycs played it on merits. It was always said that he had a bit of a weakness against medium-pace left-armers, such as EKA Solkar from India.

Sharp: Boycs spent a lot of time not scoring runs off Nash. In the modern game, you wouldn’t allow him to bowl like that. We got well behind the rate. Their score was about par, but it wasn’t insurmountable. All the time Mushy was bowling at me I can remember feeling ‘we need to score, we need to score’.

But Boycott sensed vulnerability in his colleagues.

Boycott: Mushtaq bowled his overs for 3 for 26. They couldn’t pick him. At times we’ve had exceptional teams, but in the seventies and eighties we weren’t a very good batting side. We had some lovely lads, great kids to play with, but you look at their records and we were a bit thin.

However, the Daily Express intimated that the great man’s mind wasn’t entirely on the game.

“Shortly after a loudspeaker announcement proclaiming a collection for the Geoff Boycott Testimonial Fund – an unheard of occurrence at an away game! – the old master was caught and bowled by seamer Brian Perry for 27 in 25 overs. Boycott had a bonus of £97 to show for his away-day collection”.

The Yorkshire Post added:

“Subsequently, another announcement indicated that Boycott was signing autographs and this came with Yorkshire making a desperate effort to retrieve a lost cause. Although players were reluctant to become involved in any controversy, several privately felt that everyone’s effort should have been directed towards winning the match.”

Mushy

After Boycott fell, Bairstow was bowled round his legs, sweeping, and Yorkshire were truly in the mire at 81 for 6. Not that Shropshire felt they had it won.  

Johnson: The old butterflies started going and you start believing you’ve got a chance here. But, you know, these first-class boys, there’s usually someone down the order who can get them out of jail.

Barnard: I don’t think we ever thought we were over the line. But we were experienced enough just to sit back and let them try and make the game. I picked up some wickets at the end, just through skiers, really. We suddenly realized that our score was above par, how difficult even first-class players were finding it to get the ball away.

Foster: We just had to hold our nerve, really. Andy Barnard’s a really, really reliable bowler, so having him to come into the attack to finish things off worked well and was just what we had in mind.

Sharp: You never felt as though we were going to get there. Someone would have had to play a special innings.

It was an especially poignant day for Shropshire’s Doncaster-born skipper, whose died-in-the-wool Yorkshire-supporting father was terminally ill and unable to test his split loyalties at the game. He listened on the radio and had “mixed feelings”. The players’ post-match emotions were more predictable.

Foster: The Yorkshire players packed up and left fairly sharpish. I think they got read the riot act by Dave Bairstow, but before we’d even come out of the dressing room, having opened a few bottles of bubbly, they’d all departed. That was disappointing, but understandable. We adjourned to the bar for a few drinks, as you can imagine. 

Sharp: The dressing rooms were tiny. It was not a good place to be after we’d lost. There were a few choice words flying about in there.

Boycott: We won many, many times by eight, nine, ten wickets. On paper, you’re supposed to be better than them. But sport’s not played on paper. That’s the beauty of it, and it should still be played now. Every year. If you had eight Minor Counties in, seven of ‘em would get rolled over but the eighth might be the one that lights up the whole cricket scene. That’s what it’s all about. Giantkilling. That’s the romance, the spice, the inexplicable.

Sharp: It’s one of the worst memories I have. It’s an embarrassing feeling. You’re a paid professional and you’ve lost to amateur cricketers.

The Daily Express and Daily Star ran identical headlines: ‘Flopshire!’ Natural order was restored when Shropshire lost to Warwickshire by 103 runs in the following round, but their feat was there for eternity. As for Yorkshire, any hopes of a mid-season revival were stillborn on the fourth of July.

RICHARD OLIVER: HITTING THE BIG LEAGUES

Last month, I did a short interview with Richard Oliver (no relation), formerly of Woore CC, who has enjoyed quite a summer. He started the season as a player with Reigate Priory in the Surrey Championship, and as skipper of Shropshire in the Minor Counties, for whom he blasted 148 off 82 balls in the opening MCCA Trophy fixture against Lincolnshire. 

He was then given a couple of trial games with Worcestershire, invited by their new batting coach, the former Yorkshire batsman Kevin Sharp, until recently the Shropshire coach. He made 107 against Derbyshire (and a first-baller in the second innings) in his first outing, enough to convince Steve Rhodes that he was worth throwing into the revamped county T20 competition. He started well, with three scores in four innings in the pinch-hitting role. 

A few weeks later, having made an unbeaten 292 in a 2nd XI friendly against Warwickshire, he was given a full contract. To date, his first-class batting has gone as follows: 13 and 65, 78 and 37, 62 and 18, 52 and 179, 1 and 0. That's 505 runs at 50.5. Pretty steady start. 

It's a great tale – the passage from Minors to majors – and one that seems increasingly rare these days. It wasn't always the case. However, the lack of the annual shop window games provided by the old NatWest / Gillette / C&GTrophy, has largely closed it off. The Unicorns was an ersatz replacement, but the Minor Counties game has been transfigured. Does Richard Oliver give hope, then, to MInor Counties players in their mid-twenties? 

That's the question I posed in a recent piece for All Out Cricket, pondering whether the new, Friday night T20 schedule, re-opened that possibility.

Hitting the Big Leagues (AOC 119)

WHEN THE MINOR COUNTIES BEAT THE AUSTRALIANS

the pavilion at Ashbrooke, Sunderland 

The last time an Australian team arrived in the North-East 2-0 down in an Ashes series was August 1977, while the World Series Cricket storm raged away in London and in Sydney. It may only be 7.8 miles as the crow flies from Chester-le-Street’s Emirates ICG (née Riverside Stadium), venue for the Fourth Test, to the grand old Ashbrooke Sports Ground in Sunderland where, 36 years and four days ago, they were defeated bythe Minor Counties in a two-day fixture; nevertheless, given this tour’s turbulent beginnings and the open secret of a rift between Shane Watson and Michael Clarke, the current group are neither a million miles nor light years from Greg Chappell’s much derided party, who arrived with Packer contracts in their pockets and left as 3-0 losers, having been downed en route by a team of teachers, surveyors, solicitors, and wily old pro’s of the northern leagues. 

If posterity will record the backdrop to 2013 as the sacking of Mickey Arthur in the backdraft of Dave Warner’s swinger in Birmingham’s Walkabout Bar, then the backstory for 1977 was the cloak-and-dagger negotiations over the World Series Cricket jamboree that was about to bootstrap international cricket into modernity. Wisden pronounced that the thirteen of the seventeen-strong touring party to have put pen to paper “had already inflicted the initial wound on those who sent them 11,000 miles to represent an organisation not long since celebrating something of 100 years duration”. This line, pungent with unthinking affinity for the fellow august institution, was precisely the key to the whole affair: were the cricketers representing the ACB, or were the ACB supposed to be representing – in the sense of looking after the interests of – their players, their prime assets? (Any gauche suggestion of workers seizing the means of production here has to be tempered with the reality of Packer pragmatism and a simple desire to break the TV monopoly in Australia. Less a revolution, then, than a liberal reform, precipitously carried out.)

At any rate, by the time the 1977 party reached Wearside, they were a pale imitation of the team that had eviscerated England in 1974-75, a 41-year-old Colin Cowdrey dragged from retirement and offered up to the Gods, Lillee and Thomson. The Packer secret had been broken as early as May and in early August he was in the UK putting out, and relighting, fires. Any Minor Counties players reading the Daily Mail on August 2, two days before the game, would have seen a reproduction of the Packer contracts, on the hardline nature of which their progenitor would later remark, “I make no apologies for the fact that this contract is tough. I told every player, ‘This is a tough contract and you’ll do as you’re damn well told’.” Needless to say, this was very far removed from the world of Oxfordshire versus Berkshire or Lincolnshire versus Cumberland, ‘The Sausage Derby’…

The Australians had arrived in Sunderland on the back of defeat, two days earlier, in a Nottingham Test that had seen a visit from the Queen, out in the shires on her Jubilee tour. However, an even more regal visitor had put in a rare appearance at Trent Bridge, for this was the match that Geoffrey Boycott came out of his self-imposed three-year international exile, going on to score 106 (his ninety-eighth first-class hundred) and 80 not out, batting on all five days of the match in which Ian Botham made his debut. England won – Derek Randall, who struck the winning blow, leaving his home patch arm in arm with Boycott, who, famously, had run him out in the first innings – to take an unassailable lead in the five game series.

The match at Ashbrooke, a leafy Victorian suburb four or five David Warner switch-hits south of Sunderland city centre, may only have been a two-day fixture – standard for the Minor Counties players right up until 2001 – and thus did not have first-class status, yet such a short course had not inoculated the Minor Counties against the ignominy of an innings defeat in 1964. In 1953, meanwhile, the Australians had won a first-class match slated for three days but completed inside two by an innings and 171, Ray Lindwall taking 7 for 20 and Richie Benaud following up with 5 for 13 as the Minor Counties were routed for 56 and 62. That game took place on the Michelin factory ground in Stoke-on-Trent, an 80-year-old SF Barnes bowling the honorary first ball at a venue where he had done his fair share of damage – where hadn’t he? – for Staffordshire: an aggregate analysis of 209.2-70-344-62 over seven games, in fact, for an average of 5.55 (well below the overall Staffs career average of 8.10), having made his bow there at a sprightly 55 years young. Whether it was this delivery that persuaded Benaud to select Barnes for his all-time XI is uncertain. Either way, the curmudgeonly old master told the tourists that he wouldn’t be taking the new ball, “in case I induce a collapse”.

Twenty-four years later, in 1977, another, less eminent Staffordshire man, Peter Gill, would be at the heart of the Minor Counties’ first ever victory over the Australians, just their third over any touring team in 36 attempts. Any aspirations to play professional cricket – not to mention undertake a university degree – that Gill may have had were nipped in the bud when he was commandeered to the family industrial insulation firm – an appropriate metaphor, perhaps, for a No 3 batsman, so often an auxiliary opener. Australia’s first-drop, Greg Chappell, was in London alongside Rod Marsh, parlaying with Kerry Packer who’d applied for an injunction to prevent the Test and County Cricket Board (precursor of the ECB) and ICC excluding WSC signatories from international cricket. Meanwhile, a Jarrow March away, his fellow tourists spent their solitary, rain-sodden day off after Trent Bridge touring the Newcastle Brewery, and the following morning were being asked by Cheshire skipper David Bailey to have first use of a slightly two-paced Ashbrooke surface, “because I thought we’d get them on the backlash and it was an overcast day, so it gave us the best chance of doing some damage”. From a family of West Hartlepool lawyers, Bailey had headed to Manchester a decade or so earlier to train as a chartered surveyor and in 1968 and ’69 played 27 first-class games for Lancashire alongside Lloyd, Lloyd, Engineer, Higgs, Lever, Wood, Simmons et al – qualified thrice over, then, to judge the surface: by profession, playing experience and geographical provenance.

With grass banks on three sides of the ground and a rickety, covered stand flanking the rugby pitch at the northern end, Ashbrooke, a multi-sports complex offering tennis, squash, hockey and other envigorations, provided a small-scale though fitting amphitheatre for a North-Eastern public still largely deprived of top-level cricket (Durham would not turn first-class until 1992, of course). “The ground was ringed” recalls Bailey, who duly gave the new ball to one of the crowd’s own: Durham’s Stuart Wilkinson, reckoned by Gill to be “the quickest bowler in Minor Counties cricket, if not the quickest outside it”. 

the wrong end

He may have been able to propel the ball from A to B very quickly, yet the local tearaway couldn’t always discern which way the wind was blowing, and Hertfordshire’s Brian Collins was thus more than a little surprised when his opening partner opted to run uphill across the rugby pitch. A 36-year-old former policeman who left the force to sell burglar alarms, Collins was a tall, strong, lively in-swing bowler for whom the strong breeze blowing diagonally over his left shoulder was “absolutely ideal. I couldn’t believe my luck. I saw [Wilkinson] have a word with the captain and I thought there’s no way I was going to let him have my end, so I’d got to be on the button”. Within an over, Wilkinson was kvetching to the skipper; after three, he was replaced by genial Devonian left-arm swing bowler Doug Yeabsley, a schoolmaster at Haberdasher’s Aske’s who played as a back-row forward for Harlequins for many years. Despite a rickety set of knees, he would bowl uphill and into the wind, unchanged and uncomplaining, for the rest of the innings.

Amateurs they may have been, but, as Gill remarked, “the pitch was lively and our opening bowlers were quite a handful”. Indeed, this was a more than useful attack. Earlier that summer, Collins had returned aggregate figures of 31.4-8-97-5 for Minor Counties West in the Benson and Hedges Cup group stages, while Yeabsley’s return for the same side was an even more impressive 42-12-106-7, his victims including Eddie Barlow, Glenn Turner and Basil D’Oliveira. Wilkinson, meanwhile, had picked up a man of the match-winning – if not matchwinning – 5 for 24 in the Gillette Cup against a Northants side at one stage reeling at 17 for 4, his scalps including two of the flintiest souls on the circuit, David Steele and Peter Willey, as well as Mushtaq Mohammed.

Collins’ keenness to use the advantage saw him nip out the first three wickets – the relatively unheralded Ian Davis, Gary Cosier and Craig Sarjeant, who nonetheless shared between them 25 more Test caps than their eleven opponents could boast – with Kim Hughes surviving a hat-trick ball but becoming the fourth of his 4 for 42. Yeabsley had the golden-haired poster boy of WSC, David Hookes, caught at slip, while Wilkinson, once he had the wind in his sails, finished with 4 for 49, including the prize scalp of Doug Walters, who interrupted his chain smoking to top-score with 42 as the Australians were skittled for 170 in 41.3 overs either side of a lunch interval extended for local dignitaries and sponsors. The Minor Counties’ wicket-keeper Frank Collyer observed, somewhat pithily, that “it wasn’t a gentle ride for them”.

Still, on a dank, windy day they may well have feared an equally violent buffeting themselves. With DK Lillee back in Australia – he and Ian Chappell having ruled themselves out of contention until the Packer business was resolved – and Thomson skulking around the outer for much of the two days, the new ball was taken by Lennie Pascoe, more than capable of bringing some brimstone to proceedings. He bowled 8-0-8-0, which amounts to a lot of very quick – “the quickest I saw” according to Yeabsley, who had played against Holding, Roberts, Procter and many others – though often very short deliveries allowed to sail through to the keeper. Even so, Cumberland’s phlegmatic former Lancashire opener Bob Entwistle, struck on the pad first over, walked down to his opening partner, Oxfordshire’s Mike Nurton, and deadpanned: “‘E’s a bit quick, lad”.

Entwistle was soon snaffled by Pascoe’s partner, Mick Malone, whose solitary Test appearance was just around the corner, at the Oval later that summer, when he returned the miserly first-innings figures of 47-20-63-5 (from an innings of 101 overs!) against which his Sunderland match economy rate of 3.87 looked distinctly profligate. Anyhow, this brought Gill to the crease and he offered a portent of what lay in store by contributing a sprightly, stroke-filled 39 in tandem with Nurton, a lay Anglican preacher, trained magician and eventually all-time leading run-maker in Minor Counties cricket, whose nuggety 40 helped his team to 133 for 4 off 41 overs at stumps. Meanwhile, in the High Court that day, Packer’s injunction application was rejected by Mr Justice Slynn after the TCCB undertook not to disbar anyone from selection until a full court case was heard in September, the ruling stating that doing so would amount to restraint of trade. In Sydney, a writ was issued on Packer’s behalf against the Australian Cricket Board seeking a declaration along the same lines. The game was moving forward.

On the second morning, heavy overnight rain led to the start being delayed by 75 minutes and to pockets of agitated Australian discussion on the outfield, recalls Hertfordshire skipper Collyer, a solicitor and Cambridge graduate: “On the second morning, while they were waiting for the ground to be tidied up, I have a clear memory of them punting an Australian Rules football back and forth, talking in little groups. While one’s not privy to the conversation, one got the impression that there was a lot of uncertainty over what the immediate future held”. One certainly wonders what the party’s four non-Packer players – Cosier, Sarjeant, Hughes and Geoff Dymock – made of it all, while the immediate future of footie-punter-in-chief, Thommo, amounted to having his WSC contract annulled due to a 10-year agreement with a radio station that required him to play for Queensland.

When it was clear there would be no prompt resumption, Bailey declared 37 runs in arrears, “to try and twist their arm into giving us a target. I prefer to play these games to win, not as an exhibition”. And so, typically, do Australians. Busy fifties were scored by Davis and Hookes as Bailey let his spinners wheel through a few overs – Durham leggie Peter Kippax bagged 3 for 46, while current Somerset President Roy Kerslake bowled tidily for his 9-2-22-1. Acting skipper Walters was cut on the jawline attempting to pull Yeabsley and had to be given seven stitches. Nevertheless, at 169 for 6 and without any negotiation or collusion, a declaration was made, giving Minor Counties a target of 207 to win in two and three quarter hours, about which Collyer surmised: “I don’t think they thought for a moment they thought we were going to get those runs”.

Dymock and Malone took the new ball, Nurton falling early while Entwistle chipped in with a measured 33. However, it was the 81-run stand between Gill – who played “the innings of my life”, cutting and driving and clipping 17 fours on his way to 92 of the 166 runs scored while at the crease – and Kippax that took the Minor Counties to a position of apparent impregnability. Cosier, a military-medium swing bowler whose boomerangs had taken 5 for 18 in one of the ODIs a couple of months’ earlier, came into the attack just as the sun broke through the Wearside cloud, more or less negating his threat – although Gill, within sight of a century and with his team still almost 40 runs short of their target, “got a bit excited and had a slog at one” to be caught and bowled. 

preparing for Court: Packer and Greig

With the Minor Counties cruising to victory – Collyer recalls that “there was no element of panic. We were a rather more experienced cricket team than they were” – Pascoe, third change second time around, was brought back for a second burst. It was to no avail. A bespectacled, helmetless Bailey ruefully remembers the New South Wales paceman being barracked by “a wag in the sheds who bellowed out: ‘I thought you were supposed to be effin’ quick, man’. I thought, ‘thanks a lot’,” but he then upper-cut him through third man en route to adding 29 not out to an unbeaten first-innings 21. As the victory target drew close, Collyer can “remember sitting in the stand thinking ‘well, this is rather good’ and having something to drink”. Durham’s combative skipper Neil Riddell smeared Ray Bright for a six over mid-wicket and then Bailey “kicked one and ran”, the leg-bye carrying the Minor Counties to a famous, unimaginable victory with just an over to spare. Despite the embarrassment, Nurton doesn’t “suppose it was a great tragedy in their lives, losing to us lot; an inconvenience, maybe”.

For a performance that, understandably, ranks as the highlight of his cricketing life, Peter Gill won Man of the Match – “hundred quid; bought a few drinks” – and while Doug Walters came in to offer his congratulations to his amateur and semi-professional conquerors, the rest didn’t mingle and share a beer after the game – a quintessentially Aussie tradition for which Walters was of course the prime torch-bearer for many years. In fairness, this was in large part due to a brutal itinerary – absent the first and last days in May and the tourists played 27 of the remaining 29 days that month, 92 of 126 on tour, and were starting at 11 am sharp in Manchester the following day – but was perhaps also down to there being less bonhomie than usual amongst a group who, Collyer remarks, “didn’t look a particularly relaxed or happy bunch”. Was there any obvious disarray or disharmony among the opponents? “Not that I noticed,” said Gill. “You’ve got to remember that this is a one-off match for us and I’d have been extremely apprehensive – not apprehensive, nervous about playing these guys. Regardless of the scoreline in the Test series, this was Australia and I can’t say I was looking at what was going on around me”.

The Australians lugged themselves onto the coach and went on to defeat Lancashire in comfortable fashion before re-crossing the Pennines to Leeds where Geoffrey Boycott, famously, registered his ‘undredth ‘undred. As for the Minor Counties players, they had to scuttle back down the motorways to work, no doubt while basking in their first – their only – victory over an Australian team. Collins thought some of the press response a touch churlish, if not downright disrespectful to their achievement: “That was something that was levelled at us: ‘You’ve only beat a second-rate Australian side’. Okay, we didn’t play Chappell, Marsh or Thomson, but this was still an international team, eleven of the best seventeen in their country. They had all played Test cricket. There were no passengers”. 

Regardless of its position on the Packer situation, Wisden’s post-mortem on the cricketing merits of the touring party would be relatively scathing, despite them only losing one of the seventeen three-day fixtures (to Somerset): “A side no more than a good average had been allowed to beat them, with some comfort, in three Tests in England for the first time since 1886”.

On the other hand, with qualification for the 60-over Gillette Cup (ended in 2005), Benson & Hedges Cup representative games (ended in 1998) and an annual fixture against the tourists, this was truly a golden age for the Minor Counties game, and that winter the winning XI in Sunderland, bolstered by a handful of other players who just missed out on selection for Ashbrooke, went on a fully subsidised tour of East Africa courtesy of enlightened Minor Counties’ Treasurer Geoffrey Howard, a former RAF pilot and Lancashire and Surrey Secretary who had managed Hutton’s successful 1954-55 Ashes trip.

The Aussies, of course, disbanded under the historical inevitability of Packerism, a force and legacy still vigorously present today, largely for the better yet also, it might be argued, for the worse in the shape of a complacent cricket administration – a cricket culture, perhaps – in Australia that has been too focussed on revenue streams (the Channel 9 coverage, with its regular slots for hawking merchandise, is almost gaudily commercial to English tastes) to the detriment of the creation of the type of ecology that would allow long-form cricketing talents to come through as they once had done in swaggering abundance.

The Ashes may be gone, but crisis, as they say, begets opportunity. The game in Chester-le-Street offers a chance to a new generation of players to dispel the spectre of their recent defeats. That said, the Australians are used to getting spooked in the North-East – I don’t suppose Watson will be booked into Lumley Castle this time – and one wonders whether the ghosts of 1977 may haunt this current bunch as they head to this corner of England with little – save, that is, the credibility of the Australian cricket culture (or what CA might be inclined to call its “business model”) – to play for.

A lot of water may have passed under the bridge since 1977, just as a lot of water has rolled past the Riverside Stadium and out into the sublime indifference of the North Sea, yet this present crop of Australians must hope, after the green shoots of Old Trafford, that no such nadir awaits them, there by the side of the River Wear.   

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WHEN THE MINOR COUNTIES BEAT INDIA

Prior to the 1983 Cricket World Cup in England, the touring teams got in some last-minute practice against whoever they could find. For India, this meant a watch against a Minor Counties XI and a chance to dip their bread, bully some amateurs and generally get themselves in good fettle. It didn't quite work out that way, as I explain in this piece for Wisden India: 

When Farmers and Salesmen beat India

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DAVID STEELE, THE MOST UNLIKELY S.P.O.T.Y. OF THEM ALL

Steele by name...

In the 58-year history of the BBC’s much loved Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) award, there have been only four cricketers to have received the main prize. All the first winner had to do was snare 19 wickets in a Test match, at a cost of 90 runs, while the two most recent were buccaneering batting-and-bowling behemoths, latter-day action heroes whose pinnacle came against the oldest cricketing enemy in the two most dramatic Ashes series of the modern era. The fourth recipient was also a player whose apogee came against Australia, but he was as similar to Ian Botham and ‘Freddie’ Flintoff as a bank clerk is to a boxer.

Silver-haired and bespectacled, David Steele was the most unlikely of all winners – “Test cricket has not enjoyed such a romantic story in years,” remarked Wisden – yet perhaps also the most cherished, the one whose success chimed most deeply with the British national psyche, our stoicism, defiance and perseverance, be that real or idealised. The Dunkirk Spirit in whites. He didn’t so much strike a blow for ordinariness as for the extraordinary in those considered ordinary, and at the time of his emergence there had been little in Steele’s modest career with Northamptonshire to suggest that he would take to Test cricket with such aplomb. 

That he got his opportunity at all owed much to fortuitous circumstance, as is always the case to one degree or another – the notion that you ‘control your own destiny,’ in cricket or in life, is a self-help manual myth (just ask Barry Richards and Mike Proctor). Geoffrey Boycott was in self-imposed exile from international cricket having taken umbrage at being passed over for the England captaincy in favour of Mike Denness. This – and Denness being summarily deposed after innings defeat in the first Test had followed a 4-1 pummelling in Australia that winter – created the space in the team, but a 33-year-old batsman averaging in the low thirties for “an unfashionable county” was a far from obvious choice. However, the new captain, Tony Greig, had a clever way of finding the sort of Steel(e) required to withstand Lillee and Thomson: “He went to see the umpires and they gave him a nod. Good move, that”. Their hunch would prove inspired. 

It wasn’t only on the cricket field that things were bleak. Having failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup as they would the one after, England’s football team were bungling their European Championship campaign. Inflation was at 24.2%, the highest since 1800. And the political climate was fraught, with the far-right National Front mobilising and the IRA active. From out of this desolation came an improbable figure to briefly and gloriously galvanise the country, walking straight out of his solid if unremarkable county career into the flaming roars of Lillee and Thomson. 

England team on Steele's debut. Back, L-R: Woolmer, Gooch, Old, P Lever,
Amiss, Steele, Wood. Front: Snow, Knott, Greig, Edrich, Underwood

Well, not quite straight. Famously, on debut at Lord’s, when Steele first “went to war”, his grand entrance was not so much gladiatorial as farcical, redolent of another character seen on the big stage for the first time that summer, Basil Fawlty: “I went down a flight of stairs too many and almost ended up out the back of the pavilion. When I got out there, Lillee called me ‘Groucho’.” But Steele was no comedy act and there would be no faux pas once out on the field. Gritty rather than pretty, he immediately “got stuck in” and would slowly turn the tide of the series, perhaps the national mood.

* * *

There are certain superficial parallels between Steele’s effect in 1975 and that of the Olympics this year, the latter offering a similar dollop of succour – for a city submerged by riots and looting twelve months previously and for a country paying the price for financial joyriding. Indeed, it’s debatable quite how much affection Steele’s famous “bank clerk who went to war” epithet would inspire in today’s economically straitened times, with government bailouts for banks and simmering rage at executive bonuses. Where all this provoked the short-lived Occupy movement, Steele, the very antithesis of recklessness – indeed, his parsimony earned him the nickname ‘Crime’: it doesn’t pay (also outdated, some would say) – decided he was going to do some occupation of his own: namely, of the crease, which was largely lacking in Boycott’s absence.

It is ironic that his opportunity arose in the manner it did, for Steele was “a big admirer of Boycott, the way he played. We’re similar people, from a mining background. We had a good discipline of the mind. And that’s what you need. I always felt I had a good temperament and north Staffordshire gave me that, no question.” At the heart of that upbringing was his uncle, Stan Crump, a Minor Counties stalwart of thirty years and pro in the North Staffordshire league when “it was in its heyday, before television. When there was a derby match, you couldn’t get in. It was marvellous.”

Practising come rain or snow with future county teammate Brian Crump on Stan, his dad’s back-garden concrete pitch, at the weekend the teenage Steele pitted his wits against the likes of Sonny Ramadhin (“a fantastic bowler, whether he threw it or not; a sort of early-day Muralitharan”), Roy Gilchrist (“mad as a March hare, but quick”) and West Indies captain, Frank Worrell (“wonderful man and marvellous player”). All the while he did a six-year apprenticeship as a printer, earning £14.50 a week, and played Minor Counties cricket for Staffordshire along with the likes of future England wicket-keeper Bob Taylor, and his captain, the former England leg-spinning all-rounder Jack Ikin, who popped his head round the Lord’s dressing room door after Steele’s debut innings half-century. “A lovely memory”.

His pay would rise to £21 per week when he came on the radar of the Northants secretary and recruiter-in-chief, Ken Turner, who “had never played cricket but he knew what being a cricketer was all about and had a knack of finding good cricketers. He said to Crumpy, ‘Who’s this chap Steele who’s getting all the runs for Staffordshire?’ Brian said, ‘It’s my cousin’. He said ‘Well you better get him down here’. And that’s how it went.”

Progress was steady, if unspectacular, until 1972 saw him miss out by twenty minutes on becoming the first batsmen to 1000 runs. By 1975, he says, “I was ready. I was at the top of my game”. His ascent was fortunate, in both sense of the word. “It was the benefit year. It all helped the revenue.” 

Steele on the attack at Headingley

After his 50 and 45 at Lord’s, Steele top-scored in each innings at Leeds (as he would do in six of his first eleven innings) before vandals protesting the imprisonment of George Davis caused the abandonment of the game, preventing an England team considered bedraggled two games earlier from the chance to force an Ashes decider at the Oval. Steele finished with 365 runs at 60 and, with no tour that winter, had to wait until the arrival of the West Indies for the resumption of his international career.

As has been wonderfully captured in the documentary Fire in Babylon, the tone of that encounter was set by a pre-series verbal salvo from the captain that did little to endear him to his own batsmen, let alone the opposition – a red rag that would become a white flag. “It was ridiculous, what [Greig] said. He said he ‘loved a challenge’ but the challenge was too much.”

The most gruesome act was played out on “a s--- wicket” at Old Trafford. “There were one or two who were twitching a bit, but we didn’t have fear. We were apprehensive of what was to come, but it wasn’t fear. Brian Close almost got battered to death, but he was an idiot. He said no bowler could hurt him and set out to prove it. He got more runs off the shoulders, chest and rib cage than he got off the bat. Brilliant bloke, Closey – 45, he was then. We don’t rush things in England, do we? We like our cricketers to mature.” 

storyteller

These were grand tales to begin with, of course, but have been polished to perfection by years on the after dinner circuit, where he remains a popular speaker. His enduring love for the game drips from each sentence, whether reminiscing about bagging 8 for 1 as a fifteen-year-old or watching Pietersen’s hundred in India: “I loved the game. Still do. I think about it nearly every day.”

Indeed, when Steele reflects on his career the feelings are vividly alive, memory telescoping faraway emotions into a tangible present – not in angst, though, but warmly sighed over, a demonstration of that equanimity that served him so well as a batsman. For instance, he regrets not being able to deliver a Championship to a county still to win one (along with Somerset and Gloucestershire, one of three in that boat), particularly the near-miss of 1965. “We just wanted someone to draw with Worcestershire and we’d have won it. But Hampshire did a stupid declaration in a rain-affected three-day game and Worcester bowled them out for 31 and won the Championship. So that was a major disappointment.” 

And then there was his omission from the 1976-77 winter tour and the irritation at missing out on the overseas blazer. “They left me out against India, which wasn’t right. I got runs against all the quicks and as soon as the little diddlers came along I was left out. Out came the rabbits, the Fletchers and all these. Then they went and played the Centenary Test in Australia. I should have played that.” Even while alluding to “cliques, the old school tie,” there’s little genuine rancour. “I knew I couldn’t do much about it and moaning doesn’t do any good at all. I didn’t let them down. They let me down.”

Although he insists he would change nothing about his career, Steele’s life was itself irrevocably changed by those events. The carnivorous coup he pulled off with a local butcher – “lamb chops up to 50 runs, then steaks after that. Kept me going two years” – has entered cricketing folklore, while his exploits also prompted an unexpected call from John Moores, owner of Littlewoods pools and Everton FC. “He said he’d like to give me a donation for my benefit. I was busy with everything but he said it wasn’t going to be tuppence, and it wasn’t: it was four grand [almost £33,000 in today’s money]. There he was with his old ducks, his secretaries, all sixty, seventy, lovely man, old world, and he said ‘There we are mate; I’ve been watching you on that telly, you’ve done a grand job’. Before I went he said to his PR man, ‘Take him round the stores and let him take what he wants’. I thought, ‘Good god, it’s Christmas here. Santa Claus has come!’ And I did: took a shirt here, a suit, hats, you name it – went home with a bloody carful.”

* * *

In comparison with his on-field highlights – “walking out with the lion of England on, because that’s what you dreamed about, then kissing the cap when I got the hundred, thinking ‘this is the ultimate’” – the SPOTY award was merely “the icing on the cake”. And it was not an honour that surprised him – not from self-regard, of course, but because he saw a couple of “old muckers” from his club cricket days. “I said ‘What are you doing here?’ They said they’d won the Radio Times competition for saying why they thought their choice should get the prize. When I went through the door [into the studio], I suddenly twigged and thought, ‘If they’ve won it, I’ve won it’.” 

collecting SPOTY

And won it he had, edging out the hurdler Alan Pascoe and swimmer David Wilkie, although not without more mirth. “It was funny: when I arrived at Lord’s on my first day, one of the selectors was Len Hutton, and he called me ‘Derek’. Then when I got up to receive the prize, even the presenter got me name wrong. He also called me ‘Derek’.”

This Sunday, when the eyes of the nation will be treated to a pageant of sporting excellence in this most gilded of years, somewhere in the audience will be an unassuming “professional grandfather”, fond of a glass of white wine and a yarn, the latter doubtless flowing in proportion to the former. As he mingles with the great and good of British sport, attempts to lure him into saying something grandiose about his time in the spotlight will be met with as resolute a forward defence as he showed to Thommo and Lillee, Roberts and Holding. “We’d been down. People told me it was Churchillian. I don’t know… Somebody just came and got stuck in and gave them a bit of inspiration and that’s why the country got behind me”.

Steele will admit that a similar feelgood effect was achieved by the Olympics: “They were inspirational. Brilliant. It had been a miserable summer but suddenly we had three weeks of good weather and it was tremendous, really brought the country together.” As for the award itself, he “can see three or four winning the award: Jess Ennis, Mo Farah, Andy Murray. But I’m backing Wiggins. It was an incredible achievement to win the Tour de France.”

For English cricketers to show admiration for a yellow jersey is a rare thing, but the down-to-earth and determinedly normal Wiggins would indeed be a worthy addition to an illustrious list of great sportspeople – great people – including, among others, Bobby Moore, Jackie Stewart, Kelly Holmes, Henry Cooper, Torvill and Dean, Seb Coe, Steve Davis, Steve Redgrave and “just a bloke from Stoke who loves an oatcake,” David Stanley Steele. 

The original version of this piece was published by ESPNcricinfo 

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McMAHON SEEKING MINOR CONSOLATION

A week ago last Monday, as the confetti and champagne-covered Tim Bresnan romped around the Oval celebrating his chunky contribution (16 wickets at 16.3 and 154 runs at 77) to England’s annihilation of India and ascent to the world number one Test ranking, his England under-19s captain from nine years earlier, Paul McMahon, could have been forgiven for casting a rueful eye over events and wondering what might have been. In that summer of 2002, when the best young players of England met their Indian counterparts (the maker of the painstaking Oval pair, Suresh Raina, included), off-spinner McMahon was on the verge of signing a four-year contract extension with home county Nottinghamshire. Today, when not busy in the North London office of international law firm Bird & Bird, he can be found barrelling up the A1 to Cambridgeshire, either to play club cricket for Peterborough (who last weekend fell at the final hurdle before the televised Cockspur National T20 finals), or to skipper the side that he has just led to a home Minor Counties Championship final against Devon at the picturesque March CC, starting today.

Of course, the story of a youthful prodigy drifting away from the first-class game is far from unique – one of McMahon’s predecessors as skipper of England under-19s, former Durham batsman Michael Gough, quit the sport aged just 23, citing a lack of enjoyment – but it is always tempting to wonder why it happened; or implicitly: what went wrong?

For the first three of his five years with Notts, while McMahon was up at Oxford reading Law (incidentally, he has the curious distinction of being the bowler who has dismissed Adrian Shankar most often in first-class cricket), the county employed Stuart MacGill to bowl on their famously swing-and-seam-friendly Trent Bridge pitches. Then, in 2005, a certain Graeme Swann joined the Outlaws, the moment McMahon now realizes he ought to have seen the writing on the wall: “I had hoped that when MacGill moved on I would be in a position to play regularly as the front line spinner. But that signing [Swann] has obviously worked out fantastically well for all concerned.” However, he now believes that “with hindsight, I should have left a couple of years earlier,” perhaps making the opposite journey to Swann, heading for the turning pitches at Wantage Road at the time when a strong Second XI record (175 Championship wickets at 20.8) would have outweighed the lack of first-team cricket in his final two years at Notts.

Perhaps there was an element of loyalty that kept him there, a difficult itch to scratch. Having learnt the game over twenty years at Wollaton CC in Nottingham’s western suburbs – the last three of which were played alongside recent England supersub, Scott Elstone; all in the company of his left-arm spinner father, Gerry, once good enough to take a hundred from Joel Garner in the Central Lancashire League – it was only natural that McMahon should want to accompany colleagues such as Bilal Shafayat, Nadeem Malik and Samit Patel from that England under-19 group into the first team at Trent Bridge. Ultimately, however, it wasn’t to be; not that there’s any trace of resentment: “I have never been a fan of hard luck stories,” affirms McMahon, magnanimously. “Professional sport is, in general, a fairly transparent and meritocratic environment; the cream will generally rise to the top and the players who win games and affect situations positively for their team are generally recognised and rewarded.”

So, having trialled unsuccessfully with Warwickshire 2nd XI in 2008 (largely due to reservations over his batting when compared with Ant Botha), he called time on his full-time aspirations and threw himself into a legal career, also immersing himself in the Minor Counties cricket he considers comparable in standard and intensity to Sydney and Melbourne first grade, and just as important to the respective system’s upward flow of talent. Following a couple of seasons with Oxfordshire, he switched to Cambridgeshire in 2010 and this year took on the captaincy with not inconsiderable success. Not that it has all been plain sailing, mind…

Squeezing through what was to all intents and purposes a straight shootout for the title with Staffordshire in the final round of group matches, Cambridgeshire were crowned Eastern Division champions despite accruing the lowest haul of batting bonus points since the three-day competition began in 2001: a paltry 10 in six games from a possible 24. Such have been the batting woes – four of their first innings have subsided to 62-5, 81 all out, 46-7 and 77 all out – that no one has managed to record three figures for them all summer (only Northumberland fared as badly), while none of their seamers has taken more than eight championship wickets. However, in McMahon and fellow Peterborough Town offie, Lewis Bruce, Cambridgeshire perhaps hold the trump card – indeed, in amongst their combined aggregate of 68 Championship scalps, both have already bagged 10-wicket match hauls at the March ground this season, McMahon’s match analysis of 45.2-15-90-13 against Northumberland the best in this year’s Championship.

Devon’s stand-in skipper, Chris Bradley, also an off-spinner, should therefore himself be relishing a bowl on the March track, but is wary of underestimating opponents who, despite their batting tribulations, have already this season overturned first-innings deficits of 117 (only that few thanks to a 101-run tenth-wicket partnership) and 156 to win, the latter, nervelessly, in that crunch game against Staffs. That said, Devon are just as battle-hardened, having coming through what was also effectively their own all-or-nothing eliminator against the eventual runners-up in the Western Division, convincingly seeing off Shaun Udal’s Berkshire (winners of the MCCA knockout) by 10 wickets.

Having dominated Minor Counties cricket for much of the 1990s, winning four straight championships under the erudite captaincy of Peter Roebuck (1994-1997) and two since, Devon are perhaps a little more relaxed going into what is a repeat of the 1994 final. Even so, club secretary Neil Gamble is certain that the current squad is hugely motivated to forge its own identity: “apart from [former Gloucestershire all-rounder] Bobby Dawson, it’s a completely different team to our glory years. The majority of the team are under 26 years old and weren’t involved then, so are desperate to write a new chapter in the county’s winning tradition.” 

With Cambridgeshire already having felt the disappointment of semi-final elimination in the 50-over competition, and not having won the Championship outright since their sole success in 1963, McMahon is acutely aware of how much it means to the Fenlanders and their support. As for himself, “winning the play-off final and contributing in a way that suggests I’ve continued to improve as a cricketer through my twenties would probably be one of the most meaningful things I’ve achieved in cricket.”

* An earlier version of this article appeared on the website of SPIN magazine.

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