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the pavilion at Ashbrooke, Sunderland
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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”.
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| 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.
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| 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.
