Seasons in the Sun - cricket in the 1970s

As I've hinted in this blog and on facebook, I've been very busy and my mind has been elsewhere. What happened is that my father become very ill in September last year and died peacefully in January. He was 83 and lived a full life.
One effect of losing a parent, however much it was expected, is that you tend to think back to a period when they were in their prime and that is why I am having to spill out this piece which is mainly about cricket in 1973 and 1974. It is not sentimental and I apologise if it is self-indulgent crap but, after all, there is no shortage of that on-line.
It is a time which is too recent to be history but just far enough round the corner to seem incredibly exotic now, with its half-covered pitches, test match stars in every county side and shaggy-haired, helmetless journeymen whose idea of exercise was repeatedly lifting a beer glass to the mouth with their right hands.
My father was born into a sporting family but he never really inherited the sporting gene. He liked athletics but he hated, or pretended to hate, football. He took the piss out of racing but he tolerated my interest in cricket as a 12-year-old; I think he believed playing and watching cricket would keep me in respectable company ... this was many years before the Nomads.
I started playing in 1973 when I was walking across Wandsworth Common and was collared by someone who was in the year above at school and was on the fringes of the Under 14 XI. He shared the name of a famous Film Star. He pretty much ordered me to bowl at him  - the wicket was a tree. I took a long run up, Mike Procter-style, sprinted to the crease (a coat on the floor), stopped completely and delivered the ball. It sailed over Film Star's head and hit a branch about 20 feet off the ground. Never mind; we didn't play the No Ball rule. Out! I was accepted by the local lads as an occasional  bowler; a budding Left Arm Quick who did nothing with the ball but could hit the bark from time to time and could be invited to play if they were desperate.
For the summer holidays that year, my sister was packed off to Canada to spend the summer with my Aunt. I wasn't invited and the "compensation" for missing out on summer on a prairie with cousins was some extra money from my Dad. I had got the best of the bargain and I spent this money on going to the Oval for all Surrey's County Championship matches in August. I think my father was delighted with this arrangement as I was out of the house for 10 hours a day.
Surrey v Lancashire was one of those 3-day games where an almost impossible total was set, probably as a result of a manufactured declaration, but we (Film Star and Simon - the fastest runner at school - had turned up) and watched agog as my boyhood hero Younis Ahmed smashed the ball to all parts of the crowd and I can still hear the roars from the crowd of pensioners and schoolkids as he walked off for 96 - job almost done.  "Crikey, how did they score so flipping quick?" we chirped as we sauntered back to the tube in the sweltering sun and saw Evening News Headlines - "What a scorcher. It's Costa del London. Capital basks in 79 degree heat." 79 degrees? We were easily pleased in the early 70s. I checked recently and Surrey scored at 4.5 an over. Not exactly 20-20 stuff. Those were different days.
The next match, the London Derby against Middlesex, was something else. I became aware of the types of people that hung around at The Oval, some of them quite scary. One of the scariest got talking to me and he offered me a Coca-Cola; this ended with him dropping his trousers under the Mound Stand and jiggling in his hand something that looked like a bail but probably wasn't. I had to run faster than I ever did as a bowler to get away from that one. Almost as scary were the kids of about my age who used to come to the ground every day to keep score. "I think you'll observe, " said one who had caught me glancing at his scorebook. "that I record all of John Edrich's dot balls with red biro." The page was a sea of red. Time to go quickly...again.   Word had got round about the Lancashire game and a whole crowd of the Wandsworth Common boys found me on Day 2 and I had to play in their ongoing match which took place in every interval. This was a feature of County Cricket at the time. As soon as the players trooped off for their pork pie or Battenberg cake, a swarm of kids from 8 to ...about 35 clambered over the hoardings and started to play cricket matches on the outfield of an intensity often not matched on the pitch. The stumps were the advertising hoardings. Middle stump might be the G of Benson and Hedges or the P of Woodpecker Cider. My fielding shortcomings were exposed in front of a crowd of 5,000 and I actually received a smack in the mouth from the disgruntled bowler (behind that bloody Mound Stand again), but at least I can say that I once dropped 3 catches in 10 minutes at The Oval. Anyway, we were all friends by the end of Day 3 and, with Surrey needing 1 wicket from 2 overs, we gathered on the field by the boundary rope. It was so close to the action that it was like sitting at Mid-Off. Surrey got the vital wicket and we swarmed on.
That was a fine and entertaining Surrey side. They were almost all internationals; Edrich, Younis, Graham Roope, Geoff Howarth, Leg spinner and massive slogger Intikhab Alam, "Percy" Pocock, Geoff Arnold - intense and close to world-class, Robin Jackman - seemed a bit of a geezer and was always up for some banter with the kids crowding the boundary boards. There was the forgotten Dudley Owen-Thomas who was a sort of proto-Gower; incredibly posh, came in at 4 or 5, blocked doggedly for a bit and then suddenly smacked the ball back over the bowler's head, then played an array of classic shots and was always caught for 27 to a lofted shot.
The spectators were often as entertaining as the cricket. There was usually a contingent of older Caribbean guys at the Archbishop Tenison's side and they gave support to any Away side which contained a West Indies Test player past or present (most of the other counties). Their comments were priceless but the best I can remember is when a hapless Surrey fielder tried to stop a shot from, say, Laurence Rowe or Roy Fredericks. "Leave the ball alone", they ordered him. Another time they started appealing for bad light at 2.30 pm on a vividly sunny June afternoon in a game where Surrey were getting on top. These guys commanded respect which was shown when they addressed a very young Viv Richards as "boy."  The future Sir Vivien just smiled sheepishly.
Behind this stand there was an ongoing match involving some of the ground staff who hurtled it down at 75 mph using the boarded up Tea Bar as the stumps. They were 16 or 17. The haircuts were terrible. The banter was ....70s. "Who's that wanker bowler?" demanded a new arrival, "Who can't bowl to save his life."  In one game against Gloucestershire these gents ignored all the stars on view; Mike Procter, Zaheer Abbas, the Surrey stars, but all came up to the stand to watch an entire innings by Jim Foat (the ultimate average 70s county player - sorry, Jim, if you are reading this). "Go on Foa'y, show us your class!" they yelled. Was this irony? I doubt it, it was the 70s.
So Surrey came 2nd in the table and, a few months later, 1973 became 1974. Received wisdom now has it that the country almost collapsed this year.  Even the film footage looks grainy and slightly alien. Three-Day Week, Football violence, strikes, IRA bombings, alleged widespread Police corruption and brutality. There was very unstable government and an atmosphere of social and political crisis (bit different to now, then.)
To a 13 year old perhaps the biggest crisis was the shocking state of the pop charts. Absolutely dreadful - the nadir of pop music. "Tiger Feet", "Billy, don't be a hero", The Rubettes, and a Canadian hippie called Terry Jacks who sang a saccharine ditty about a dying man featuring some of the worst key changes in musical history. The song was called "Seasons in the Sun" and it was and is almost unlistenable unless you are in the rawest stages of bereavement, when it is strangely affecting and you realise it has a bit of side to it, written as it was by Jacques Brel in a Moroccan brothel. It also provides the crap link to the title of this piece.
Anyway, cricket survived and my Dad, despite being perennially short of money, bought me my first bat. It was Stuart Surridge SS; one of those white ones that were covered, so lazy kids like me could use it straight away without having to bother about Linseed oil or "knocking it in".  I was soon out on the Common and had graduated from being "shit player" to "shit player with his own bat". Before long I was head-hunted by Film Star and asked to take part in "The Ashes". The boys from Balham were locked in combat, seven-a-side, against a team from Tooting Bec. Balham were 2 down with 3 to play and Film Star assured me that I was needed as they were desperate (illness? holidays? probably the 1974 World Cup.)
We had a couple of warm-ups as this match was vital. There is a small triangle of Wandsworth Common between Wandsworth Common Station and Balham which borders the London to Brighton line and can be reached without crossing a busy road from many parts of Balham. There is an open space in the middle of this which is about the size of a First Class Cricket field. we didn't use the whole space as in one corner there was a natural unprepared pitch which always had smooth grass and played really well - lucky that, as we had no helmets, boxes or gloves and only one pad between us.  One of my team-mates was a slightly older and more sophisticated boy called Jamie who had a reputation for dry wit as a result of impersonating Richie Benaud and spouting a stream of cricket cliches . I came on at the Railway End and nervously bowled one at waist height, no bounce. "Ah" noted Jamie, "A full toss bowler. Particularly useful - to the batting side."  Anyway I got in the team and the day dawned. 2 innings a side. I can't remember the exact details but we ended up needing about 55 in the final innings (as this was the mid 70s I like to think the target was manufactured between the captains over drinks (Cresta, it's frothy man!) in order to produce a positive result before our Mums called us in for Supper. This is what happened in most 3-Day County Matches at the time....well, apart from the Mums, and the Cresta.  Anyway, Tooting Bec were a fine side and their seamers Simon C and Keith-O both did a bit with the ball. When I came in at 7 (of 7) we still needed 20 and I was soon alone but allowed to bat on. There was plenty of time left. There were no LBWs, you just got a bruise or a hairline fracture if you were hit on the leg. People who have seen me "play" will not be surprised to hear that I just stood right in front of the stumps and slogged cross-batted to leg. "You won't find that in any text book," a team-mate muttered.  Eventually I connected. "Well there's no need to chase that, " Jamie cried, "That's fairly racing away to the mid-wicket boundary."  "Over this lightning outfield," another wisecracker remarked as the ball bissected a dog turd and a can of Coke and thudded against the fence. A few nervy singles and a couple of slogs and the game was ours. I was Film Star's hero and an automatic pick for the Fourth Test.
There was another great sporting event running in parallel - the 1974 World Cup, starring the Dutch; one of the finest teams in football history. This did not go unnoticed on the Common as groups of kids tried to play Total Football, passing it out from the back and invariably shouting "Cruyff" as they attempted the famous drag back and ended up on their back-sides. There were rumours that these kids were having intense arguments at half-time and consuming suspect substances, in honour of their heroes, but I'm not sure about that. They argued constantly anyway and the drug of choice was Burton's Wagon Wheel biscuits. The World Cup Final was West Germany v Holland. One of the classic games in football history. And where was I? Surrey v Kent John Player League at The Oval part of a jam-packed capacity crowd of 15,000; while the World Cup Final was being played. Now that would not happen these days.
Another match against Kent which turned into what The Sweet would term a "Teenage Rampage" was a tight 3-day game during half-term in May 1974. Kent were the glamour side of the time with Alan Knott, Derek Underwood, Asif Iqbal & co. Even Colin Cowdrey and Brian Luckhurst who were hardly glamorous but were test players. Kent's image as a sort of Manchester United of the mid-70s was reinforced by thousands of London lads invading the ground and adopting Kent as their team, even though most of them seemed as if they had never seen a garden, let alone the Garden of England. Some of the Tooting Bec boys were amongst the Kent fans, clearly in need of a geography lesson as well as a musical lesson as they belted out such ditties as "Supper (not super) Kent, Supper Kent, Supper Kent Kent Kent" and "Goodbye Johnson we will miss you." The end of the day brought a mass autograph-hunting in the car park, led by an experienced, mullet-haired youth who offered up such gems as "Don't bother about Edrich, he's a miserable sod" and "I had to chase D'Oliveira right through the Pavilion to get his."  Poor Dolly; all the troubles he went through only to be pursued by a Bay City Roller-lookalike.  I was left with an unenviable choice; Alan Knott or Derek Underwood.  I chose Knott, and probably sold the signature at school the next week.
Underwood become my hero after a very famous Test match against Pakistan at Lord's in August 1974. Pakistan started well but torrential rain got at the pitch before it could be covered and. when play resumed, Deadly Derek skittled the visitors for 130. England made 270. Pakistan again started brilliantly and Day 3 closed with honours even. At some point during the rest day or night, more torrential rain somehow penetrated the covers and Underwood - lethal on a wet pitch - took 8 wickets for next to nothing, leaving England needing about 80 for victory of which they managed 27 before the close of play. The final day brought the inevitable downpour and the TV coverage was of old games, cut with Peter West smiling wryly at a sozzled Denis Compton in the studio and telling the nation that some sort of justice was being done. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories about the rain getting under the covers and, in this year of the rumoured planning of a military coup against the Harold Wilson Government, this seems highly probable. I was fascinated by Underwood. Why was he so deadly on a wet pitch? He seemed just a routine quick-ish spinner who didn't turn the ball much but he just seemed to magic people out.
Delayed by rain, it was finally time for the Fourth Test on Wandsworth Common. A must-win game for Balham but once again. probably thanks to my dodgy fielding, Tooting Bec were soon on top. There was only faint hope when I strode out at 5 in the second innings and Jamie announced; "Ah, here comes Nicky, the last of the recognised batsmen!"  "'E ain't that ****ing good", muttered another; and so it proved. Rain had got at our pitch as well and my third ball barely rose and it sneaked through my defensive wall. Stumps were scattered and bails, had we had any, would have been on the ground.  "Pea..ea..ea..roller," chanted Tooting Bec in an absurd pseudo-calypso worthy of Typically Tropical, "If you can't stop it.....You're out!"  And that was about it. The Ashes went south and I'm not sure the Fifth Test was even played as a month-long wall of water descended on South London suburbia.
There was just time for a trip to Cheltenham where my Canadian cousins were staying. Chris, roughly my age, became briefly obsessed with cricket and we played every day on Prestbury Rec. I have to say I probably peaked as a player here, at the age of 13. I made the only century of my life - it seems much easier with no fielders or LBW rule. When it was my turn to bowl, my Grandfather, a hard-bitten former jockey and general tough guy, arrived to watch. I shaved Chris's ear with a nasty bouncer. "Get oatta here, man!" the Canadian protested, but my Grandpa nodded his approval; "Demon bowler, the boy" and he took me up to Winchcombe cricket club where he was an umpire (he didn't give many LBWs either - it's a family trait - but no-one argued with him) and he introduced me to former England star Tom Graveney. "Ah, The Oval," Graveney nodded sagely, "I've had some good times there." It was hardly a reminiscence of the Neville Cardus standard but Tom became a family hero. Even my sister, whose interest in cricket had appeared limited to fancying Phil Edmonds, declared; "Phew, I'm Graveney the Second" as she hit a sparkling 20 on the Rec.
And that's about it. 1975 arrived and the "Little Common" became an edgier place. I was even mugged at gunpoint there but I am assuming, as the bandits were quite satisfied when I gave them 5p, that it was a toy gun. The cricketers had disappeared. Had they turned to Football? Rock n Roll? Girls? No, that would have been too sensible. When they finally appeared they had walking sticks, little white balls, bits of stick with their mums' tea towels tied on and they inserted these in the football goal post holes. They claimed to have wedges, putters, birdies, eagles, pars.......Muppets! They had embraced golf. It was not exactly the Royal and Ancient. I couldn't even hit the ball off the ground. I played some cricket with my friend Richard, a dashing lad who was a favourite of my father and was in the school team. He was a gentlemanly type. Once he had flayed my best deliveries to all parts of the park and onto the railway tracks he would nod appreciatively and say; "you bowled well today." Some new boys moved in a few doors down and showed an interest in cricket. They were tall and of a Caribbean background so everyone just kind of assumed they would be lightning quicks and the stereotype was not at all wide of the mark. Facing these guys on uncut grass with no safety equipment whatsoever cannot be any less frightening than facing a top class speed merchant when covered with body armour. One of the chaps roared in and unleashed a bullet which ricocheted off Richard's knee up onto the handle of his bat and onto the side of his head.  We ran two. The school of Hard Knocks. Richard became a lawyer so I can't even say he was unharmed by the incident.
I was drifting out of cricket and into watching football at Wimbledon (probably the best non-league side in history) and even doing some homework for my O Levels but there is just one more match I must bore you about if you are still awake. England v West Indies at The Oval in August 1976. This was the mid-1970s distilled and it tingles the spine when it is shown occasionally on TV. A baked, cracked, desert-like outfield, scorching sun, outrageous fashions and hair, intense rivalry with a bit of edge, rapier banter and a constant clanging rhythm section as Brew cans were banged together all day. It was one of England's better days in the series; they were merely crushed as opposed to pulverised. Tony Greig went sprawling in the dust when fielding. "Grovel, " came the delighted cry from half the crowd - Greig's unwise words coming back to haunt him. Then "Whispering Death" glided in like a ballet dancer on steroids. Stumps shattered. "No ball" shouted the umpire. The roar of outrage almost cracked the gasometer.
And that really is about it. It was time to put away the things of childhood but I never really did. I met John, the Chance brothers, Andrew, and I was even responsible for teaching Emil Todorow cricket. we played a bit on Clapham Common and ultra-argumentative sessions in the nets at Brixton Recreation Centre. The odd competitive game, and I was Man of the Match with 39 not out and 3 for 20 in Emil's first proper match. It seems now that I wasn't that bad after all in the 1980s. It's just a shame that I started playing for a team in the 1990s. I fell down a hole in the Mountains of Mourne and did my knee, lost my action and got the Yips. I didn't play much cricket then but I had a steady job and even a girlfriend. I looked to be on course for a normal, unremarkable, contented life but then, one balmy morning in the middle of Italia 90, the phone rang and there was a harsh but fair Dublin accent at the other end. "Aaargh, Nick, I'm David Hunter, captain of the Open University. John tells me you play cricket. We'll give you a lift to Milton Keynes today, you can bat at 9".......................

So I was out for 0 but it was not enough. I engineered a run out and we won. I was in. Too late.... the rest is history.

In memory of Gerald Lefebve - 1935 to 2019. Formerly the greatest living son of Gloucestershire; a title now held jointly by William Lefebve, Paul Nicholls and the patron saint of Nomads - Jack Russell of Stroud, Gloucestershire and England.