Well, no, they never are and were never meant to be. “Life is like riding a bicycle,” Albert Einstein wrote to his son, “To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” Yet, to some, the pace of change may seem to be at breakneck speed, headlong and volatile; the worry is that they might fall off the bicycle because they are going too fast.
Consider this. The news of Horatio Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar took a fortnight to reach England. Today, it would have been passed on at the press of a button. Captain Hardy would have whipped out his mobile and keyed in the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty. “Good news and bad news, Your Lordship. The bad news is that the old sea dog with one eye has copped a bad ‘un and is not long for this world. The good news is that Boney’s Navy is at the bottom of the drink.” Talking of mobile phones…. Do you remember the ‘communicators’ that the crew of the Starship Enterprise used to contact each other in the TV series Star Trek in the 1960s? What a splendid idea, we all thought, but surely impossible. 50 years later, we all had one.
As it happened, the Swinging Sixties was a good time to grow up, even without mobile phones. The shackles of post-war austerity were being cast aside; everything seemed new, colourful, exciting and full of possibilities. But not for cricket it wasn’t. In the immediate aftermath of war, crowds starved of competitive sport, flocked to cricket grounds and feasted on the run-making exploits of Denis Compton, Len Hutton, Bill Edrich and the burgeoning talents of the young Peter May and Colin Cowdrey. However, as with all honeymoons, the glamour faded and cricket started to become dull, stale and unprofitable. The draw was now the expected outcome of any match. County cricket was in a rut and radical remedy was required.
Even Aristotle, who knew nothing of cricket, said, “Change in all things is sweet.” Change in cricket came slowly but when it did, two ‘sweet’ initiatives changed the landscape. First came the advent of the one-day game, matches of limited overs in which there could be no draw. The Gillette Cup (60 overs), the Benson and Hedges Cup (50 overs) and the Sunday League (40 overs) paved the way for a completely different type of game and the crowds came flocking back.
Garry Sobers led the way, signing for Nottinghamshire
But I would contend that another remedy had an even more striking effect on the domestic game. In 1968, England was invaded… by the world’s best players, who were now allowed to sign for the counties without having to go through any residential qualifications. The world’s best was no hyperbole; the charge was led by Garry Sobers, the greatest all-round player in the game at the time – of any time, arguably – who signed for Nottinghamshire and was swiftly followed by Clive Lloyd (Lancashire), Barry Richards (Hampshire), Mike Procter (Gloucestershire), Asif Iqbal (Kent), Majid Khan (Glamorgan), Rohan Kanhai (Warwickshire), Vanburn Holder (Worcestershire) and others. Notable exception was Yorkshire, who stubbornly held onto the precedent that only those born in the county could play for them, to their evident disadvantage. (It was only in 1992 that they untied the hand from behind their back and signed the 19-year-old Sachin Tendulkar.)
South African team-mates and great buddies. Barry Richards signed for Hampshire and Mike Procter for Gloucestershire
The invasion became practically a mass migration when the rules were further relaxed, and more and more recognised internationals flocked to join the counties. It was a very attractive proposition to them because of course, being situated in the Northern hemisphere, England was the only country in the world where cricket was played between the months of April and September (though that is no longer the case). Soon, all the counties – save Yorkshire – boasted two, sometimes three, overseas players. Off the top of my head, I can recite the top-class performers who were operating in English cricket in the 1970s (and I am sure I have missed a few):
Derbyshire: Holding, Venkat, Barlow
Essex: McEwan, Phillips, Boyce
Glamorgan: Majid, Cordle
Gloucestershire: Procter, Sadiq, Zaheer
Hampshire: Richards (B), Greenidge, Roberts
Kent: Asif, Shepherd, Julien
Lancashire: Engineer, Lloyd
Leicestershire: Davidson, McKenzie
Middlesex: Daniel, v.d. Bijl
Northamptonshire: Mushtaq, Bedi, Sarfraz
Nottinghamshire: Sobers, Hadlee, Rice
Somerset: Richards (V), Garner
Surrey: Younis, Intikhab, Clarke
Sussex : Imran, le Roux, Wessels, Miandad
Warwickshire : Gibbs, Kanhai, Murray, Kallicharan
Worcestershire : Holder, Headley, Turner
Bishan Bedi, the finest left-arm spinner of his generation, signed for Northamptonshire
Not all these players played in the same team at the same time, but the list gives you some idea of the jewels adorning the professional game in this country in that era. No Australians, you will note, though Greg Chappell did spend a couple of years cutting his teeth at Somerset and by this time Graham McKenzie was no longer playing Test cricket. So, no Ian Chappell, Rodney Marsh, Dennis Lillee, Doug Walters, Ashley Mallett, Max Walker. Jeff Thomson did come over to Middlesex for one season, but that was in 1981. So why the dearth of Australians when every other well-known Test player was beating a path to a county’s door? I’m not sure, but I do know for a fact – because he bluntly told me himself - that Ian Chappell, then his country’s captain, held English county cricket in the deepest contempt.
Every one of the great West Indies team of the 1970s played county cricket at some stage of his career.
Furthermore, these were the days before central contracts, so when the England players were not involved in a Test match, they would be playing for their counties. Boycott, Amiss, Fletcher, Greig, Illingworth, Snow, Arnold, Underwood, Knott, Cowdrey, Willis, Botham, Gower, Old, Edmonds Emburey, Taylor, Gooch, Randall, Hendrick et al were more often than not in one or other of the opposing teams. Thus,with the exception of a few Australians, the professional game in England in the 1970s boasted the best players in the world. To borrow Wordsworth’s words:
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.”
The Golden Age of Cricket is popularly held to be the era between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, which saw the flowering of a generation of legendary figures, led by the Bearded One himself, including CB Fry, RE Foster, Archie MacLaren, Victor Trumper, Jack Hobbs, Frank Woolley, George Hirst, Wilfred Rhodes. FS Jackson, Prince Ranjitsinhji and many more. Were the 1970s like to compare?
Victor Trumper
Even hinting that this era was another ‘golden age’, I feel that I am on very dodgy ground. The blissful dawn that Wordsworth was referring to, was the French Revolution and we all know how that turned out, when noble idealism gave way to rivers of blood cascading from the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. Cricket too was about to undergo major upheaval. The Packer Revolution changed everything:conditions of play, drop-in pitches, new equipment, coloured clothing, technological advances, floodlit matches, better renumeration, a complete reset of how the game should be played. Cricket today is unrecognisable to those who played in the 1970s. In almost every respect, it has to be admitted, these changes have been for the better, no matter how much a cohort of supporters nostalgically pine for the good old days.
Yet I would contend that the improvement in cricket has largely been confined to Test matches. I am not so sure that county cricket has seen a commensurate advance in quality. How can it if all the international players, both home-grown and overseas, do not participate? There was a time when success in the domestic game naturally led to international selection. No longer is this the case. Indeed, in recent selectorial choices, the England management have made it abundantly clear that county cricket is no nursery for Test cricket. To be fair, most of these ‘maverick’ picks (Bethell, Brook, Carse, Bashir) have proved to be successful but that just goes to underline my point. Worthy county pros, with a body of work to back up their claims (Dawson, Northeast and others), never get a look-in. As Charles II did not quite say on the scaffold: “County cricket and Test cricket are clean different things.”
No doubt this has always been the case, but I suspect today the gulf has never been wider. So no, the world does not stop spinning even if some of us feel giddy at the fast clip that things are changing.
Fings are not wot they used to be. Not necessarily worse, just different.
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