Spirit On The Water (15 page)

The tourists moved on to Lords for the Second Test. Once again, just as in the tied Test at Brisbane, the West Indies were to be involved in an extraordinary match that set the series alight. Just as in Brisbane, all four results were possible at the start of the last over at the end of the final day.

Frank Worrell won the toss and batted. The game started in dramatic fashion with Hunte taking boundaries off the first three balls of Trueman’s opening over. Thereafter runs dried up to such an extent that only 47 were scored by lunch. Derek Shackleton had been recalled to international duty at the age of thirty-eight, after a gap of more than eleven years. He replaced Brian Statham who had been disappointing at Old Trafford.

England had again gone into the match with two spinners – Allen and Titmus – but the latter didn’t get a bowl in the first innings. The damp conditions favoured swing bowling and both Trueman and Shackleton used them well. The selectors were no doubt regretting that Statham was not playing instead of one of the spinners. At the close, the tourists were 245 for 6, Kanhai top scoring with 73. Honours were shared and the stage set for one of the most exciting games ever seen at Lords.

The West Indies were out for 301 on the morning of the second day, Fred Trueman taking 6 for 100 from his forty-four overs. Shackleton lacked the pace of Trueman but was very economical. He didn’t take a wicket on the first day but ended the innings with three wickets in four balls. He finished with 3 for 93 off 50.2 overs. Not bad for an old timer!

John Edrich was out to the first ball he faced and Micky Stewart followed soon afterwards and England went into lunch at
20 for 2. In the afternoon, Dexter played one of his best innings for England, scoring 70 at nearly a run a ball. He took on the fast bowling of Hall and Griffith in imperious fashion, hooking, cutting and driving before Sobers trapped him LBW. Colin Cowdrey and Brian Close were out cheaply but Ken Barrington batted over three hours for 80.

The gates were closed well before play started on the Saturday and England managed to reach 297 mainly thanks to a fine innings of 52 not out from Fred Titmus. The West Indies lost early wickets and only an excellent innings from Butcher, supported by Worrell, kept them in the game. They finished the day in a good position on 214 for 5. After a rest day on Sunday, the tourists lost their advantage on Monday morning when five wickets went down for 15 runs in only six overs. Butcher was the ninth wicket having scored 133 out of a total of 229.

So England were set 234 to win. They were soon 31 for 3, but Barrington and Cowdrey came together and offered some resistance. They had to withstand a lot of short pitched bowling from Hall and Griffith and, with the score on 72, Cowdrey received a ball from Hall that broke the bone above his left wrist. He left the field to be replaced by Brian Close. When bad light stopped play at the end of the fourth day, England were 116 for 3 and the game was delicately poised.

Rain and bad light prevented play from starting until 2.20pm on the last day and, when they finally began, England struggled on a lively pitch. Barrington only added 5 to his overnight score and was out for 60. Jim Parks, who had replaced Keith Andrew in the team as wicket-keeper because of his superior batting, supported Close for a while, scoring 17, and at tea, England were 171 for 5. They needed 63 to win with 5 wickets left but one of those was Cowdrey in the dressing room with his fractured arm in a plaster.

After tea, the balance of the game swung back to the West Indians. First Parks was out, followed later by Titmus and Trueman who fell to successive balls. Brian Close had played an incredibly courageous, but mainly defensive, innings up to that point, taking numerous blows on the body and had the bruises afterwards to prove it! He had a similar experience in 1976 when he was recalled to the England team at the age of forty-five to face the fearsome West Indian pace attack. As a Sky commentator these days, Michael Holding, with his mellifluous and mellow tone, is always worth listening to. Watch his over to Close at Old Trafford in 1976 on
YouTube
and you see a different Holding. Seeing him deliberately bowl at Close’s helmet-less head, at over 90 mph, is pretty scary even today.

Back at Lords in 1963, Close changed tactics and started to come down the pitch to Hall and Griffith to try and put them off their length. It worked for a while but then, with 15 runs needed, he edged to the keeper. With nineteen minutes to go, Derek Shackleton came out to join David Allen. Together they eked out a few runs and when the last over began, England needed 8 runs to win. The West Indies needed 2 wickets to win. The similarities with the tied Test in Brisbane extended to the fact that Wes Hall was to bowl the last over. Showing extraordinary stamina, he had managed to bowl for three hours and twenty minutes with only the tea interval as a break.

With encouraging words from Worrell, Hall began the final over of the match. Shackleton swung at the first ball and missed. He got a bat on the second ball and they ran a single. Allen turned the third ball to leg for a single. 3 balls to go. England needed 6 runs to win, the West Indies 2 wickets to win.

Hall charged in and bowled the fourth ball. Shackleton stumbled as he swung and missed. He looked up to see Allen
running towards him. As Shackleton set off for the other end, Deryck Murray, the nineteen-year-old wicket-keeper, calmly threw the ball to Worrell. Not risking a throw at the stumps, the two thirty-eight-year-olds had a foot race which Worrell won by a couple of yards and Shackleton was run out.

This brought Cowdrey to the wicket with his left arm in plaster. Luckily the batsmen had crossed so Allen was facing. He had probably dreamt of this moment as all cricket loving schoolboys do. Two balls to go and the chance to hit a 6 to win the game for England. He played the fifth ball defensively back to the bowler. Hall went back to his mark. Whereas today there would be a cacophony of noise as the bowler ran in, according to Ian Woolridge writing for the
Daily Mail
at the time, there was “utter silence” as Hall ran in.

The ball was on target and heading for the middle stump. Allen played forward and met it with the middle of his bat. The match was a draw. It had captured the imagination of the country in a way that cricket games occasionally can. Such was the evenness of the contest that it would have been very hard on one side to lose. The West Indies were still 1 – 0 up in the series but they knew that they were in a battle.

It was straight down to Southampton for the West Indies after the match at Lords. They were scheduled to start against Hampshire the very next day. Understandably, Hall and Griffith were rested. It was a below par performance for the tourists with Gibbs and Valentine holding out on the last day for a draw.

Again with no rest day, the West Indies moved on to Southend to play Essex. They were probably glad of a break when rain delayed the start. Play started after tea with Trevor Bailey putting the visitors in on a lively pitch. It seemed a good decision when they were all out for 205 but when Essex batted, they were soon in
trouble against Hall and Griffith. Only a brave and skilful innings of 29 from a nineteen-year-old Keith Fletcher prevented complete humiliation. As it was, Essex were all out for an embarrassing 56 with the follow-on being saved by one run. Fifties from McMorris and Hunte enabled the Windies to declare and at 92 for 4 in their second innings, rain saved Essex from probable defeat.

The next game in the Test series was at Birmingham. Gerry and the Pacemakers were No.1 again, this time with
I Like It
. At the start of 1963, the Beatles were not even the biggest band in Liverpool, Gerry and the Pacemakers were huge! The band’s original name was Gerry Marsden and the Mars Bars but they had to change it when the Mars Company, producers of the infamous chocolate bar, complained! The Marianne Faithfull, allegedly apocryphal, anecdote would never have seemed quite the same if they had been able to keep the name.

Later in the year, Gerry and the Pacemakers were to have a third No.1, with a song that the Kop adopted as their own and is still sung at Anfield today.
You’ll Never Walk Alone
was originally a show tune from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical,
Carousel
. The Beatles also had three No.1s in the year and soon became the biggest band in the world but you can’t see them perform now can you? Gerry and the Pacemakers, on the other hand, are still touring, presumably sponsored by their namesake.

In 1963 the music was still a bit saccharine. Apart from Gerry Marsden and his lot, Frank Ifield had two No.1s, Cliff Richard was going on a
Summer Holiday
and The Searchers were singing
Sweets For My Sweet
. It wasn’t until the next year that the bands with a bit more edge came into their own. The Rolling Stones, The Animals and the Kinks all had their first No.1s in 1964.

As the two teams gathered at Edgbaston, the West Indians would have been feeling confident. They were one up in the
series and most of their key players were in form. What they hadn’t allowed for was the weather. A downpour had drenched the ground the day before the match was due to start. The slow pitch did not suit Hall and Griffith and it was the left arm swing of Sobers, bowling at a lively pace, which carried the greater threat. England finished the first day at 157 for 5 when rain prevented any further play after tea.

Most of the second day was lost to rain but there was time for England to be all out for 216 just before the close, Sobers taking 5 for 60 off thirty-one overs. On the third day, a Saturday as it always used to be in Tests, there was less than three hours play and the West Indies struggled to 110 for 4. Sunday being a rest day, the match resumed on Monday and the crowd were rewarded with a full day’s play.

The West Indies were out for 186 with no player getting to fifty. Trueman reduced his pace and, cutting the ball both ways, again got five wickets. He was well supported by the medium pace of Dexter who claimed four of the other wickets.

England steadily built on their first innings lead when they batted a second time. Phil Sharpe of Yorkshire, a brilliant slip fielder, was the replacement for the injured Colin Cowdrey. He came in at No.6 and batted fluently with Dexter initially, then Tony Lock. When Lock, who had come in for Allen, was out for 56 on the morning of the last day, Dexter declared. Sharpe, on début, had scored 85 not out.

The stage was set for an exciting finish. The West Indies had to make 309 in just under five hours. With the stroke makers they had in their side, this was definitely possible, but it was not to be. They were 55 for 3 at lunch and then collapsed to 91 all out. Trueman took the last six wickets to fall at the cost of four runs. He finished with twelve wickets in the match for 119 runs, the best
Test analysis of his whole career. This was done at the grand old age, for a fast bowler, of thirty-two.

The tourists had four games to recover their winning ways before the next Test. Rain ensured that their two-day game at Sunderland against the Minor Counties was a draw. The team contained G. Boycott (Yorkshire) batting at No.4. Yorkshire? A Minor County? Surely not? The other players were all representing counties like Cheshire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. I’m not sure what Boycott was doing there. Maybe he just turned up and asked for a game? Occasional bowler Seymour Nurse bowled him for 16, so he wouldn’t have been very happy.

The next match also contained an oddity: H.D. Bird opening for Leicestershire and being cleaned bowled by Garry Sobers in both innings. Dickie Bird, born in Barnsley, famously played club cricket in the same team as Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Parkinson. He played for Yorkshire between 1956 and 1959 but could not command a regular place at a time when the county was particularly strong. Dickie scored 181 not out against Glamorgan in 1959 and was dropped for the next match when players returned from the Test side. He joined Leicestershire the next season but always regretted leaving Yorkshire. As an umpire he was idiosyncratic, to say the least, and somewhat eccentric. He once arrived at the Oval five hours early because the Queen was due to attend the Test match. You can’t help thinking that one of his relatives emigrated to New Zealand some time in the past, got married and Billy Bowden was the result. However, Dickie Bird had the respect of the players because he kept his sense of humour and, crucially, got most of his decisions right.

The West Indies went on to beat Derbyshire and Middlesex comfortably before arriving at Leeds for the Fourth Test. The tourists had not played well in the damp conditions at Edgbaston.
Although most of the team were used to wet English summers it didn’t mean they enjoyed them. The good news for the tourists was that first of all the sun came out at Headingley and then Worrell won the toss.

The West Indies chose to bat and lost three early wickets, but Sobers and Kanhai came together and put on 143 runs. Garry Sobers went on to his century and the visitors finished on a total of 397. The pace of Griffith soon had England in trouble and eight wickets went down for only 93. Tony Lock again got a fifty and, helped by Fred Titmus, managed to get the total to 174.

Worried that the pitch would deteriorate, Worrell did not enforce the follow-on. Although Hunte and McMorris were out cheaply, Kanhai and Butcher piled on the runs. Sobers scored 52 in quick time and the West Indies were all out for 229, scored in three and a half hours.

England were faced with the prospect of having to score 453 on a pitch helping the bowlers. Things did not start well when Sobers, opening instead of Hall, bowled Stewart in his first over. There was some resistance from Ken Barrington and also Brian Bolus playing in his first Test but both were out before the close.

The next day, Close and Parks scored aggressive fifties but England were all out for 231, with the wickets shared between Sobers, Griffith and Gibbs. The West Indies were 2 – 1 up in the series with one to play.

After draws against Surrey, again, and Glamorgan, followed by a win against Warwickshire, the West Indies had a chance for revenge against Yorkshire who had beaten them at Middlesborough in May. A green pitch tempted Hunte to put the opposition in. The first three batsmen – all young uncapped players – must have made him think he had made the wrong decision. John Hampshire (who later scored a century for England on début against the West
Indies in 1969), Geoffrey Boycott (back from the Minor Counties) and Richard Hutton (son of Sir Len) took the score to 150 for 1.