by David Lloyd
The following day, we toddled off to Colchester to face Essex in a Sunday League match while Derbyshire stayed put at The Park to defeat Glamorgan. Our three-day match was therefore due to recommence on the Monday morning, 2 June. Only the curtains in our hotel room concealed an unbelievable sight. A blanket of snow covered the town, and the uncovered pitch had turned pale.
One of the umpires was good old Dickie Bird and he was his usual flappable self, exclaiming that he had never seen the like before as we surveyed the ground, the bottoms of our flares beginning to look like they had experienced a nasty bout of dandruff. All we could do in that situation was wait for the pitch to thaw.
It did not happen immediately and there was no play possible that day, but on the following morning the sun came out once more to melt any lingering white stuff, and as it did so the pitch began to steam. To be fair, Derbyshire had no chance on this sticky dog. The contrast in conditions to Saturday had – according to the Meteorological Office – been caused by a depression bringing cold air down from the Arctic. Batting on this surface was enough to depress anyone. Our quicks were unplayable, the ball pitching and darting this way and that off the seam, dislodging sods on its journey. It took just over an hour to wrap up their innings for a grand total of 42.
As captain it was my duty to walk along the splintered old floorboards between the dressing rooms, pop my head round the door of the Derbyshire one, and invite them to have another dig. On hearing the news Brian Bolus, their opening batsman, exclaimed: ‘Thank you, Bumble, I can feel another desperate nought coming on.’
When Ashley Harvey-Walker, their belligerent middle-order strokeplayer, came to the wicket he took the precaution of removing his false teeth and handing them to Bird at square leg for safe-keeping. He was not without them long. This time, Derbyshire were finished off in the equivalent of two and a half hours to give us an astonishing innings and 348-run win.
We were regulars at Buxton but could rarely force results because more often than not rain disrupted us. There were at least two matches in which no play was possible for two whole days, and with the ground under water we took temporary memberships of the Buxton Conservative Club and played snooker.
That 1971 win over Gloucestershire was one of the greatest in domestic limited-overs history and a reprise of it took place in 1975, the year of my only trophy as Lancashire captain. My involvement in that latter semi-final was peripheral, sat among a crowd of 25,000 at Old Trafford, nursing a broken bone in my right hand. In a way, this injury was self-inflicted – not in the Ben Stokes way of punching a locker, but equally stupid.
We were playing a County Championship match against Hampshire at Aigburth, Liverpool, at the start of August and appeared set fair for a useful first-innings lead in reply to Hampshire’s 160 all out. I had negotiated my way to 92 and everything was relatively calm as Andy Roberts came on for another five-over spell. The impudence of my next act, however, came back to haunt me. I stepped across to the off-side and picked him up over midwicket. While stood admiring this clip, I noticed Andy’s eyes were almost popping out of his head.
As it was the end of the over, I was casually patting the middle of the pitch when Richard Gilliat, the Hampshire captain, walked past on his way from slip at one end to the other and muttered: ‘I wouldn’t have done that if I was you.’ I was about to find out the consequences of riling Roberts, a magnificent bowler who could go up and down the gears at will.
The next delivery from this West Indies great reared up and hit me straight on my hand, in front of my nose, exploding my glove like a machete would a pillow and breaking a bone for good measure. The ball spiralled up into the air and was pouched by Gordon Greenidge ambling in from gully. I was out for 96, five wickets went down without the score moving off 144, and the substantial innings lead we believed was in our sights was in reality no more than three.
This injury came at a crucial period of the season as we chased a rare Championship and cup double. But Clive Lloyd took over the captaincy and the team secured a fifth final appearance in six years by three wickets, the exact same margin of victory as that classic four years earlier, and in similar circumstances with Hughes once again to the fore in the chase alongside Jack Simmons. Thankfully, my hand had healed sufficiently for me to feature in the final, providing me with one of my career highlights – lifting a trophy in front of a throng of Lancashire fans.
These Lord’s finals used to attract massive crowds, with hordes of folk wedged between the advertising hoardings and the boundary rope. When they used to say that grounds were packed to the rafters, they really were in those days and sometimes the only spare seats in the house were those you bagged on the grassy outfield perimeter. There were no restrictions back then for the paying public, no heavies in fluorescent jackets rugby-tackling enthusiastic young lads and pinning them in half-nelsons.
As a player, I used to love it when the crowd invaded the pitch at the end. The comical chaos of players running off and the umpires hobbling behind always appealed to me. It was great fun and no one has shown me any evidence to suggest that players were ever endangered or anybody was ever hurt. When you had won, it was an exhilarating feeling to run back to the dressing room chased by the mob. Nobody picked a stump up by the way because there just wasn’t time. Had you lingered you’d get caught up in the stampede, and like British Bulldog the name of the game was to get back to base before the chasers caught up with you. It was a good job too as those stumps were there to last all summer. You didn’t have a hundred sets in the groundsman’s shed waiting to replace them; you might have a spare one or two but they had to last from April to September.
The support for Lancashire throughout my playing career was incredible, partly due to a full 15,000 membership, complete with lengthy waiting list. Compare that to 2011 when Lancashire won the County Championship with the number down to around 5000 including women, who were not previously included in the figures. In real terms, the membership has dwindled to almost nothing.
The reduction in membership numbers has been one of the massive shifts I have witnessed during my time in the game, and for my mind you can no longer consider county clubs as member clubs. They still carry a membership, of course, but there is nothing like the impact either financially or in terms of support that there once was. We were made to feel that we were serving these people, and I’m not sure that is felt by our dressing room descendants at Old Trafford.
The club indoctrinated us with the idea that these Lord’s final days were for the membership, to give them something back for their commitment, and I can honestly say that it made you extra motivated whenever you got into the latter stages. There was no remuneration for us, the drive to win strengthened only by a sense of duty to those who willed us on.
There would be a little bit of a bonus for winning the competition, and we had that German jaunt as a small reward, but don’t get carried away with this because you weren’t buying a new car. The lack of a financial carrot rankled with some of the players, because they believed the team should be better rewarded for their endeavours, given the amount of money that was washing around the game. We got a bit but to some never enough, and the money that we were effectively playing for was the sum detailed in our next contract. A cup final victory certainly gave us a bit of a negotiating tool.
There was no coach with a wish-list to tell the chairman that he wanted X, Y and Z in his squad for the next season; you were still reliant on blokes sat in the committee room with their gin and tonics being asked to put their hands up and vote for each player. Your future was still decided when the question ‘all those in favour’ was asked. Not enough hands meant you were gone. There was no warning letter, no chance for you to beg for your job back or taking the club to a tribunal for unfair dismissal. If you weren’t flavour of the month with that committee then that was it, you were off. If enough hands went up, you got what you were given.
Once you got into August, and contract decision time, some of the playi
ng staff would be chewing their fingernails. Thankfully, I never felt that I was about to be binned; I always felt that I was doing okay and would be paid a fair amount for what I was doing. I guess that was a by-product of a modest upbringing and simplistic pleasures. But there were plenty that did feel the heat and the insecurity that such a system promotes.
Things got better over the years, and when I returned to Old Trafford as coach in the 1990s contracts were upped to five years in length which previously were unthinkable. Players such as Neil Fairbrother and Wasim Akram – the Pakistani star we called The King because on the field he was cricketing royalty – demanded that kind of commitment because they were box office players. You needed to look after assets like that.
Undoubtedly, that shift from the arbitrary selection process of the committee to one of greater transparency had to happen, and it came about through the Kerry Packer era. Packer’s World Series Cricket offered players like Tony Greig greater freedom and they took it – suddenly players were more aware of their market value.
The Professional Cricketers’ Association – of which I later became president – had a representative at each club and I was ours. But it was not a position I necessarily enjoyed, because you had to be so careful that the club did not view you as a shop steward, stirring things up. While you were the link between the players and the representative body, you had to carry out your work covertly, like a secret agent.
There were those who were unafraid to push for the greater good, men like John Arlott, a staunch Labour supporter, and Jack Bannister, but you were made to feel like Arthur Scargill by challenging authority and asking for more or better. Here we were, PCA reps viewed as individuals who were disturbing the peace. You were seen as activists when actually you were trying to stand up for what was right and proper, not only for yourself but for the sport going forward.
I might not have been as passionate as others, but when Jack Bond – who had been one of the twenty-nine men at the inaugural PCA meeting in 1965 – suggested I inherit the role from him I felt compelled to do it, and there was no queue forming behind me to challenge for it.
Whenever we had these PCA meetings, talk nearly always turned to strikes as a way for the organisation to gain greater recognition from the Test and County Cricket Board. Latterly, the PCA has become a very healthy, reputable body able to fund itself, as is the Federation of International Cricketers’ Association (FICA) around the world, and as president I have been proud of the work it has done to help all cricketers past and present.
I have always believed in being fair. In fact, one of my regrets from my playing days was that we were not fair as a team to some of our best players. I have to say that when Peter Lever, Frank Hayes and Barry Wood opted to go on strike in a pay dispute with the club in that summer of 1975, it proved to be the most difficult few weeks of my career. The entire squad was pushing for better terms across the board, but this trio felt that their status as current England internationals merited an opportunity to negotiate a bit more toffee on top. They wanted the chance to sort themselves a superior rate befitting their elevated status. This, of course, went against any notion of an all-for-one team ethos, and there was some resentment from the dressing room that they should think in this way. Perhaps time has changed my own mind because I now feel we should have supported them. Back then, I didn’t see it as an option.
That course of action could have become very messy, and as captain I already felt caught in the crossfire between the playing staff who believed they were deserving of a greater slice of the financial pie generated by our sustained success and a committee protecting the club’s long-term future by keeping money for rainy days. Already pushed to the limit on getting the average player paid commensurately for his efforts, I let the talented rebels go it alone.
We didn’t stay together as a team simply because we couldn’t. As young men with wives, children and mortgages we felt we could not risk our livelihoods for others. If truth be told, we were scared, feeling as though we had our hands tied by the gin-and-tonic brigade. The fear of losing what we had was overwhelming. We were comfortably off, paid more than your average man on the street, and the general consensus was that was not worth risking.
So when Lever, Wood and Hayes took their public stand and withdrew their labour after returning from World Cup duty, we let them get on with it. We have come through it and we are all mates, but with hindsight we should have supported them as a group and told the club we weren’t playing either on that morning of 21 June.
It was the day of the World Cup final between Australia and West Indies and Cedric Rhoades, the club chairman, was therefore one of the dignitaries sat at Lord’s. Their decision to pull out of this match against Derbyshire at Old Trafford at the last minute, less than three weeks on from our snow-catalysed landslide over the same opposition, was obviously tactical. From a pure cricket point of view this irked me, because we were unbeaten in our first seven matches and making a rare bid for a Championship title.
‘You’re letting us down pulling out at such short notice,’ I told them during the frank exchanges that took place in the dressing room.
In turn, they pleaded for my support and that of the rest of the team, to no avail. The consequences of which were that our star trio sat out the game, officially with ‘injuries’, while those of us not in a sufficiently secure enough position to support them ventured out, Harry Pilling and Jack Simmons, carrying minor niggles, included. We began with ten men before Bob Ratcliffe, who had been out doing his Saturday morning shopping, arrived from Accrington.
Bob played his part in a ten-wicket win, claiming wickets and scoring useful runs, which served only to stir things up further. As captain, I made the decision to stick with the team for the next match against Kent, despite the England three making themselves available. Peter Lever grabbed me around the throat and accused me of betrayal when I revealed my decision in the dressing room. ‘I’m not leaving blokes out who turned out and did the business for me,’ I told him. Sure, we had won without them, but my stand backfired as Kent took away our undefeated status.
The conflict did not linger even though the committee suspended all three men for a few games – if it had I’m not sure I would have ended up on that podium on the Lord’s outfield in early September – and my relationships with those in question did not suffer any deterioration either. If you want evidence, then consider that when I was on my last legs as captain, I agreed to the committee’s instruction to appoint Frank Hayes as vice-captain and, by association, my successor.
As with all such things, this proposal needed to be put to the committee and done through official procedures. It took the form of Mr Jack Wood, who was club secretary and would later become Frank’s father-in-law, extending the invitation to become my deputy through me. In his youth, Frank might not have been placed in the ‘captaincy material’ bracket, given his confrontational reputation, but this was an image that he did his utmost to keep rather than deconstruct. He was a bright bloke with a degree who we signed once his days at Sheffield University were over, and his gregarious nature meant he enjoyed socialising. But I certainly didn’t have him marked down as a hellraiser, as others clearly did.
Although there was a caveat to him becoming my number two in 1976 – he had to return the Samurai swords he had pinched from the Clarendon Court Hotel in London. These two ceremonial weapons, that had previously been on display in the establishment’s bar, had gone missing earlier that week and the last reported sighting of Frank had been of him jousting on the Edgware Road with Mike Hendrick.
I asked Frank if this was true when I finally pinned him down. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘Well, where are they now?’
‘We threw them in a garden about five houses up,’ he said.
‘You want to be vice-captain still, don’t you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, I think you’d better get these swords back to their rightful place . . . don’t you?’
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Needless to say, they were returned and Frank was in position waiting to succeed me when I got to the end of the 1977 season. By then I had spent five years in office and despite some nearly moments – including that season of 1975 when we headed into the final round of matches with a chance of winning the Championship pennant only to finish fourth – it was a period which delivered a solitary piece of silverware, though on a personal note I did also receive national recognition during this time.
CHAPTER 7
National Service, at the Double
A cricket career is full of stepping stones positioned to help you navigate along the path towards your ultimate destiny: playing for your country. When I started off as a spotty youth, my first ambition was to play Lancashire League and for me that meant the first team at Accrington. Then the next footing was with Lancashire County Cricket Club, and of course throughout the entire journey my thoughts were never far away from playing Test cricket. It really is the ultimate and, as it says on the tin, it is a real test.
Becoming a Test opening batsman, as I did during the summer of 1974, completed a wonderful transformation for me from the young hopeful, rummaging through the Accrington club kitbag as a thirteen-year-old to fish out its delights, to the man who was to inherit Geoffrey Boycott’s vacated England place. Boycott had been one of two major obstacles in my way to the top, with John Edrich being the other. I was nowhere near the kind of player either of those men were, but I had to get past them if I wanted to fulfil my ambitions, and having them as rivals certainly ensured I kept my standards high.