Special September days
On Saturday, Nottinghamshire and Surrey face off for the Royal London One-Day Cup, as the final takes up its new place in the calendar on the first day of July, leaving more than 50 years of (mostly) September finals for the annals of history. Knockout cricket, and the competition’s autumnal climax, was rapturously received when it was launched in 1963. When Sussex beat Worcestershire by 14 runs with 10 balls to play to win the first final, the Guardian’s Geoffrey Nicholson enthused: “Lord’s couldn’t remember anything like it. The tickets had been sold out completely: something virtually unknown for a domestic match. Spectators wore coloured rosettes and favours. There was continuous cheering and singing from the Tavern.”
The following year, Sussex won again. Their captain, Ted Dexter, would have chosen to bat had he won the toss. Instead, he lost it, was ordered to field and the ball duly hooped around for the first couple of hours before the sun came out. “The best things about the day were the weather and the sight of a great ground so well filled, so late in the year,” wrote the Times. “There was an atmosphere of companionship and amity, and of expectancy early on that compensated for the one-sidedness of the match. We had seen again the snags and problems of the one-day match. Like all games of cricket the interest can never be ensured. But thanks are due to the sponsors for their welcome gift to the summer calendar.”
The date’s popularity with supporters made it impervious to criticism, wrote John Arlott, then the Guardian’s chief cricket correspondent, after that match. “Knockout cricket can never be real cricket,” he wrote. “It is a contradiction of the game when the fielding side do better to confine their opponents to 100 for no wicket than to bowl them out for 101. But to fill Lord’s on a Saturday in the football season is a mighty argument for it.”
When Nottinghamshire proposed a restructuring of the season in 1967 that would have involved the Gillette Cup final being shifted to an earlier date, the popularity of its September denouement was the main reason why it was emphatically voted down, by 13 votes to four.
One-day cricket in September brought with it some unusual challenges and it took everyone a few years to get used to them. In year one Sussex won the toss, batted first and won; in year two Warwickshire won the toss, batted first and lost; in year three, Surrey won the toss, fielded first and lost, and in year four Warwickshire won the toss, fielded first and won. That was all possible coin-toss/decision/outcome combinations covered in the minimum possible time.
Then things settled down, with rather monotonous results. Between 1969 and 2006 – the year before the competition was renamed the Friends Provident Trophy and the final played for a few years at least in mid-August – the winners of the toss fielded first 31 times, winning 71% of those games, and batted first on seven occasions. In the 10 years from 1986 the winners of the toss fielded first eight times and won them all, and batted first twice, losing both.
“It’s all a bit strange when everyone talks in the buildup about how you must win the toss,” the Warwickshire captain Neil Smith said after defeat against Essex in 1997. “This is supposed to be a showpiece final, but at 10.30 in the morning any pitch will do a bit off the seam.”
Mike Selvey, of the Guardian, wrote of that match that “as a spectacle, like so many of its predecessors, it was a disaster”.
“The toss yet again proved decisive. September dew and the 10.30am start are the excuses used in mitigation, but yesterday, for good measure, Warwickshire were outplayed in all departments. However, the groundsman Mick Hunt has to take some responsibility for producing pitches which in successive seasons have deprived 28,000 people, paying in excess of £1m, a total of 66 overs of cricket out of a maximum 240.”
Seven years earlier this advantage had been seen at its most glaring. Lancashire won the toss, put Northampton in, and Phil DeFreitas proceeded to take the first five wickets within the first hour, at a cost of 9 runs. “In theory the toss should not give an advantage,” Selvey wrote. “In practice, at Lord’s in September anyway, this is rarely the case. Much is made of the 10.30 start, and of course it has a bearing. But there is no excuse this summer for a pitch to contain the degree of moisture and exhibit quite the movement that this consistently showed. The game should be a struggle in the first hour, but not conclusively so. The power given by the coin is reducing the final as a contest to the level of the bingo hall.”
Perhaps then it is a surprise that it took another 20 years after that Warwickshire defeat by Essex for the final to be definitively and emphatically moved from the September home it has occupied for most of the 54 years it has, in various guises, survived. In 2007 and 2008 it was played in mid-August, in 2009 on 25 July, and since then it has been played between 15 and 21 September.
Bad weather was an issue surprisingly infrequently. Besides, in England no date is guaranteed to be entirely rain‑free. There was a semi-final between Middlesex and Somerset in August 1977 that was abandoned after three days of solid rain and rescheduled for the following Wednesday, the day before the final Ashes Test was to get under way at The Oval, allowing England’s Mike Brearley and Ian Botham to turn out. But it was rained off then as well, and again on the Thursday. That evening the captains agreed that if no play was possible on the Friday the tie would be decided on the toss of a coin. After a bit of rain in the morning, and with more expected in the afternoon, the sides squeezed in a quick 15-over match, won by Middlesex. “The whole thing typifies my life – it was a complete farce,” said Brian Close, the losing captain.
This was the start of a couple of seasons for Somerset to which the word dramatic could scarcely do justice. In 1978 they entered the Gillette Cup final as overwhelming favourites to beat Sussex, and having never won a major trophy in their entire history were expected to win two in a single weekend, leading the Sunday League by four points (the reward for a victory) with a game to play. On the Saturday Sussex won the toss, fielded first (inevitably) and after scoring 14 runs from Imran Khan’s opening over Somerset managed eight from the next six and lost in the end by five wickets. The following day they lost against Essex by two runs and were pipped at another post. “So much talent, such marvellous support, and nothing for us in the end,” complained Brian Rose, their new captain. “We feel we deserved at least one title.”
The following year they were infamously expelled from the Benson & Hedges Cup for declaring having scored one run after a single over, an attempt to protect their run rate. But the ensuing furore galvanised them. “It drew us together because everybody made the decision,” said Rose. “On the other hand if it had been made by just one person, then it might have split us.”
In particular, despite the criticism and controversy, the captain found a rich seam of form. “Following the incident Rose strung together a chain of fifties, and was even known to air some cover‑drives, a novel development,” wrote Scyld Berry, again in the Guardian. “In all competitions he has scored more than 2,000 runs. Moreover, his golf has been transformed.”
This time they did win the Gillette Cup and Sunday League in the space of 48 hours, beating Northamptonshire at Lord’s – Viv Richards scoring a brilliant 117, “pushing the ball off his legs as one would knock the ash off a cigarette,” according to Sir Len Hutton – and then outfoxing Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge the following afternoon while Kent, who had been leading the table, lost unexpectedly (it was quite the season for teams whose trophy cabinets had previously been bare: the only other one, Essex, won the County Championship and the Benson & Hedges Cup).
This year’s remodelled domestic calendar has been widely welcomed and may well, as Andrew Strauss predicted when it was announced last March, “create a better narrative to the summer”. But it is worth remembering a time when a few days in early September could conjure up all the narratives any spectator could need.
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• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
