The Fiery Summer

GH brings you the highlights

The cricket of yesteryear doesn’t always measure up to our estimation of it. We are spoiled by modern standards of athleticism. We take strokemaking power and umpiring precision for granted. Cricket back in the day can seem stilted and inexact by comparison. But while rooting around on You Tube yesterday, I chanced on this fifty-year-old BBC panorama of that vintage summer England hosted West Indies, with a cracking narration by John Arlott plus the dulcet commentary tones of Richie Benaud and Jim Laker. And it’s brilliant.

Clive Lloyd’s West Indians won the series 3-0, and it’s often remembered as the first foretelling of the dynasty that would dominate Test cricket’s next two decades: Arlott describes the troika of Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Wayne Daniel as the fastest a team has ever fielded, but he hadn’t, of course, seen anything yet. Yet England were a team on the make also. Tony Greig rued his notorious promise to make his visitors grovel, giving David Tossell the title for his enjoyable retrospective account, but England were shortly to win in India and the following summer to regain the Ashes.

The summer was infamously hot and dry: this time fifty years ago, England was about to commence a fifteen-day stretch of temperatures exceeding 32 degrees. You’ll notice how the outfields grow paler and paler, until the Oval Test seems to be being played on a dune. Viv Richards is the chief beneficiary, peeling off 891 runs in four Tests - Arlott avers that a batter can never have scored so many ‘with such careless ease’. Caps and sunhats remain in vogue - Viv will never surrender his - and it’s almost a little uncomfortable watching the unhelmeted heads among the bouncers. This was the year that inspired Eric Morecambe’s joke about you always knowing that summer had begun from the sound of leather on Brian Close’s body.