Chapter Thirty-Five Changing Partners In time, a generation of cricketers and spectators with no memory of the Whitsuntide and early-August holiday games emerged. After all, Spring Bank Holiday at the end of May bore little difference to Whit Monday and in some years the dates coincided. And as the seasons gradually edged into the second week of September, it followed that they were still in full swing over the late summer holiday. But although some classic encounters took place after Spring Bank Holiday joined the late August Bank Holiday in 1967 things were never quite the same. Some of Whitsuntide’s charm failed to make the transition and as the football season expanded an eye had to be kept on the Spring Bank Holiday weekend’s play-offs for the final promotion spots, particularly on the Monday. By August Bank Holiday the new soccer season was under way and crucial Championship matches – and even the final Test - played second fiddle. Within the game itself significant alterations to the pattern and rhythm of the summer occurred. The Gillette Cup, the John Player Sunday League and the Benson and Hedges Cup had to be accommodated. Consequently the Championship was reduced and in 1988 there was an experiment with four-day matches which was fully adopted in 1993. All were absorbed into an increasingly complex and disjointed programme which had few points of reference. Sometimes there was no cricket at all on Saturdays or the Bank Holidays. At the outset, a desire to continue the Bank Holiday traditions remained. A mixture of old and new emerged. Derbyshire- Nottinghamshire, Essex-Surrey, Gloucestershire-Somerset, Hampshire-Kent, Lancashire-Yorkshire, Middlesex- Sussex, Leicestershire-Northamptonshire and Warwickshire-Worcestershire occupied most, if not all, the holiday dates during the 1970s and 1980s until the four-day matches and, in 2000, two divisions, put paid to the continuity. Ernest Hemingway closed Death in the Afternoon , his classic work on Spain, life and the bullfights, by saying that if it had been enough of a book it would have had everything in it. It would have had the chestnut woods on the high hills, the green country and the rivers, the red dust, the Prado museum of art, with sprinklers watering the grass early in the bright Madrid summer morning, and the cafes where the boys are never wrong and are all brave and there is talk of seasons lost and feeling good because there are no other triumphs so secure. In this vein, certain things must be acknowledged, such as Middlesex and Sussex, who for more than 20 summers kept the traditional flag flying with an almost unbroken run of holiday fixtures. There must be mention of outstanding performances from John Snow and Kepler Wessels, by Mark Ramprakash in a Middlesex-Surrey derby and of Brian Lara illuminating Lord’s before 3,000 spectators on the Monday - far removed from the halcyon days but reasonable enough in modern times - when Warwickshire were the visitors in May 1994. And of the Roses encounters, where the Spring Bank Holiday meeting was 183