History of Bucks CCC

The Gillette campaign in 1972 opened in style. Drawn to play Cambridgeshire at Fenner’s, Bucks scored 224 for 7 with 95 from David Janes. The home team’s batting then buckled in 75 minutes as Bucks’ opening bowlers operated unchanged. Bond, with five for 17, and Harris, with four for 21, dismissed the home team for only 41. For 13 years this remained the lowest total in the competition, printed on the back of score cards across the country. The county’s reward was a home tie at Amersham against Glamorgan. Up to this point Bucks had always been as the proverbial lambs when facing first-class opponents. This was now due to change. Perhaps unwisely, Tony Lewis, on winning the toss for the visitors, chose to bat. By lunch his team, with a top four of Alan Jones, Roy Fredericks, Majid Khan and Lewis himself, were precariously placed at 80 for six. The tail then wagged, with Malcolm Nash leading the resistance, as Glamorgan were thankful to reach 174. “I made a bit of a cock of it,” Chris Parry confesses years later. “Because Ron Hooker had pulled a muscle and was limping everywhere. With about five overs to go I suddenly realised that I’d ended up with one of my prime bowlers, Ray Bond, only going to bowl eleven overs. Something went radically wrong all because Ron had pulled up lame.” In fact, the captain took the final wicket with the last ball of the fifty-eighth over, but by this time an over he had not initially planned to bowl had gone for 17 during a productive ninth wicket stand. Despite this the Glamorgan total was starting to look too few as Bucks reached the drinks interval on 122 for two, Turner and Hooker having added 88. However, Hooker had started his innings with his muscle injury and had subsequently broken a knuckle. He now felt that he would serve the cause best by retiring. “He shouldn’t have done,” Chris Parry now reflects. Wickets tumbled, among them Turner for 66. Fred Harris, who had been the pick of the bowlers with four for 33, clouted a huge six before being held on the third man boundary. The final over came with 13 still needed. Could Bucks become the first of the minnows to beat a first-class county? The last pair were at the wicket, Hooker having returned with a bandaged hand, and by now the television cameras were on the ground. A place in history was still at stake as Solanky came up to bowl the final ball. It had to be hit for four, but Bond swung and missed so Glamorgan were the narrowest of victors. For Bucks there was some consolation as Jack Robertson named John Turner as his Man of the Match, while for the visitors there were celebrations into the night in the Amersham pavilion. “It was all quite different from Hampshire,” Chris Parry remembers. An indifferent championship performance meant that Bucks were not in the Gillette Cup for 1973, but Parry’s legacy was to ensure that the teamwould be re-joining battle with first-class opponents the following year. The captain had played a full part with 39 wickets, but during his time in charge Parry had seen the potency of his side’s attack diminishing. Lever, Bond and Waite all offered only spasmodic availability and Fred Harris, though he played his last match as late as 1976, had virtually called it a day. As opportunities for new bowlers arose, a few were tried whose figures suggest that they fell short of the necessary standard, but one who briefly seized his chance was Nigel Rogers, a brisk outswing bowler from Tring Park. He began with five wickets in the first innings of his debut match, against Bedfordshire at Buckingham. There were only seven more victims in his next four games and he had gone wicketless in the first innings at Bray when Berkshire batted a second time with a lead of 46. Stuart York recollects that Rogers’ first wicket came from a catch on the boundary and that, when Lever was replaced by leg spinner Laurie Champniss, the Berkshire captain Francis Neate was obsessed with taking all the bowling from the spinner, leaving Rogers to wreak havoc at the other end and set up a seven-wicket victory for Bucks. His final analysis of nine for 50 is second only to Frank Edwards as the best in the county’s history. These two apart, the only other Bucks bowler to have taken more than eight 78 Gillette Cup excitement: Chris Parry & David Mackintosh