History of Bucks CCC

give the innings a firm foundation for the next three years. There was another debutant who was destined to go further in the game than any of these, Gordon Parsons from Slough, later of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, whose two matches for Bucks yielded him a duck and three overs for 18 runs. A more commercially oriented world lay round the corner. On the world stage Kerry Packer was flexing his muscles. Already Bucks, like all minor counties, relied heavily on TCCB handouts, but 1978 was the year in which a sponsor was first found for the county, Richard Zeidler of ACE Office Cleaners stepping forward with £2,500 for each of three years. There were also cash incentives to reward individual performances. The players agreed that the money earned should be pooled and in one dead match at Marlow the promise of an easy time at the bar persuaded the opposition to connive in ensuring that a Bucks bowler should take five wickets for the second time in the match! In a wet summer the county team managed four wins and earned enough points to take fourth place in the table and with it qualification for the Gillette. This was assured with a six-wicket win against Norfolk in the final match of the season. The batting was strengthened this year by the enrolment of Richard Hayward, a left-hand batsman from Ickenham, who had played for Middlesex Second Eleven and who now headed the averages. In a career punctuated by spells on the staff with Hampshire and Somerset, Hayward’s correct and forceful batting brought him 3,320 runs at the healthy average of 44.27. There was good support from Smith, Edwards, Feasey and Cordaroy. Gooch, Bailey, Bond and Lyon constituted a powerful quartet of bowlers with Hedley Wright from High Wycombe coming in for the last four games. But there cannot have been too much in reserve with the county turning, for the Berkshire match at High Wycombe, to Alan Coxon, a left-armer from Chesham, who had earned his place in history by saving the 1952 Varsity Match for Oxford when, in a defiant last wicket stand, he had played a ball from the South African fast bowler Cuan McCarthy with his unprotected head. In those days he had been an opening bowler but, when he made his sole appearance for Bucks, Coxon was bowling a gentle brand of spinners that befitted one who had passed his forty-eighth birthday. The last of Poll’s four seasons, 1979, was a disappointment. After losing a crucial toss Bucks crashed at the first hurdle in the Gillette Cup losing by two wickets to Suffolk, while only two championship matches were won – with a bit of luck it might have been five - and the county could manage no better than twelfth in the table. The perennial problems with availability meant that Bond and Lyon missed the tour of Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and the opportunity was taken to introduce three new faces in the same match: Mike Milton, Sam Mehar and David J Smith. Milton was to play off and on for ten seasons and score six centuries. An opening batsman strongly focused on his own success, he was nevertheless capable of scoring quickly. In 1981 he almost became the first Bucks player to score two centuries in a match, making 120 and 95 against Berkshire at Slough. Milton was also a useful left-arm spinner. Mehar was an accurate ‘skiddy’ bowler who moved his medium-pacers off the seam. For the next five years, appearing intermittently, he brought much needed experience to the attack and sometimes made handy runs. Off spinner Smith played only a couple of years, initially as a replacement for Lyon, but in 84 The North Circular team: Brian Poll and David Smith Richard Hayward