The Summer Field

184 knowing what anyone was going to be doing. It was quite fun.’ * By 21 st century standards the first Gillette Cup final on Saturday, September 7, 1963, looks mad, or corrupt. How could Worcestershire fall short of Sussex’s 168 in 65 overs ? Because batsmen were still learning how to pace their run-making, while bowlers had already mastered how to save runs; through ‘attrition rather than attack’, in John Woodcock’s words in The Times on the Monday. The Sussex captain Ted Dexter deployed fielders ‘with unremitting caution’, stopping runs rather than seeking slip catches. As Woodcock pointed out, this was contrary to the aim of the competition, for free- and high-scoring batting. Still, Lord’s sold all its tickets and all the private boxes were taken; the supporters ‘found themselves reacting to a boundary hit more like West Indians than Englishmen of traditional reserve’. Woodcock seemed unable to accept that it could be in the character of English cricket followers to let themselves go; doubtless they had not read the ground regulations about ‘unnecessary noise’. Woodcock’s reports of those first one-day finals – until one-dayers became the norm — amounted to a critique of the limited-over form that remains unanswered. In 1964, Sussex beat Warwickshire easily: ‘Like all games of cricket, the interest can never be ensured.’ In 1965, on a slow wicket and slow outfield, Yorkshire made 317 for four in 60 overs and crushed Surrey by 175 runs; in its way, as one-sided a match as the year before’s, yet remembered for Geoffrey Boycott’s ‘magnificent’ 146 that had ‘every shot in the book’. Why then did he not play like that more often? And if spinners were so unsuited to the one-day game, as convention suggested already, why had Norman Gifford and Raymond Illingworth, two spinners, been as tight as any finals bowler, so far? In 1969, after Yorkshire beat Derbyshire in another one-sided final, Woodcock made the fundamental point: ‘The cricket was more full of incident than distinction.’ Two teams could make a close finish, or batsmen could hit many runs; it did not mean the play was of quality. For all the flaws of the limited-over game, ‘it does not prevent the Gillette competition from being a firm favourite with spectators and players alike’, as Woodcock wrote after the 1967 final. As early as 1966, he foresaw even more of the same. If customers kept paying, despite the flaws, where was the problem? Customers set taste in cricket now, as in ‘pop’ music, played on the radio according to the ‘charts’, the best song being the one most bought the week before, no matter how silly. The more mass the market, the sillier the taste; yet the more money came in. This tension in taste between the few of good taste and the many ignorant was insoluble; a sport (and music and theatre) needed both, to keep ticking. * Limited-over matches have become a part of pro’ cricket as beyond altering as keeping to the left on the road; and yet, as Warner took for granted, you could arrange a single-day match in other ways. Tom Austin, brought up on 1940s’ ‘straight cricket, no complications’, and who played until his 50s in the 1980s, recalled some of his best matches in Hertfordshire club cricket as draws; when batsmen were fighting to stay in, and bowlers had Modern Changes