Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

Annual Report description of Shepherd’s 1979 season as ‘disappointing’ was perhaps fair, although their charge that he was ‘plagued by injury and ill-health’ was overstated. There were some highlights – a ‘violent’ 86 with 3 sixes and 8 fours in the Championship versus Middlesex at Lord’s in May and six wickets in the match in the return at Tunbridge Wells in June when Shepherd bowled 54 overs across the two innings – no lack of effort there! There are suggestions that the Kent committees were beginning to think of a future without John Shepherd. For example, the minutes of the Cricket sub-Committee meeting on 20 November 1979 record that ‘The Cricket Manager [Colin Page] said that during a recent tour of Antigua he had seen a young West Indian, S.Baptiste aged 18, 137 who he considered might be a replacement for John Shepherd as an allrounder’. Not too much should be read into this although, as we shall see, Shepherd’s position was to become more precarious in 1980 and 1981. John Shepherd’s benefit of around £60,000 138 was a record for Kent and for the first time in his life he began to feel financially secure. Returning to Barbados for the winter, he decided that he would use half of the money to buy a house there, partly as a long-term investment and partly to give himself and his family the option of returning to the island of his birth at some time in the future. 1980 With the benefit year successfully behind him, John Shepherd returned to Kent at the beginning of the 1980 season to commence his sixteenth year as an employee of the county. He was slightly late arriving back from Barbados and this led to his being fined £178 by Kent – a curiously precise sum. Shep resented the suggestion that he had been casual in not getting back to Kent on time: ‘I was not gallivanting about – I trained out there but was involved in buying property’, he said! 139 At the age of 36 he was, as the previous year had suggested, creaking a little at the seams but his underlying physical strength remained good and his Kent experience was unequalled. Apart from the unique Derek Underwood, Shepherd had taken more first-class wickets by far than any other player on the staff and his runs total was bettered only by Knott, Asif and (just) by the fast-improving Bob Woolmer. Although he had been overlooked for the captaincy, Shepherd’s match experience and sound cricket brain was also being tapped frequently by his friend Alan Ealham, whose own position as captain after two seasons might be threatened if Kent did not return to trophy-winning form in 1980. It was to be a very wet year. A number of Kent players were on international duty on and off throughout the summer (Woolmer, Tavare, Knott, Dilley Kent: The Final Years 101 137 Eldine Baptiste was to play for the county from 1981 to 1987. 138 Equivalent to around £230,000 in 2009 money. 139 Reported in The Cricketer magazine, July 1980.