Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

the eve of the 1981 season Page was taken ill and Luckhurst was appointed acting manager – he was confirmed as full-time Cricket Manager later in the year. Luckhurst had said to Shepherd that his recent (1979 and 1980) record was not really good enough and that Shep needed to ‘ … show me some good results so they could keep him on’. The removal of Ealham and the holding-operation appointment of Asif Iqbal at the age of 38 suggested that the Kent committees did not have confidence that a younger captain such as Tavaré or Chris Cowdrey was yet ready to assume the captaincy mantle. The shaky confidence of the committee men was matched in the dressing room where after two unsuccessful years, and with the after effects of Packer still rumbling, confidence was also low. By mid-June none of the six Championship matches played had been won and only one of the four Sunday League games. Kent was also out of the NatWest trophy, although qualification for the knock-out stages of the B&H had been achieved. John Shepherd was also struggling, uncertain of his future and conscious of the scuttlebutt about the need for Kent to choose younger players – especially the promising twenty-year-old allrounder Richard Ellison. The first match of Tunbridge Wells week showed that the county’s predilection for using Shep as a ‘workhorse’ had not changed and he was required to bowl 46 overs in the Leicestershire innings as David Gower helped himself to a sparkling century in the town of his birth. Shep took three wickets for 132 in a match reduced to one innings each and was also involved in a match-saving partnership, scoring 56*, when Kent batted. Later in the week Shep’s workload was scarcely reduced with 25 overs in Sussex’s first innings in a match in which Kent achieved one of their few Championship wins in the season. In early July he bowled 99.3 overs in the two Maidstone week matches and this was followed by a further 82 overs in away matches at Lord’s and Leicester. In the Leicestershire match Shepherd and Jarvis bowled Kent to a fine victory with Shepherd reminding the Kent selectors and committee men that he could still take wickets with four for 42. On 23 July 1981, two days after Shep had helped Kent to win the Leicester match, the Cricket sub-Committee, under Arthur Phebey’s chairmanship, was meeting with a full agenda including an item on ‘Playing Staff for 1982’. Also at the meeting was Shep’s colleague Bob Woolmer who was the players’ representative on the committee – a fairly recent innovation – and Brian Luckhurst who, as we have seen, had been appointed acting Cricket Manager earlier in the season. The sub-Committee’s minutes record the outcome of their deliberations on the playing staff issue: After a lengthy discussion it was agreed not to offer fresh contracts to the following players: N.J.Kemp, C.J.C.Rowe and J.N.Shepherd. The Committee were very appreciative of the service which all three players had given to the Club and especially wished to record the great contribution which John Shepherd had made to the Club’s success in the 1970s. 104 Kent: The Final Years