Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

The day after this meeting Bob Woolmer travelled to Derby where he was to join the Kent side for the Championship match against Derbyshire which began on Saturday 25 July. Waiting for him in the hotel was John Shepherd, who knew that the subject of player appointments had been discussed the day before. As Woolmer saw Shep he went bright red in the face and, although he could not disclose the discussions in the committee, for Shepherd his friend’s face said it all. He had been sacked. Later in the month Brian Luckhurst explained Kent’s reasoning to The Guardian : ‘He [Shepherd] has given wonderful service over the years and must be one of the best value for money overseas players ever. We felt, however, that the time has come to look to the future and the young players coming up.’ 144 John Shepherd played only three more games for Kent after that momentous weekend in Derby. Sitting out one of Kent’s end-of-season matches at Canterbury he sat next to Brian Luckhurst and said to Kent’s Cricket Manager that he would be happy to make himself available on a match-by-match basis in 1982 – partly because with 953 wickets under his belt he wanted to pick up the 47 more he needed to achieve the rare feat of a thousand wickets in the first-class game. 145 Luckhurst replied that Shep must understand that Kent ‘… was not running a charity’. To say that John Shepherd, the loyalist of Kent servants, was incensed by this tactless remark from someone who had been a playing colleague of his for more than ten years would be an understatement. That Luckhurst came very close to getting a large clenched black fist in his face he probably never knew! John Shepherd was distressed and disillusioned. He really found it impossible to believe that at the age of 37, after seventeen years with the County and, he believed, with at least two more seasons in him, his services had been so summarily dismissed. In particular he was aggrieved that the decision not to re-engage him had been handled with such crass insensitivity. The world of cricket agreed. Alan Lee in The Cricketer summed up the feelings of many in the game: It was galling, therefore, for him to discover the hard way that he was no longer wanted by the county he joined in 1966. [sic] There are undoubtedly good reasons for Kent’s decision, but the manner in which it was made and transmitted to the Barbadian whose cheeriness has been such a feature of domestic cricket, seemed to some to be a little callous. 146 John Shepherd’s final match for Kent was in the Sunday League at Canterbury against Worcestershire on Sunday 13 September 1981 – he was given a warm send-off by the crowd for whom he had always been a special Kent: The Final Years 105 144 The Guardian , 30 July 1984. 145 Amongst county cricket regulars only Geoff Arnold, Jack Birkenshaw, Norman Gifford, Ken Higgs, Robin Hobbs, Intikhab Alam, Robin Jackman, John Lever, Pat Pocock, Mike Procter and Derek Underwood had reached this landmark at the end of 1981. 146 Alan Lee in The Cricketer , October 1981.