Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

‘ … at that time I don’t think that [Kent] would have wanted a West Indian captain’. 13 The light brown Asif Iqbal, who came from a privileged background on the Indian sub-continent 14 and was seen as something of a ‘toff’, was an entirely different matter. But it is important to nail the canard that prejudice was endemic in middle England – it certainly wasn’t in Kent in the sixties and seventies anyway. Yorkshire in the 1980s was however a different matter and in 1984, in his last full year as a player, Shepherd and his Gloucestershire colleague David Lawrence were subjected to extreme racial abuse at a Sunday League match in Scarborough (see Chapter Eight) – this followed similar abuse directed at other West Indians at Yorkshire grounds over the years. 15 The rewards given to cricketers in the early years of John Shepherd’s career seem very measly when compared to the norms of today – even if we ignore the exceptional riches of the Indian Premier League and other million-dollar Twenty20 competitions. County professionals were paid only during the summer and pay for the younger player and uncapped was below the average wage of the times. For cricketers of Shepherd’s ability, on the fringes of international recognition, the financial compensation was little better. In the West Indies, the Test match fees of, at best, $100 per game, were not much more than nominal and there was absolutely no security of employment. Couple this with the fact that there was no continuous international programme – the last Test match of the West Indians’ England tour of 1969 finished on 15 July and their next Test did not start until 18 February 1971, a gap of 19 months – and there were no lucrative one-day matches in between either. So a professional cricketer had to ply his trade wherever he could, to make ends meet – unless he was of the old ‘Gentlemen’ class and had married well, like Cowdrey. It was the amateurishness of everything about domestic and international cricket that was to be challenged and eventually cracked in 1977 by Kerry Packer, but this earthquake in the game did not just ensure that cricketers would be properly paid in future. It also shattered once and for all the distinction in the English domestic game between the patrician, officer-class ‘Gentlemen’, like Cowdrey, and the rest who, though they played the game in part for the love of it, also had lives and families outside the game to sustain from their cricketing earnings. In the past the county professional was caught in a trap of having to accept remuneration which barely gave a living wage in the summer and less than that in the winter months – Derek Underwood remembers Kent being one of the ‘stingiest’ of all the counties. 16 The only carrot that was dangled in front of them was the ‘benefit year’ during which the most loyal county pros were able to build up a modest nest-egg which would help fund them when their playing days Introduction 10 13 Interview with the author, 24 September 2008. 14 Asif was born and educated in India but moved to Pakistan at the age of 18. 15 Report in The Times , 10 July 1984. The other West Indians were Gladstone Small, Norbert Philip and Vivian Richards. 16 Derek Underwood recalled, in an interview with the author, that all the players struggled to make ends meet: ‘You would think twice about going out for a meal and try and save your meal allowance.’