Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

Another key aspect of John Shepherd’s value to the side was the rapport that he enjoyed with the crowd. Mike Denness recalls how he would usually have Shep fielding in front of the changing rooms at Canterbury and the crowd would expect to see him – and to have a light-hearted dialogue with him. This was illustrative of how the spectators would genuinely bond with the players – most of whom, at that time, were unwavering Kent loyalists through most of their playing days. 25 But the strongest feature of the Kent family was the genuine team bonding in the dressing room – and from the start John Shepherd was a fully accepted member of the team; his nationality and race was never an issue of any sort. The journey that I have taken in researching and writing this tale of the cricket life of John Shepherd has been a richly rewarding one and I feel truly like a time traveller who has ventured back in time to a foreign country where they often do things very differently. The world of cricket has changed, but not beyond recognition – there are still twenty-two yards between the wickets and six balls in the over. The master-craftsmen with bat and ball still strut confidently on the stage as ever they did – and the cricket administrators still manage to mess things up as comprehensively as ever – albeit for slightly different reasons. Where snobbery, arrogance, prejudice and a love of the traditional orthodoxy were the sins of the committee-fodder in the days when John Shepherd was first a player, today it is the sin of greed, along with the offence of insensitivity, to which the cricket men in suits all too often succumb. Only an innocent would suggest that cricket should be played in a world where matters of money are secondary to the game itself – ‘twas never thus. John Major, writing about cricket in England in the eighteenth century, said that ‘money was to be the root of all progress’ 26 – and that has certainly never changed in the centuries that have followed. But, as I have tried to show, another thing that has never changed is that though we may all agree that cricket is indeed ‘more than a game’ it is never right to compromise values just to allow that game to be played, however wonderful we may all agree that it is. To know the game of cricket well it is essential to know the wider world that not only surrounds it but impacts upon it. And in this respect perhaps we have not all advanced as much as we should and tried sufficiently hard to learn the lessons of history. When Billy Griffith’s Cricket Council said, in 1970, in respect of the planned South African tour to England that the tour would be ‘not only a lawful event but … [that] it is clearly the wish of the majority that the tour should take place,’ 27 he was reflecting the widely-held view that if something is lawful and it is popular, then that is sufficient: for Griffith and the Council there was no uncomfortable moral dimension. Roll forward to the year 2003 over which period of thirty-three years you would 14 Introduction 25 Interview with the author, 16 October 2008. Canterbury was, in its turn, one of Shepherd’s more successful venues; he took 140 first-class wickets there at 23.94. 26 John Major, More than a Game , Harper Press, 2007. 27 Cricket Council statement of 19 April 1970, quoted in Wisden , 1971.