Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

one of the first names on the teamsheet. And there was a new name alongside his – Kent, taking advantage of the new rule which allowed one overseas player per county who could play without needing to spend two years qualifying, had signed the Pakistani allrounder Asif Iqbal who had played an astonishing innings of 146 in the 1967 Oval Test match. (In the event, though, a back problem meant that Asif played primarily as a batsman in his first Kent year). The squad, under Cowdrey’s rejuvenated leadership, with the Gillette Cup in their trophy cabinet and with class players in all departments, had high hopes. The 1968 season was a watershed year for cricket on and especially off the field and Kent’s captain was right in the thick of it throughout. At times in that fateful summer it was not England affairs that were a distraction to Cowdrey’s ambitions for Kent, but the other way round. Regaining the Ashes and trying to preserve the planned winter tour to South Africa were Cowdrey’s top priorities and Kent, for whom he played only 16 out of 30 matches, took second place. Whilst England completed a famous win over Australia at The Oval on 27 August (tying the series so the Ashes remained with Australia) Kent were ruing the fact that the absence of their captain along with Alan Knott and Derek Underwood (also in the Test side) had weakened the team at crucial moments throughout the summer – including their last match against Warwickshire which they had lost badly. On the same day as The Oval Test win a meeting of England selectors took place at Lord’s to pick the touring side for South Africa – the meeting included both Cowdrey and the Kent manager Les Ames who had been appointed as manager for the planned South African tour. Whilst the details of that meeting remain sketchy it seems certain that Cowdrey and probably Ames were key players in ensuring that Basil D’Oliveira was not selected for the tour – a questionable cricketing decision but if your main objective was to keep the tour on track, as Cowdrey’s was, understandable. The repercussion of D’Oliveira’s non-selection, and the shambles that ensued when he was eventually chosen which led inexorably to the cancellation of the tour and then later to South Africa being excluded from Test cricket for 22 years, need not detain us here. However collateral damage was done, not just to the reputation of MCC and England cricket, to Cowdrey himself and to Kent’s Championship ambitions, but also to John Shepherd – as we shall see. But at the beginning of the season these rather grubby events were months away and the optimism that always surrounds the start of a new cricket season was certainly rife in the garden of England when the sun shone at the start of the first match at Canterbury in early May. The first Championship game of 1968 saw the Barbadian Shepherd and the man from Hyderabad, Asif, combine to skittle Lancashire for 69 in their first innings and Kent went on eventually to win the match by six wickets. Another unknown of the county’s near-miss season is how many more games would have been won and bonus points garnered had Asif been fit enough more often to bowl in tandem with Shepherd. The pattern set in 1967 when Shepherd contributed with either bat or ball in almost every match continued in 1968. The month of June was particularly prolific, Kentish Apprentice 37