Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

injury that he had picked up in the Second Test was taking a long time to heal and although he was available for Kent from late July he was only able to play in four championship matches and two in the one-day League. Mike Denness feels that the West Indies had ‘bowled Shep into the ground’ 52 during the Test series and certainly bowling 58.5 overs in England’s first innings at Old Trafford followed by 43 overs in their first innings at Lord’s was asking a lot – even for a man of Shepherd’s legendary fitness and physical strength. The West Indies had no fixtures between the end of the England tour in 1969 and the next scheduled home series beginning in February 1971. So at the end of the 1969 English season John Shepherd decided to stay in England and set up home in his new house in Sturry to try to establish the beginnings of a stable family life with Terry. He also needed to get fully fit for the 1970 season; a decision which paid off, as we shall see (Chapter Four) as he helped Kent to their first County Championship for 57 years, taking 84 wickets and scoring 695 runs in the process. Also during the 1970 season Shepherd was called up by the selectors 53 of the Rest of the World side which played five matches under Test match rules against England. He just missed out on selection for any of the matches and was particularly unlucky at Headingley where the green wicket seemed made for him. He was twelfth man for the last two matches at Headingley and The Oval. After the successes of the 1970 season John decided to return to Barbados for the 1970/71 domestic season and, he hoped, to put himself again in contention for selection for the Test side. He had been told by Garry Sobers that he was to be part of the West Indies squad for the upcoming home Test series v India and that his fare back home was to be paid for by the West Indies board. Terry, who was pregnant, came with him. The first Shell Shield match was in January 1971 in St Lucia and whilst the match was under way, Terry phoned him from Barbados to say that there was a problem and that it looked as if the baby, only a week or so from its due date, had died in the womb. Hardly surprisingly Shepherd played little part in the match but he had to wait until the match was over before he could return to Barbados to be with his wife who had, in the meantime, lost the child. This was a tragedy that they and their families had to deal with and if John wanted to resume his cricket career he had to make himself available for selection immediately. The next match, against Guyana, was at the Kensington Oval only a week afterwards and Shepherd courageously played and acquitted himself well – as he did in the next match in Port of Spain and, back home, in Barbados’s match against the Indian tourists when he took four wickets in the tourists’ first innings. But Shepherd was not selected for the first three Test matches, and to comprehend this we need to understand West Indian cricket politics with a few selections taking place for each match which favoured candidates from the island Testing Times 50 52 Interview with the author, 16 October 2008. 53 These were F.R.Brown (manager); G.S.Sobers (captain) and L.E.G.Ames.