Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

indisputable international standard: Cowdrey, Denness, Luckhurst, Asif Iqbal, Knott, Underwood and Shepherd. Shepherd’s role in the season was to be crucial. The English Test players were to be busy in the five ‘Test’ matches against a ‘Rest of the World’ team. The other experienced allrounder in the Kent squad, Alan Dixon, was absent through injury for the first two months. Support for John Shepherd was to come from the young Bob Woolmer who bowled well when given the chance, but much of the bowling burden was borne by Shepherd who was clearly now being seen by Kent as a ‘bowling allrounder’. The first Championship match in 1970 was against the new county champions at Swansea and Kent lost a low-scoring match by 46 runs – but Shepherd failed to emulate his namesake Don who took eight wickets. The first victory did not come until late May against Leicestershire, with Shepherd this time taking nine wickets (six for 89 in the second innings), but the county continued to struggle and went through June without a win. John Shepherd’s season, however, was going well and by the end of June he had bowled 366 overs and taken 33 wickets. He had also made some major contributions with the bat, including a fine 105 against Hampshire at Portsmouth which rescued Kent from 177 for seven and took the county to a respectable first innings of 310 in an eventually drawn game. But Kent continued to stutter along, even falling to an Essex run-chase during Tunbridge Wells week after Cowdrey (106*) and Shepherd (60) scored quickly to set a seemingly challenging target (203 in two hours) which Essex comfortably reached. But at the end of June Kent were bottom of the County Championship table – some 70 points behind the then leaders Surrey. The turnaround began in a match that started on 1 July when Kent, without their England Test stars, had an innings victory against Essex at Harlow – Shepherd again in fine form with five for 41 in the Essex first innings. This win was, however, to be followed by a disappointing loss against Middlesex at Lord’s (Shepherd three for 54 and four for 67 notwithstanding) and a tame defeat at Canterbury to Sussex in the Gillette Cup was to follow. Kent’s batting great, eighty-two-year-old Frank Woolley (who had been in the Kent side in 1913 when the Championship had last been won) was visiting the county from his home in Canada at the time of this debacle to see progress on the new stand at the St Lawrence Ground and was heard to say tetchily that the new stand was ‘too good for this lot’. After this defeat Secretary/Manager Les Ames ‘blew his top’ in the dressing room and this helped transform an underperforming county into a winning team. Momentum began to gather with wins against Hampshire and Sussex and by the end of July Kent had ‘climbed’ to 13th in the table. John Shepherd was the mainstay of the bowling attack, illustrated by a drawn match at Sheffield when he took five for 123 in the only Yorkshire innings and bowled a phenomenal 52 overs with hardly a break. He also set up the win against Sussex at Hove, forcing the home side to follow on by taking five for 45 in 25 testing and economical overs. A further big wicket haul for Shepherd followed in a drawn match against Middlesex (six for 33) at We are the Champions 54