Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

For John Shepherd it had been a long, long season. He played in every Championship match, bowled a phenomenal 867.5 overs 58 and took 84 wickets at 26.70. In addition he played in 15 of the 16 Sunday League games, scoring 240 runs and taking 23 wickets in 114 overs, helping Kent to 12 wins and to the position of runners-up in the League. By the end of the Surrey Championship match this workload had taken its toll and the back problem that had plagued Shepherd since the 1969 Lord’s Test match recurred – so it was a sore but happy man who joined in the celebrations in the dressing room with champagne supplied by Edward Heath, now Prime Minister, who joined in enthusiastically. Shepherd’s contribution to Kent’s championship success cannot be overestimated and Wisden ’s eulogy that he ‘performed magnificently’ is justified. He was the leading wicket taker as well as a significant contributor with the bat – many of his 695 runs were scored down the order and when chasing crucial bonus points. Colin Cowdrey believed in being flexible with the batting order and Shepherd, in particular, was used as a sort of dispensable wild card, to be played as circumstances demanded. He also took 23 catches. The back muscle injury sustained in the Lord’s Test of 1969 had forced Shepherd to modify his bowling action – but his performances belied any problems. The Championship win brought a further and rather more formal invitation from the Prime Minister – a gourmet celebratory dinner in 10 Downing Street. The boy from Belleplaine had come quite a long way. 1971 For Kent the triumph of 1970 had laid a firm foundation for what they hoped would be continued success in the years to come, a success that was based on certain crucial underpinning in terms of personnel. The side had world-class batting (Denness, Luckhurst, Asif, Cowdrey in his swansong years), attacking bowling (Underwood, Graham, Dye), and hardworking and solid allrounders (Woolmer, Shepherd, Johnson and Julien) – along with the best wicket-keeper in the world, Alan Knott. The personnel for 1971 was broadly the same as in the Championship-winning year, although with Alan Dixon’s retirement Shepherd was now undisputedly the leading allrounder on the books. In Knott’s view 59 Shepherd and the other allrounders were the main reason for Kent’s pre-eminence in the 1970s – and there is no shrewder observer than a man who had to watch every ball bowled more closely than any other when Kent were in the field. 1971 was Cowdrey’s twentieth season as a Kent player and it was to be his last as captain (he carried on as a player until 1975). Mike Denness was due to take over as captain in 1972 but a serious illness curtailed Cowdrey’s season and Denness took charge halfway through the 1971 season. We are the Champions 56 58 In the 1970 first-class season only three bowlers, all of them spinners, bowled more first-class overs than John Shepherd’s total of 890.5. His namesake, Don, of Glamorgan bowled 1,123.3; Fred Titmus of Middlesex, 1,106.3; and Norman Gifford of Worcestershire, 965.5. 59 Alan Knott, It’s Knott Cricket , MacMillan, 1985.