Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

In 1971 Shepherd began further to develop as a bowler. His natural ability was as a seamer – not a physical action but using his arm and shoulders to good effect; this was the style that got him his Test place and his good results in the Test matches were with balls that ‘ducked into the batsman’. But at the beginning of the 1971 English season he chanced upon an MCC coaching manual and read in this book a description of how to bowl an out -swinger with the seam facing away to the slips – a ball which had hitherto not been in his armoury. He then worked on the delivery in the nets and in a one-to-one session with his friend Alan Knott. The out-swinging ball gradually became Shepherd’s stock ball with his in-swinger becoming his main wicket-taking ball – because it surprised the batsman. 60 Clive Radley, who faced Shepherd many times for Middlesex, says that he never felt that he was ever ‘in’ against Shep’s bowling because of his variation and this surprise element. In Radley’s view, Shepherd was a wicket-taker rather than a defensive bowler and there were usually some hittable balls in his spell – but it was dangerous to be lulled into a false sense of security. 61 Shepherd dismissed Radley sixteen times in various Kent v Middlesex matches over the years. John Shepherd’s swing variation worked particularly well with an older ball, say thirty overs old, and he believes that through most of his career he was a better bowler with the older ball than with the new ball. The slower ball was not one that he used often, but he did occasionally use the bouncer as a shock delivery. Essentially he was, in Derek Underwood’s words, ‘a persistent good line and length bowler … with a speed [in mph] in the late seventies’ 62 – although there were no cameras to check this in those days. The first Championship match of the 1971 season was at Bradford where on a sticky wicket Underwood and Shepherd skittled Yorkshire twice to win by an innings, Shepherd taking seven wickets in his first first-class match of the year. As a tough and very full season progressed Shepherd chipped in with significant runs or wickets or both in almost all of the 47 matches that he played in the three main county competitions. He took four or more wickets in an innings on eight occasions and scored fifty or more seven times. But the real value came in the solidity and the reliability. Before the start of the 1972 season Shepherd was described in the Kent Annual as the ‘war-horse’ [sic] of the Kent attack and he gained the slightly patronising but no doubt well-meant plaudit that he ‘remains optimistic and cheerful under all circumstances’. The ‘war-horse’ bowled nearly 950 overs, took just under 100 wickets and scored 1,272 runs in first-class and limited-overs competitions in 1971 and was in many ways the fulcrum on which the Kent side was balanced, and in a dressing room where there were occasional tensions Shep was, at 26 years old, emerging as a steadying as well as cheerful influence. Highlights We are the Champions 57 60 In Shepherd’s view the fashionable description today of a ball that ‘reverse swings’ is nothing more nor less than his ‘in-swinger’. There is nothing new about the reverse swinging ball! 61 Interview with the author, 2 October 2008. 62 Interview with the author, 24 September 2008.