Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

– a highly talented prospect who had been labelled the ‘next Garry Sobers’ – a tag that was, of course, to be impossible to live up to. Julien played in 26 Test matches for the West Indies as well as appearing on and off for seven years for Kent. Julien was initially put under the tender care of his fellow West Indian John Shepherd and he lived with the Shepherds for much of the season as he found his feet in Kent. Later Julien was to move permanently into ‘The Monument’, a Canterbury pub where away from the Shepherds’ watchful eye he lived a rather more unrestrained life! Over the years Julien was burdened both with painful injuries and with difficulties in balancing his life as a professional sportsman with his natural joie de vivre. John Shepherd, whose room-mate he often was for away matches, helped him considerably through these difficulties. An even more eccentric room-mate was John’s close friend Alan Knott who on one occasion woke a soundly sleeping Shepherd at five in the morning doing callisthenic exercises noisily on the spot – a similar problem had, in Knott’s words, ‘ … ended my rooming arrangements with Geoff Boycott’ on England tours! 64 With his Test career behind him, to his great disappointment and mystification, John focused from 1972 onwards entirely on being a county professional, augmented, as we shall see, by occasional winter employment in Southern Africa and Australia. He was never to play for Barbados again either; his whole professional life was to revolve around Kent for the next eleven years. And that life was to be in a county programme in which one-day cricket was to play an ever more important part. At the end of the 1971 season Les Ames put the new commercial realities into sharp relief: ‘In eight Sunday League games [this year] the paid attendances were 28,106, whilst 36 days in the County Championship brought in 31,414.’ 65 Kent’s modest profits of £7,345 in that year came substantially from an increase in membership, to around 7,000, in response to the 1970 Championship success. A new one-day competition, the Benson and Hedges Cup, was to be added to the Gillette Cup and the Sunday League from 1972 onwards and, as a world-class performer with bat and ball (and in the field), Shepherd was to We are the Champions 59 Signs of success. Shepherd collects a new Cortina from a Ford dealer in 1971. 64 Alan Knott, It’s Knott Cricket , MacMillan, 1985. 65 The Cricketer Spring Annual , 1972.