Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

‘Kolpak’ players alike are mercenaries for hire to the highest bidder and John Shepherd’s old county Kent has been in the forefront of this expedient approach. More than once an overseas player has been signed for just a few games or well short of a full season – compare that with Shepherd’s sixteen years (or Asif Iqbal’s fourteen years, for that matter) at Kent. In a thoughtful newspaper article, veteran sports writer Michael Henderson recently wrote about the truly great overseas players in county cricket and without exception these were the men who loyally served their counties for many seasons, not the short-term mercenaries. He included John Shepherd in his list and accurately wrote that Shep ‘ … became part of the club fabric at Canterbury’. 1 The figures bear Henderson out. When, in 1992, The Guardian did an analysis of the contribution that overseas players had made to county cricket they showed that Shep’s 976 wickets in the Championship put him at the top of the list of post-war overseas bowlers and third in the all-time rankings. 2 Derek Underwood states it plainly; he says that Shepherd was ‘the mainstay of [the Kent] attack for years’ and that essentially ‘he was Kent’. 3 Times change, but the value of loyalty should be a constant – and it is also a two-way thing. Loyalty given and loyalty received are the two sides of the same coin and in this book we explore how this unfolded in John Shepherd’s case. Virtually every player who was with Kent in John Shepherd’s years spent a decade or more with the county. Some, like Shepherd himself, moved on to other counties – usually reluctantly, and some players, inevitably, did not quite make the grade – but in the main over these years it was a dressing room that morphed gently from one season to the next without major staffing disruptions. This had the massive benefit of creating a natural ‘team first’ emphasis – with nobody there just for a short-term fee for a few matches before moving on elsewhere – as all too often happens today. Shepherd also recognised the importance of the loyalty of spectators and supporters – in those halcyon days they were numbered in their tens of thousands, and that is just those that came to matches. Shep was always seen in the Supporters’ Club tents during festival weeks and he regularly attended members’ functions as well. In 1975 there were over eight thousand members of the county and the President at the time said that it may be necessary to ‘consider putting a limit on the number of members’. 4 By 2007 membership had fallen to half of the 1975 figure. John Shepherd’s long career as a professional cricketer, from 1965 to 1989, spanned a time of almost unparalleled change in the game. The last Gentlemen v Players match took place only three years before Shepherd’s Kent debut: and South Africa’s banishment from the international cricketing arena spanned much of his career. The first one-day Introduction 6 1 Article in The Guardian , 2 September 2008. 2 Article in The Guardian , 6 June 1992. The two ahead of Shepherd on the all-time list are Jack Walsh of Leicestershire, and Ted McDonald of Lancashire. The next highest after Shep on the post-war list is Mike Procter of Gloucestershire, with 790 wickets. 3 Interview with the author, 4 September 2008. 4 Kent County Cricket Club Annual, 1975.