Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

have been with them that inspired Shepherd, for his feats that glorious Maidstone week were prodigious. In the first of the two County Championship matches, against Worcestershire, he took four for 55 in the opponents’ second innings to dismiss them for 183 and set up a run chase – 187 to win. Then, with Kent floundering a bit at 129 for seven, Shep guided them home with a fine 53* for a two-wicket victory. In the second match, against Sussex, Shepherd opened the bowling and in an unchanged spell of 32.5 overs, took eight for 93. He followed this by scoring 52, helping Kent to recover from 171 for five to post a solid 329. Shep opened the bowling again in Sussex’s second innings and in another unchanged spell of 29 overs he took seven for 54 and Kent won the match by an innings and 10 runs. Wisden hailed ‘a magnificent all-round performance’ and recorded that Shepherd’s match figures of 15 for 147 were the first fifteen-wicket haul by a Kent bowler for sixteen years. This was to be John Shepherd’s best match analysis in first-class cricket. In June he played his part in Kent’s epic win against the Australians, their first for 76 years and a match highlighted by Colin Cowdrey’s penultimate first-class century in his final year with Kent – a chanceless 151*. In the county’s following match Shepherd set up a good win over Lancashire by taking four quick wickets for seventeen runs in 10.5 overs (24-10-59-5 in total) with ‘late movement off the pitch’ 116 to reduce their opponents to 45 for four in their second innings and, eventually, to 166 all out. Kent, who had been in the lower reaches of the Championship table only a few weeks before, were now fourth. Two more wins in the next matches against Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire took the county, by mid-July, to second place just one point behind Lancashire and hopes were rising that a first County Championship for five years could be won – but it was not to be as the county only won two of their remaining nine matches and finished a respectable but disappointing fifth. There was disappointment as well in the one-day competitions with early exits from the two knock-out tournaments and occasional vulnerability in the Sunday League which turned a table-topping position in mid August into an eventual third place. Between 1970 and 1978 Kent only had two seasons in which they failed to win a tournament – 1971 and 1975 (a disappointment for the county President, Les Ames, that there were no trophies in his year of office). For John Shepherd it was a hard season and, unusually, he missed a few of matches with niggling injuries. Despite this his bowling workload was down only a little from previous years and he still bowled more overs than any other Kent bowler in both the Championship and the one-day matches. Shepherd was the leading wicket-taker in the Sunday League and second behind Underwood in first-class matches. His batting was rarely crucial as Kent had such a powerful batting line-up, even when some players were away on Test duty, but there were a number of classic Shep innings – not least his first century in the County Championship for five years batting up the order at No.5 against Middlesex at Canterbury in August, albeit in a losing cause. This innings of 116, with 3 sixes and 11 fours, was The Consummate Professional 89 116 John Woodcock in The Times , 2 July 1975.