Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

The Packer affair was to rumble on for the rest of 1977 but the Australian’s battle with the cricket establishment was to work out entirely in his favour with the High Court ruling on 25 November that the ICC and the TCCB could not preclude Packer players from returning to county cricket. Indeed, Underwood, Woolmer and Asif Iqbal were all to play a full season for Kent in 1978 although Alan Knott took a year off, before returning to the county in 1979. Shepherd returned to skipper Footscray in Australia for the 1977/78 season and was successful again with fine allround performances for the Melbourne grade club, taking 48 wickets and scoring 450 runs. This included one match against St Kilda in which Shep took seven for 27 in the opponents’ first innings and eight for 10 in the second. As in the previous year he polled 36 votes in the 1977/78 Ryder Medal, but this time he finished equal third behind Keith Stackpole (38) and Mick Taylor (37). 1978 On the morning of 28 March 1978 Kent’s Cricket sub-Committee met to discuss, among other things, the captaincy of the county for the 1978 season. As we have seen, the fact that this was on the table at all after Asif Iqbal’s successes in 1977 was entirely due to Asif’s participation in the Packer ‘World Series Cricket’ matches the previous winter. The sub-Committee recommended that Asif be reappointed but recorded that as there was a ‘probability that [this recommendation] would be rejected by the General Committee … [they] should consider an alternative nomination’. They then ‘discussed the most suitable candidates, in particular Messrs A.Ealham, J.Shepherd, G. Johnson and M.C.Cowdrey were mentioned. It was decided by five votes to two that in the event of Asif Iqbal’s appointment not being confirmed to recommend Alan Ealham for the captaincy.’ 123 The sub-committee was right that the General Committee would reject Asif and indeed they went further by terminating Asif’s contract, along with the other Packer players, with effect from the end of the 1978 season. 124 ‘A number of alternatives were then discussed, after which the name of Mr Alan Ealham was put to the Committee and he was elected captain for the 1978 season.’ 125 The Kent committees’ wrestling with their consciences so close to the beginning of the 1978 season need not deter us now other than to reflect on the almost surreal nature of the debate – at least when viewed from the perspective of thirty years on! That Colin Cowdrey, by then aged 46, should actually have been discussed by the sub-committee seems bizarre. (Perhaps Colin’s son Christopher, who had made his debut for the county The Consummate Professional 95 123 Minutes of Kent C.C.C. Cricket sub-Committee, 28 March 1978. 124 This decision was rescinded in July 1978 and all the Packer players were retained for 1979 and beyond. This led Brian Johnston to resign his Kent membership believing, as he said in The Cricketer magazine in October 1978, that Kent were wrong to put the county first ahead of the interests of England. 125 Minutes of Kent C.C.C. General Committee, 28 March 1978.