Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

112 television too. Is it any wonder that this is the game above all that Bob recalls as the highlight of his playing career? Certainly it was more of a highlight than the disappointing game three years later in which he made his sole first-class appearance. Still playing regularly for Westcliff but with his place in the county seconds now under challenge from, in particular, the future Cambridge Blue Richard Baker, Bob was delighted to be asked by Taylor to keep wicket in the match against the touring Jamaican XI at Leyton starting on 19 August 1970. Taylor also played in this match, but was content to hand the gloves to someone else. At the time, Bob didn’t know that this was a first-class match; he only found out some time later ‘when some kind soul [not the present writer!] sent me a sheet of players who played one first-class match and not contributed in any way during the game.’ The Essex side had a few newcomers: debuts were given to batsman Vic Brooks and to Keith Pont as well as to Bob. Sadiq Mohammad made his only appearance for the county. Their opponents were pretty much the full-strength Jamaica XI that had recently finished as runners-up in the Shell Shield (Lawrence Rowe, Maurice Foster and all), and who were now undertaking a brief and little-noticed tour of four first- class and five other matches. Bob’s game too was brief and little-noticed. The first two matches of the Leyton Festival 182 had both reached a conclusion, but rain set in on 19 August and no play was possible on the first scheduled day of the Jamaica match. Play began at 2 pm on the following day, when Essex scored 107 for six before declaring at the tea interval. In ‘gathering gloom’, as Wisden puts it, Jamaica scored 116 for three in the remaining hour and three-quarters before close of play. A night of heavy rain followed, and the match was called off at 11 am the following day. So ended Bob Richards’ first-class career, had he but known it. For him, this was ‘just another game of cricket’; as already noted, he did not appreciate at the time that it was a first-class match, and of course at the end of it he did not know that he would not play at that level again. Today he has no mementoes of the match, not even a scorecard. Such as it was, it was a pretty quiet game for him. He did not bat in the Essex innings: the team list in Wisden has him at No.11, though Bob feels he might have gone in a place or two higher in practice. Although he kept wicket for the 33.5 overs of the Jamaica innings, 8.5 of them bowled by Keith Fletcher (!), he did not get a catch or a stumping; he recalls that no chances were given. Then again, neither did he concede a bye. Apart from the rain and the consequent small crowd, Bob has one enduring memory of the game. When Jamaica batted, Keith Boyce opened the bowling. Bob had played with him before, and so stood back at his normal distance, and was taking the ball comfortably enough. But ‘then he let a rocket go, an absolute Exocet, which lifted off a length, and I want 182 Leyton had long since ceased to be the county’s headquarters ground, but between 1957 and 1977 it hosted an annual ‘festival’ of between two and four first-class matches during August each year. A Life in Cricket