Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

43 Number 11 when taking three for 28 in nine overs against Western Province. Nuffield Week was no schoolboy jolly, and standards were high. Seven of Kevin’s 1957 team-mates (there were 13 in all in the squad) went on to play first-class cricket, two of them (Brian Burrow and Don Mackay- Coghill) playing over 60 matches each at a time when opportunities for South African cricketers were severely limited. Names in the other teams’ squads that year included Eddie Barlow, Denis Lindsay, Tiger Lance, Colin Bland, Peter Carlstein, Jackie Botten and Richard Dumbrill: future Test players all, and a measure of the class of cricketer that Kevin was already pitting himself against. After leaving school it was back to Durban, where he joined one of the city’s leading clubs: ‘Tech’, or more properly, Natal Technical College. Kevin was not himself a college student (this was not a necessary qualification to join the club), but it was here that his cricketing education really developed - and here too that he acquired his lifelong cricketing nickname of ‘Moose’, given by team-mates in honour of his striking laugh. He was now rubbing shoulders, either as team-mates or as opponents, with the likes of Neil Adcock (‘facing him wasn’t funny’), Mike Procter (‘he had a very difficult action. If he came over the wicket I didn’t have too much problem with him because I knew his arm was going to come between the body and the wicket; but when he went around the wicket, oh my God, then it came from anywhere’), Roy McLean (who suckered Kevin into pitching the ball up, whereupon he deposited it on the grandstand roof; but Kevin had his revenge in a later game when he dismissed McLean for a duck), Jackie McGlew (who ‘encouraged me no end; one time I was beating him all ends Neil Adcock causes Kevin Martin (batting) to take evasive action.