Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

45 Number 11 for Durban Colts, generally as a bowler and batting around eight or nine in the order - partly because of the outstanding batting talent that was available in the city at that time, and partly to reflect the fact that he was selected above all for his bowling. One of the cuttings in his scrapbook shows him playing for a Durban eleven (as a late replacement for Test player Pat Trimborn) against the Colts - the latter a side including Messrs Richards, Procter and Irvine. Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, the scrapbook doesn’t include the detailed scores of the game. Tech were invariably one of the two or three top club teams in Natal, and with so many big names playing for the club, their ‘lesser’ players were well-placed to catch the eye of the provincial selectors. Natal at this time was comfortably the leading provincial side in South Africa. Between 1959/60 and 1967/68 inclusive they won the title six times and shared it once in seven successive Currie Cup competitions, and such was their strength that from 1965/66 they were allowed to enter two teams in the tournament - a privilege previously only allowed to Transvaal. The ‘first team’ and ‘second team’ squads - known respectively as Natal and Natal B - were not mutually exclusive, and players could move between the teams during the season on the basis of form alone. The two teams would never meet each other; Natal played in Section A of the Currie Cup competition alongside the other leading provincial sides (Transvaal, Eastern and Western Provinces, Rhodesia) while Natal B were in Section B with the relatively lesser lights (Transvaal B, North Eastern Transvaal, Orange Free State, Border, and Griqualand West). Kevin told me that off the field, in Natal at least, the players in the two squads were a single unit, socialising together (it must have helped that they knew each other well from local club cricket), and with the ‘A’ squad players in no way treating the ‘B’ team as poor relations. With promotion or relegation of individual players between the teams always a possibility, it could hardly have been otherwise. Squads for the ‘A’ and the ‘B’ teams were thus selected match-by-match, or perhaps for groups of matches. As the 1965/66 season progressed, both Natal’s Section A side (as usual) and their Section B side (as probably might have been predicted) were riding high in their respective tables. By mid- February the Section A team was tied with Transvaal for first place in their table, with one match to go; while the Section B side were fourth out of six sides in their table, but with matches against the two already-tailed-off bottom sides to come. Victories in those two matches would have made second place in the table likely, and first place an outside possibility. The Natal selectors named a 12-man squad for the B team’s last two matches - at Bloemfontein against Orange Free State (OFS), and against Griqualand West at Kimberley. Four of the 12 had not previously played for either Natal side this season. Two of the four - batsman Grayson Heath and ‘medium-paced bowler who batted’ Rodney Falkson - had appeared in first-class cricket in previous seasons. But the other two had never done so. One was batsman Roger Seymour, and the other, at last, was Kevin Martin. He had finally made it to provincial selection.