Strathmore Cricket Union: the first 90 years a history 1928-2018

98 1968 saw at least one good cricket match on TV when Derek Underwood spun England to victory at the Oval after an army of volunteer spectators had agreed to help mop up the pitch for him. The rest of the series hadn’t been all that impressive, but that game was very good. There was of course the side effect that this game, in which Basil D’Oliveira had played a significant part, led to the D’Oliveira affair when England first did not choose Basil to play in South Africa, then did so when Tom Cartwright called off, and the tour of 1968/69 had to be cancelled when South Africa refused to accept Basil because of the colour of his skin! They then had the gall to talk about “political interference!” This was bad enough, but was not a threat to International peace. A far more serious international event happened in August when the Soviet Union, disturbed by the liberalising tendencies of the Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek, suddenly invaded that country. In essence, therewas no real difference between what the Soviets had done in 1968 and what Hitler had done in Poland in 1939, but, perhaps mercifully, given that nuclear war was a strong possibility, there was no reaction from the West other than protests and a certain amount of self-righteous and hypocritical stuff from the Americans who were doing the same, if not worse, in Vietnam. This year Nigel Hazel topped the Union Batting Averages with an average of 115.60. By an arithmetical quirk, his average was actually higher than his top score of 109 not out, but this was because he batted 16 times and was 11 times not out as he totalled 578. This was phenomenal stuff, and with GavinMcKiddie this year topping the Bowling Averages (CharlieMcPherson in fact was better, but he was the professional of Blairgowrie), it was little surprise that Strathmore topped the table once again with a percentage that was 20 % better than the second placed team. Dundee YMCA won the 2nd Division, but it was sad to note that two of the traditionally better teams of the Union, Meigle and Arbroath occupied the bottom two places in the League. Such was the virtual paralysis that Strathmore were able to inflict on their rivals. Administratively things were not so good with Secretary Bob Laing once again resigning, and once again at the AGMbeing persuadedwith apologies and promises of good behaviour in the future to stay on. This time there seemed to be two “casus belli” for what was now beginning to look like Bob’s “annual” resignation. One was that the dates for the Strathmore Union representative fixtures against the other associations had been