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

111 CHAPTER EIGHT CRICKET IN THE 1970s The 1970s were an ugly decade. It is often cruelly described as “the decade that fashion forgot”. Any photograph taken in the 1970s is not likely to be a flattering one with long, unkempt hair, sideburns and moustaches being the order of the day. In some ways the images were a throwback to the Victorian era, except in colour. It is often said that if you are to play cricket well, you have to look as if you can do so. Very few cricketing photographs of this era in tea pavilions make one think “This was a team of world beaters”. In addition the years from 1972 onwards saw some dreadful social unrest and general upheaval as no British Government seemed to have the slightest idea of how to deal with inflation. We had an American President being forced to resign for the crime of burglary and his part in the cover- up at the same time as that country was struggling to come to terms with the undeniable fact that it was (painfully) losing the Vietnam War. We had a couple of Miners’ Strikes in Great Britain in 1972 and 1974 with the accompanying power cuts and scenes of intolerable violence on picket lines. At times it seemed as if all authority was going to be lost, and that the country was indeed sinking into the new dark ages. One recalls the banner at Lord’s about John Snow, arguably England’s best bowler of the time. “John Snow strikes faster that British Leyland” – a sly and none too subtle dig at the perpetual militancy in the British motor industry. Fortunately some things remained stable, and there was still cricket, the only appreciable difference being that it was nowplayed by youngmenwith long hair. England, captained by a Scotsman, lost the Ashes in Australia to sheer, frightening pace, while their best batsman Geoffrey Boycott, who, like Achilles in The Iliad “sulked in his tent” and refused to join the fray. They fared dreadfully against the West Indies as well, and just as the Ashes were being won back by the restored Geoffrey Boycott and others in 1977, the Packer Circus appeared, something that changed cricket for ever with its apparent justification of nothing other than greed. The disguise was “legitimate financial rewards for cricketers”, something that cut very little ice among cricket fans. These were tumultuous earth-shattering days, and the “jolly old chaps” of Lord’s never regained their pre-eminence in the cricketing world. They had to surrender to a new, more blatant and less subtle form of capitalism.