by Mayukh Ghosh
“We are irrevocably and wholly opposed to one-day cricket in first-class (or indeed any important cricket) for one very simple reason. It is equated with one-innings cricket. And that is NOT cricket.”
Rowland Bowen.
The Cricket Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 3.
It’s been sixty years and one-day cricket has taken giant strides to become the most popular form of the game in most parts of the cricket playing world.
Then, over the last two decades, T20, T10, The Hundred and others have arrived and changed the game forever.
.Never the purists’ choice but no denying that these matches in coloured clothing, using white balls and shorter boundaries, generate the revenue the game often need so badly.
David Tossell has been a popular and well-respected sportswriter for over a couple of decades.
His latest book is about limited overs cricket. To mark the 60th anniversary of the inclusion of one-day cricket in the cricket calendar, he has chosen twenty-five defining matches to chart the history of this format of the game.
Tossell has written extensively on both football and cricket and for things to make perfect sense, we must go back to the 1970s when he was growing up in London.
“I grew up in north London as a huge fan of football and cricket. While I was a died-in-the-wool Arsenal fan when it came to football, my allegiances in cricket were a little more fluid, focusing on the England team and my earliest individual heroes, Geoffrey Boycott and Tony Greig.
My earliest memory of watching cricket live was sitting on the boundary at The Oval as a nine-year-old for the second day of the England v Rest of the World game in 1970, watching Graeme Pollok and Garry Sobers construct a sublime partnership of 150-plus. I was too young to recognise the nuance of a South African and a West Indian in perfect harmony in a series that came about because of South Africa's apartheid regime - which had led to the cancellation of the proposed tour of England- but knew I had witnessed something special.
When I wasn't spending my spare summer days in the 1970s playing club cricket, I could be found at Lord's, where I was a junior Middlesex member, marvelling at the likes of Wayne Daniel and Graham Barlow in the championship-winning team of Mike Brearley. I still get shivers when I remember one terrifying spell of Daniel's between lunch and tea on the second day of a game against Worcestershire in 1977. He took four wickets and retired two batters hurt. It's still the fastest bowling I have seen in person.
I am a Middlesex member once again and, now that Arsenal's old stadium at Highbury is no more, Lord's remains my favourite place in the world.
Having gone into sports journalism and ended up as executive sports editor on a national newspaper - the now-defunct TODAY - I moved into public relations as head of European communications for the National Football League (NFL), another of my sporting passions, working for hem for 26 years until last year. An unexpected spin-off of that career switch was that, having moved away from a pattern of late-night working and having to view all sports through a work lens, I found I had time to fulfil an ambition of writing books.
After a few football books, beginning with pet subject of Arsenal in the 1970s, my first cricket book had its roots in further fond memories of the 1970s. To be honest, I could say that about most of my books, which tend to focus on the personalities, teams and events of that era. I had always been fascinated by the 1976 West Indies tour - when Greig threatened to 'make them grovel' - and remember scoring the majority of the series while watching on TV. It was a subject that allowed me to write about some great cricket, some fascinating social history of Britain in the 1970s, and some compelling individual stories.
For the past 20-odd years I have never been without a book project on the go. And while I have written more books about football, it is cricket that is my primary sporting obsession these days. Having given up playing for 25 years because of work and family commitments. I took to the field again when I reached my 50th birthday and now play club cricket at weekends and county over-60s cricket for Buckinghamshire in midweek. After giving up full-time work, I also qualified as an umpire so I could spend even more time around the sport! My wife, Sara, who is no fan of cricket, deserves a medal.”
The Gillette Cup anniversary was the driving force behind doing the book at this point. As an added bonus, there’s a 50-over World Cup too this very year.
“Yes the 60th anniversary of the Gillette Cup - and therefore limited-overs cricket at the professional level - was most definitely something I knew was looming. The fact that it fell in a 50-over World Cup year as well made it seem like a most relevant topic for a book. If you look at cricket in the 60 years before 1963, it pretty much stood still. The game being played in 1963 was essentially the same as at the start of the century. Yet the past 60 years have seen a revolution in the sport, almost entirely based on one-day cricket in its various guises. Now you can see the influence on the shorter game in the way that a team such as England are approaching Test cricket.”
The thought of chronicling the history of one-day cricket in this manner came from a non-cricket book.
“In terms of the format for the book and the way in which I chose to trace the history of limited-overs cricket I have to confess to being strongly influenced by a friend of mine, Matthew Sherry, who wrote a book on the 100 years of the NFL by focusing on certain games. I decided I would take that approach, highlighting 25 specific matches - not always the most iconic or historic games, but those I felt allowed me to best chronicle the development of limited-overs cricket over the decades.”
But choosing these twenty-five matches from thousands played all over the world was not easy.
“Choosing the matches was a lot of fun. The main aim was to select games that enabled me to produce a narrative of the 60 years of limited-overs cricket. So some matches were chosen because they in themselves were obvious landmarks, for example, the first Gillette Cup final and the first World Cup final, and others were selected because they provided a good platform from which to explore certain narrative strands and explain how the limited-overs game has evolved.
Then there were others that did not necessarily impact the development of one-day cricket but were simply great games or performances, such as the Viv Richards epic in Manchester in 1984. Or those that presented an important moment in the history of the sport in a wider context, for example the key game in the Hansie Cronje affair.
I also tried to strike a balance between not always selecting the obvious matches, and also trying not to be too clever by choosing really obscure ones. Obviously, India's victory over West Indies in the 1983 World Cup final was a pivotal moment that changed the sport by making India fall in love with the shorter game, and that game is discussed. But I chose to anchor that chapter on an ODI between the two countries in Guyana earlier that year, when India proved to themselves they could beat the best team in the world - as they went on to do twice in the tournament.
And as I acknowledge in the book, there is naturally some geographical bias because I am from England. and any list such as this is, of course, entirely subjective. Someone else might have had the same idea for the book, followed the same narrative path, yet chosen entirely different matches.”
An interesting book by a fine writer.
It is available from the publishers Fairfield Books: https://www.thenightwatchman.net/buy/one-day-at-a-time
Also, as always, the book is available to buy from all the usual online and physical outlets.