County Archives - The Somerset team of 1974

Team of young talent was being forged into a major force

In late April, Richards marked his debut by making 81 not out. His team mates lined up to applaud him back to the pavilion

Paul Edwards looks at an emerging team that would become England’s dominant one-day force with some of the game’s greatest personalities

Sport offers few sights as exciting as budding genius; and perhaps none as poignant as the final flowering of greatness. So what can we feel but envy when we reflect on the riches placed before Somerset’s supporters in the summer of 1974?

Even across four decades there is skittish delight in remembering the captaincy of Brian Close, who had been sacked by Yorkshire in 1970 and was now leading Somerset with madcap brilliance. The skipper’s more bizarre stratagems – like donning the keeping gloves in a vital game in 1973 and then discarding them when the distinctly quick Allan Jones was bowling – tried the patience of his more experienced colleagues but they followed him out of curiosity and faith.

And Close had a corps of formidable county cricketers on the front row of the team photograph in 1974. They included Brian Langford, an off-spinner who had made his Somerset debut two decades previously, Jim Parks, a batsman who had left his beloved Sussex during an uncivil war in 1973, and Tom Cartwright, whose medium-pace bowling had been the rock upon which Somerset’s attack was built since his move from Warwickshire in 1969.

Yet when that fine season is discussed in West Country pubs, it is not the leathery veterans which the drinkers recall but a group of young cricketers in whom the county had decided to invest the mighty sum of £6,000. Five of these six freshmen went on to enjoy successful cricket careers. One was plainly a genius yet Close’s story went that he only arrived at Taunton on the toss of a coin in a West Indian bar. His name was Vivian Richards and in 1974 he had yet to play Test cricket.

Another was an all-rounder although the people at Lord’s, where he was on the groundstaff, thought he was a joke bowler and it didn’t help that a few people kept mispronouncing his name. Subsequent events have tended to cast doubt on that assessment of his skill and no one mangles Ian Botham’s name these days.

Then there was Vic Marks, an England off-spinner whose service to Somerset has now entered its fifth decade; Phil Slocombe, a classy middle-order batsman whose silky footwork to the slow bowlers is still fondly remembered; and Peter Roebuck, a fine opener and arguably the most perplexed and perplexing of the five. And this galaxy of young talent was led by a captain who some thought should be certified and others reckoned should be knighted. Perhaps it could only be Somerset.

For all that he only played five Championship games that summer, Cartwright was a crucial presence at the County Ground in 1974. In his later writing, Roebuck used the model of the wartime cabinet and compared Cartwright’s Attlee to Close’s Churchill. Certainly the former Warwickshire bowler was an excellent foil for the eccentric skipper.Yet his main contribution to Somerset in that summer when they finished fifth in the Championship, were runners-up in the John Player League and reached two limited-overs semi-finals, was as a coach.

Cartwright believed passionately in the development of young cricketers. It was he and the cricket chairman, Roy Kerslake, who had decided to invest in young talent, most of it homegrown. The exception was Richards, who spent 1973 playing club cricket for Lansdown while completing his residential qualification.

Cartwright’s recollections of his first sight of the 21-year-old Richards in the Taunton nets say something about both the coach and the cricketer.

“Viv batted for half an hour. He didn’t hit the ball off the square, but he looked magnificent.You could have put a pint of beer on his head, and he wouldn’t have spilt a drop while he was batting. He was absolutely perfect.”

Richards was the only Somerset batsman to score over a 1,000 runs in Championship cricket that season. In late April he marked his debut by making 81 not out to take his side to victory against Glamorgan in a Benson & Hedges game at Swansea. His team mates lined up to applaud him back to the mighty pavilion. A week later at Taunton Richards, took 15 runs off the first over bowled to him by Gloucestershire’s Mike Procter. There were two fours and then a response to a very rapid bouncer.

“The ball finished up in the organ works,” recalled Cartwright. “You could hear it rattling round the machinery in there, never to be seen again.”

Taunton’s Press box in those days was held together, so it seemed, by a few nails, a roll of typewriter ribbon and a lot of love. Sitting at their desks Eric Hill, Alan Gibson and David Foot – as fine a triumvirate as have ever written about a single county at the same time? – watched games in 1974 and wondered at the glory laid before them.

Other players commanded the eye, even on the days when Richards batted well. Peter Denning, born in Chewton Mendip, educated at Millfield and with a hairstyle sometimes reminiscent of a badly-constructed haystack, was as Somerset as they come. He made 87 in that B&H game against Gloucestershire and then a glorious 112 in the Gillette Cup quarter-final victory over Surrey at Taunton. “He was popular, stubborn, honest and inclined to regard anyone living outside his county with a mixture of pity and naked hostility,” wrote Roebuck.

Cartwright watched it all with quiet pride and some nervousness. It took time for his young players to earn their chance and in the meantime Close had a cadre of more experienced cricketers at his disposal. The seam bowling, for example, was left in the capable hands of Hallam Moseley and Allan Jones, both of whom took over 60 wickets. Despite missing eight Championship games through injury, Merv Kitchen made 790 runs and the wicketkeeper Derek Taylor managed 927. Close, who was still an excellent cricketer, made 984 runs, took 19 catches at short leg and wondered what had won the 3.15 at Towcester.

The 18-year-old Botham was learning his craft, yet in the B&H quarter-final against Hampshire he revealed a precocious ability to take a match and shape it as he demanded. In the first innings he bowled Barry Richards for 13, but Hampshire still managed 182 and that looked more than enough when Somerset crumbled to 113-8.

Botham’s response was blood and guts defiance. Despite being hit in the mouth by Andy Roberts, he added 63 in 13 overs with Moseley and sealed the victory with a cover drive off Bob Herman.

The journos got it right when they labelled the game an epic and over 6,500 watched it all. Tom Cartwright, however, missed those final overs.

“Ian took them on. I couldn’t watch it,” he said. “I remember disappearing from the dressing room and wandering out into the streets outside the ground. It was very eerie; there was nobody in the vicinity as they were all inside watching the game. And I could hear the cheers. It wasn’t just the winning of the game that stirred me; it was that it was one of my boys and that I could see this vision of the future. All my good days were when these lads started to do well. In a way I got too involved. I’d go home at night and worry whether they were playing well or not.”

Two spectators required to watch the game were Vic Marks and Peter Roebuck, both of whom were on scoreboard duty. Marks was to go up to Oxford that autumn and Roebuck to Cambridge, but they found the Hampshire game to be an occasion when passion overpowered intellect.

“We got so excited that we kept cocking it up,” said Marks. “We all knew Both was a bit special, though we never dreamt he’d become what he became. We always wanted to watch him – not just because he was Both but because he was the same age as us. If he could make an impact, perhaps we could as well.”

“Perhaps we could as well.” The phrase encapsulates the simple hope of the young cricketer and it carries the same resonance this spring as it did over four decades ago. Marks didn’t play a Championship match in 1974, while Roebuck appeared just twice, making 46 in his first innings against Warwickshire at Weston-super-Mare. Close complimented him before adding that he should have got a hundred.

Cricket’s glittering prizes were still to come for Somerset’s class of ’74.

They were to play leading roles as their county woon five one-day trophies in as many years. And, yes, in time, other prizes lost their glitter. By then, Tom Cartwright had been sacked when an oaf insisted that he play when injured in 1976.

But it is not mere romance to say that those who remain from that summer are bound by the shared memories of the time when they were ‘Tom’s boys’ and were having their cricketing careers guided by a coach who knew their names and cared almost as passionately about their futures as they did.

“Tom talked cricket all evening, and the young ones just listened to him,” said Brian Langford. “He knew so much about cricket, more than anyone I’ve met.”