COUNTY ARCHIVES

How Sainsbury set the tone for shock win by the 66/1 boys

Paul Edwards Hampshire’s superstars of1973

Paul Edwards looks back to the unlikely winners of the inaugural County Championship trophy and the stories behind the men who earned it

It is golden, it stands something over a foot high and it is shaped like a huge goblet. It is very precious and its worth is far greater than its monetary value; for it represents over five months’ effort across each cricket season. It is the County Championship trophy.

The Lord’s Taverners ECB Trophy has been held aloft by the captains of 14 counties since it was first presented in 1973. There is a photograph of Prince Philip handing over the shiny new prize to Richard Gilliat, the Hampshire skipper, at Buckingham Palace, and the Prince is sharing a joke with the champions.

At the front of the party and clearly enjoying it all hugely is Peter Sainsbury, a 39-year-old all-rounder and the only survivor from the Hampshire side who first won the Championship in 1961.

That is pleasant and appropriate, for in his quiet way Sainsbury was the epitome of all that was good about the county game in his time. “If he ceased to play cricket tomorrow he has already made an indelible mark on those who watched him play,” wrote John Arlott of Sainsbury in 1965. “Cricket matters quite desperately to him, not merely so far as personal performance is concerned, but in every direction.”

The qualities Sainsbury possessed in abundance – enthusiasm, skilfulness, loyalty – were passed on to Hampshire’s younger players when he became the county’s coach following his retirement in 1976. The former Hampshire offspinner, Shaun Udal, tells how he and other colts were interrogated about their weekend performances for their clubs when they reported for work on Monday morning.

What had they done, Sainsbury demanded to know, to help their team?

The professional standards coaches like Sainsbury instilled in young cricketers are still very evident in so many of today’s players, but in this final Archive of the close season, I want to look at that 1973 Hampshire team, the 66/1 boys.

For those were the April odds against Gilliat’s side winning the title. The bookies’ price reflected the view that while Hampshire’s batting might help them achieve a limited-overs triumph, their bowling was not penetrative enough to win Championship matches.

Yet the team’s scorer, Peter White, reckoned it was still worth a punt and he was collecting his winnings in the first few days of September after Hampshire had picked up eight bonus points against Gloucestershire at Bournemouth, the ground where that first Championship had been secured in 1961.

There was no fluke about the business. Hampshire won ten of their 20 matches and drew the other ten. They led Surrey in the final table by a very comfortable 31 points and received £3,000 for their efforts. It was the first year that prize money had been awarded.

There is another photograph of Sainsbury on the balcony at Dean Park. Pint in one hand, he is passing the trophy over to the seamer Bob Herman, whose 63 wickets in 1973 made him the county’s joint leading wicket-taker with his new-ball partner, Mike Taylor, whose contract had not been renewed by Nottinghamshire at the end of 1972.

“Bob had come from Middlesex and had quite a good year in 1972,” recalled Taylor, “but he was not the sort of bowler to make you think, ‘God, we are playing against Bob Herman today’. I am sure he would agree.”

That brand of self-effacement was characteristic of Hampshire’s cricketers in 1973 and it might be thought odd given that the county’s openers that season were Barry Richards, the South African widely considered the best batsman in the world at that time, and the 21-year-old Gordon Greenidge, whom many felt was unlucky not to be selected for the summer’s West Indies touring party.

Rohan Kanhai’s team won the short series 2-0 but Greenidge called attention to his own omission by hitting five centuries and making 1,620 Championship runs for Hampshire. He shared three partnerships over 200 with Richards, was dismissed three times in the 90s and made six other halfcenturies. Richards, who missed four matches through injury, managed 1,239 runs and the pair also pouched 71 catches, most of them in the slips.

Hampshire also benefited from the fact that Greenidge’s parents had moved from Barbados to Reading when their son was 14; it allowed the county to engage David O’Sullivan, the New Zealand spinner, as their second overseas player. And they were perhaps fortunate again that O’Sullivan was not called up by the New Zealand tourists, whose visit occupied the first half of the summer.

However, the tour was long finished when O’Sullivan played his best cricket. The slow left-armer had taken only ten wickets prior to the game against Essex at Portsmouth in early August when his 6-35 on a drying pitch took his side to within a wicket of victory.

In the next four matches, all of which Hampshire won, O’Sullivan took 24 wickets, Sainsbury a further 13. And there were occasions, the first innings of the vital two-day victory over Northants, for example, when the seamers did the bulk of the work. Tom Mottram, a medium-quick bowler who only played 35 matches in a five-year career at Hampshire, took 57 of his 111 wickets in 1973.

Yet for all that Gilliat captained the team shrewdly and sympathetically and Bob Stephenson kept wicket with admirable efficiency, Hampshire’s title still came as something of a shock. In

The Times, John Woodcock declared his home county were the “most surprising winners” in the history of the Championship.

In the following year’s Wisden Brian Hayward placed modest emphasis on the enjoyment the players had derived from their unexpected summer. “There was not a better atmosphere in any other dressing room in England,” he wrote, “Hampshire were always cheerful, friendly and happy and they remained so even when the pressure was greatest.”

Perhaps it was all too improbable to last. In 1974 Hampshire replaced O’Sullivan with the Antiguan fast bowler, Andy Roberts, who had spent the previous season in the second team, dismissing a lot of batsmen and terrifying more or less everybody. Mottram lost his place to Roberts but the logic of the selection was irrefutable. Roberts took 111 wickets at 13.45 apiece and Hampshire were stronger for his presence. They only failed to retain the title when rain washed out five days’ play in their last three games, including the whole of the last match of the season against Yorkshire at Bournemouth.

Sainsbury remained an ever-present in 1974, just as he had been in 1973, when he finished top of the bowling averages. He was also third in the batting list albeit that his technique frequently consisted of nudges, flicks and nurdles; he was the sort of batsman for whom a captain might place three midwickets. No matter. He scored 20,176 first-class runs. His method worked for him.

By the time Sainsbury retired only Phil Mead and Alec Kennedy had played more games for Hampshire and only eight fielders in the history of the Championship had taken more than his 546 catches. His work at short leg and in the outfield still evokes wistful smiles from those privileged to witness it.

“I didn’t see a better fielder,” said the Hampshire batsman, Jimmy Gray. “He just caught the ball and threw it back. And those people don’t get publicity, do they?”

No, perhaps they don’t.Yet Sainsbury set an example to those with whom he played and those whom he coached; and we may hope that they in their turn will pass it on to young cricketers seized with this strange obsession that they would like to spend their adult lives playing this damn silly, damn beautiful game. Such notions justify the behaviour of children who still pester their parents to bowl at them in the garden or hall.

The Hampshire seamer, Malcolm Heath, remembered this about Sainsbury: “When he was a boy, his grandparents took him to Beale’s in Bournemouth. ‘What would you like, Peter?’ they asked. It was a great big department store, and do you know what he said? ‘I’d like a ball’. It was all he ever wanted.”

The 2017 County Championship begins on the morning this

There was not a better atmosphere in any dressing room in England. Hampshire were always cheerful, friendly and happy

edition of The Cricket Paper plops onto doormats. You may even be reading this as you travel to Headingley, The Oval or any of the other four other grounds where games are to take place. If so, thanks a lot. For all that there are glitzier models on the market, Championship cricket still bewitches a surprising number of people. They take days off to watch their county or they steal crafty glances at the scores on their works PCs. They tweet, blog and agonise. Still crazy after all these years…

Peter Sainsbury, of course, would understand. He, like thousands of others, was lost to cricket at first sight. He went from fresh-faced colt to battletoughened senior pro and on to coaching, where toughness and kindness were two sides of one coin. He and thousands like him made the game what it is. It is their legacy we hold in our hands this morning.