HOOK’S SHOT: This week marks the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest sporting performances in history, and one which marked out the 1976 fifth Test match between England and the West Indies at The Oval as one of the great Tests in history.
MARCUS HOOK talks to Michael Holding and Mike Selvey about a game which will stand long in cricket fans’ memories
It is the figures from the game which make it stand out. The West Indies winning The Oval Test by 231 runs, despite virtually forfeiting their second innings. Double centurions on both sides. And one fast bowler, one very fast bowler, taking 14 wickets in the match.
Unstoppable: Michael Holding was one of the fastest, and most accurate, pace bowlers cricket has ever seen
The fifth Test match of 1976 was played out 50 years ago this week at the Kennington Oval. It was one of the most significant contests in Test match history – with Michael Holding’s 8-59 and 6-57 marking him out as one of the great fast bowlers.
Viv Richards set the tone with 291 as the visitors racked up 687-8 declared in their first innings. Yet by the close of the third day, the Saturday, England were still in the match, at 305-5 with opener Dennis Amiss on 176 not out on his way to a double century of his own.
Yet it was Holding’s Herculean display which shattered the England batsmen’s stumps and, in some cases, their hearts, too.
As now, August 1976 saw the country in the grip of a heatwave – to the extent that the government appointed a Minister for Drought, Denis Howell, who urged us all to take baths together to save water. Standpipes and hosepipe bans defined the summer, and by the time the five-match Test series culminated at The Oval, the outfield was snay brown-coloured, instead of its usual lush green.
Everything pointed to The Oval being a batter’s paradise – an odds-on draw. The bookies were offering 6/1 on England registering their first win in a series that began with their captain, Tony Greig, foolishly stating his intention to make the West Indians “grovel”.
Folklore has it that Greig’s appearance on the evening news, shortly before the first Test, aired just as the West Indians were assembling for a team meeting. According to Viv Richards: “Someone said to the skipper, ‘Clive, are we still gonna have the meeting?’
“He said: ‘No, the meeting’s over’.”
The manner in which England were dismantled at The Oval, first by Richards with the bat and ultimately by Holding marked the start of a 20-year dominance of Test cricket by the West Indies.
“I hear the weather has been similar this summer – hot and dry,” Holding told Inside Croydon last week. “But I doubt it’s as dry as 1976. There were hosepipe bans and nothing at The Oval was green during that game.”
Only two fast bowlers have ever taken 14 wickets or more in an Oval Test – Australia’s Fred Spofforth in 1882, which prompted The Sporting Times to publish the mock obituary to English cricket that led to the creation of The Ashes, and Holding, in 1976, as England were bowled out for 435 and 203.
Masterstroke: Viv Richards, batting at No3, scored a double century on the first day of the Test
Mike Selvey, playing in only his second Test, was one of the Englishmen on the receiving end. “It unquestionably stands as one of the greatest bowling displays in history,” says Selvey.
“Not only was it a great display of youthful stamina to get through 50-plus overs, it was achieved on a most inhospitable pitch, a massive playing area – it was bigger in those days anyway, but the boundary was the gully running alongside the walls – so devoid of moisture that the grass had died back. The outline of the drains under the outfield were visible.
“It was a flog for me.
“Knotty [wicketkeeper Alan Knott] dropped Roy Fredericks off me in the second over of the match, poaching a catch from first slip. That was the closest I ever came to taking another Test wicket!
“Thereafter, it was just feeding Viv’s batting and damage limitation. I believe he was the first non-opener to reach a double hundred on the first day of a Test.
“Mikey largely took the pitch out of the equation by bowling very fast, full and straight. He also ‘tailed’ the ball in, which we now recognise as classic reverse swing, but about which probably no one outside Pakistan at the time had a clue.
“The conditions were perfect for it. I think we all recognised the phenomenon of reverse, but didn’t understand it for what it was.
“Mikey was also driven by pride and the corporate anger that he and his team felt at Greigy’s ill-judged and offensive ‘grovel’ remark before the series.
“In England’s first innings, I dragged my first ball onto the stumps from quite wide (so keen was I to try and get behind the line). Second innings, I made fur not out, including a two or three driven square.”
Second Test: Mike Selvey went on to become a widely admired journalist and broadcaster
Selvey, who after his playing career went on to become The Guardian cricket correspondent and BBC Test Match Special pundit, adds: “Before the game Greigy in his team talk said: ‘We may not be able to bat them off the park and we may not be able to bowl them off it, but we can certainly field them off it’.
“I remember looking around at 600-odd for four and there was a dusty bedraggled Deadly [Derek Underwood] in his 55th over at the end of his run, and in a circle in the field were me, a stayer rather than sprinter, Peter Willey, with a gammy knee, Geoff Miller, Bob Willis, Bob Woolmer, Dennis Amiss, who hated fielding, Chris Balderstone, a stroller as a footballer, David Steele and Greigy …
“And I thought ‘Yeah, dead right Greigy’.”
Bowled over: England batsman Chris Balderstone never had a chance when playing against the majestic pace of the West Indies’ Michael Holding at The Oval in 1976
All about survival
All those years ago, The Oval Test was always the last of the summer, and it was always played before the end of the school summer holidays. So equipped with my small booklet pass as a proud junior member of Surrey County Cricket Club, I was able to walk through the Hobbs Gates on the first day of that Test in eager anticipation of what was to unfold before me.
I’d done the same the year before, when I’d also taken the bus to Kennington Oval on the Wednesday, the day before the Test, to see the Australians practising in the nets on the edge of the outfield. They were all very obliging when I asked for their autographs, and Dennis Lillee kindly allowed me to carry his bag back to the Pavilion.
I wasn’t allowed inside, though. I was only a junior member, after all. We knew our place, and that was in the junior pavilion. It was a rickety old building even 50 years ago, long since demolished to make way for the more modern players’ changing rooms. It served its purpose, though, by keeping cheeky teenagers out of the members’ bar.
And it was here that I settled down, more in hope than… well, this was a tortured cricketing summer for England. In July, we’d been given the afternoon off school on the day that old boy Mike Selvey was making his Test debut at Old Trafford.
Now I had the chance to see him playing in his second Test. I wasn’t to know it would be his last.
I had pretty much the same seat for each of the five days, positioned at about seven o’clock from the wicket. With my sandwiches and Playfair Cricket Annual in my bag, it was there that I opened up my Bill Frindall’s scorebook, to record every dot ball, every catch and every run over the course of the five days of what turned out to be an often brutal battle between England and the West Indies. Mike Selvey ended that match with bowling figures of 0-111 off 24 dispiriting overs…
And I think that this Test was the first time I’d ever seen a grown man cry.
Clive Lloyd, the West Indies captain, pulled off a tactical masterstroke in the second innings. West Indies scored 687 for 8 before declaring in their first, and England kept themselves in the game with their 435 all-out.
We were, by now, midway through Monday, the fourth day of a five-day Test. The draw beckoned. But not for Lloyd and his mercurial Windies team. He sent in Roy Fredericks and Gordon Greenidge, and in an early version of BazBall, they rattled off 182 in barely 30 overs, before Lloyd went on to the balcony and beckoned his openers in.
The England batsmen now had to see off Holding and Andy Roberts for another day and a bit. It was all about survival.
Later in his career, Holding was given the nickname “Whispering Death”. Watching him glide along his run-up from the Pavilion End, it was easy to see why: graceful, paceful, his long approach had the crowd awed into silence, to the moment of deadly release.
Dual professional: Carlisle United’s Chris Balderstone
Chris Balderstone was a footballer for Carlisle United, and helped them win promotion to the old First Division. He spent his summers as a middle-order batsman at Leicestershire. By 1976, the England cricket selectors were running out of options to find batters who could stand up to pace attacks. Boycott was still on his long-term “sabbatical” from fast bowlers, so Brian Close got a recall in his 40s, Surrey skipper John Edrich faced the barrage for a couple of Tests. And Balderstone made his England debut. Poor bloke.
In the first innings in his second Test at The Oval, Balderstone failed to score, bowled Holding. In the second innings, my trusty Frindall’s scorebook shows Balderstone faced six balls. I never made a note, as I ought to have done, but memory tells me that Balderstone never laid a bat on any of them.
For Balderstone’s seventh ball, Holding went back to the start of his run, almost to the end of the outfield, and wound himself up to deliver a straight ball that was so fast, it’s unlikely that anyone in the ground saw it. Balderstone certainly didn’t, but just heard the death rattle of his stumps being hit behind him.
It’s a long walk from the Vauxhall End back to the Pavilion at The Oval. On his way back, I’m sure I saw Chris Balderstone wipe away a tear.
Steven Downes
Holding says: “There was one personal experience that possibly hasn’t been written about.”
“In England’s first innings, when they were nine wickets down, I was on a hat-trick and Lloydie called everyone together in a huddle near the pitch while Bob Willis was walking out. As I approached the huddle, what was in my mind was Lloydie wanting to concoct a plan for my hat-trick ball.
Holding fast: the former West Indies pace bowler was a Sky commentator until recent retirement
“I was 22 years old and I thought it was all about me. So, you can imagine my bubble burst when the conversation was about whether to enforce the follow-on or to bat again. It was all about the team. I learnt that lesson early.
“I didn’t get the hat-trick of course, but only because the delivery wasn’t good enough, irrespective of what field had been set.”
Folklore also suggests that as the victorious West Indians were being engulfed by their fans at the end of the game, a spectator handed one of the umpires £5 to pass on to Holding.
“The story about the £5 note was told by Dickie Bird himself, who umpired in the game,” Holding says.
“I presume it’s correct, but haven’t really verified it. I’ve just accepted it as true. He said during the melee that took place on the field, a gentleman gave him the £5 note and asked him to pass it on to me. Dickie said it went straight into his Yorkshire Building Society account!”
The summer of 1976 was my introduction to cricket. It helped that all the Test matches – plus more than a dozen Sunday league county games – were broadcast live on the BBC, even though, in those days, there were just three TV channels to satisfy the masses.
Pitch invasion: no one knows what umpire Dickie Bird did with Holding’s fiver…
I remember going with my sister to see Bugsy Malone, at the pictures, and making numerous trips to the Purley Way Lido. But the highlight was my first visit to The Oval, a fortnight or so after the last Test.
It was the final day (of three) of a bore draw between Surrey and Sussex – the sort of day that would put anyone off ever wanting to go to cricket again.
But not me, due to Richards, who I still rate as the best batter I’ve ever seen, and, of course, Holding, who, for five days, had me spellbound.
Recent cricket columns from Marcus Hook:
- Gone missing: Surrey handicapped by loss of 17 senior players
- Boomer Harris setting records on way to Surrey’s T20 finals
- Blind man enjoys wonders of cricket comradeship at The Oval
- What the Foakes! Surrey keeper ruled out after bowling injury
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I was at the Oval test match in 1976 (aged 10), and still have a cricket scoring book where I scored all of Viv Richard’s 291. Michael Holding must have had the smoothest run-up and bowling action ever(?). Bowlers like Bob Willis seemed to be making a huge effort to bowl, and looked like they might have a heart attack at any moment, but Holding would just glide up to the wicket and bowl fast and accurately with no effort !