A dead-rubber victory has greater tokenistic than tangible value. A morale restorative at the conclusion of an arduous series deceives in the flattery of figures and the illusion that the defeated side had finally, if too late, found the measure of a persistently superior opponent. On rare occasions – Centurion 2000 before evidence of Hansie Cronje’s sickening collusion in corruption was uncovered – it offers hope, a sign of spring, foundations on which to build afresh. Usually, though, it serves as a consolation prize, a source of ephemeral, ultimately unimportant solace, a meaningless quirk considered by history with the same contempt Les Dawson reserved for a Blankety Blank chequebook and pen.
The sixth Test between Australia and England at Melbourne in 1975 was one such inconsequential triumph, giving England comfort after their spirits and bodies had been broken by Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson, Max Walker and the bats of Doug Walters, Ian and Greg Chappell. The tourists won by an innings and four runs to lose the series 4-1, the captain, Mike Denness, adding 188 in his ninth innings to the 130 he had managed in his previous eight during his second Test back after dropping himself at the SCG for poor form.
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Keith Fletcher, who had been mercilessly targeted after encouraging Tony Greig to bounce Lillee at the Gabba, made 146. At Sydney Fletcher had gloved a vicious lifter from Thomson to defend his cheekbone and deflected it on to the badge of his MCC touring cap, an embroidered image of England’s patron saint slaying the dragon, from where it ricocheted towards cover. Only profound surprise dulling his reactions prevented Ross Edwards from running forward to catch Fletcher out. “Blimey!” said Geoff Arnold from the safety of the dressing room. “St George has been knocked off his ‘orse!”
Thomson was ruled out of the last Test with a sore shoulder and Lillee pulled up lame with a trapped nerve in a foot after six overs. Three of England’s four century partnerships of the series took place after Lillee had hobbled off. “When the cat’s away” pertains all the more when the felines are a pair of sabre-toothed tigers and the mice scampered to a comfortable victory, then convalesced by defeating New Zealand 1-0 in a two-Test series, with hundreds for Denness and Dennis Amiss and a double for Fletcher before heading home.
At Lord’s the inquest into England’s humiliation drew the blood of the three members of the selection committee under the chairman, Alec Bedser. Ossie Wheatley, Jack Bond and Brian Taylor, county stalwarts but without a Test cap to share between them, were asked to take the honourable course and were replaced by Sir Leonard Hutton, Ken Barrington and Charlie Elliott. The new panel was split two-two over Denness’s reappointment but, despite his technical flaws against fast bowling and his traumatic loss of confidence, Bedser’s casting vote gave him the captaincy for the Prudential World Cup and the opening match of four Tests against Australia, the first back-to-back series since 1911-12 as everyone nudged up a year to make sure 1975 – notionally a year for the visit of South Africa – did not have to emulate 1970 and require a summons into the breach for a scratch Rest of the World party.
Tony Greig in top form
The heir apparent, Tony Greig, began the season in extraordinary nick and on the eve of the World Cup had a phenomenal four days against Warwickshire, scoring 226 and 71 in the Championship match and an unbeaten 108 in the John Player League game on the Sunday between the first and second days. When the tournament began England were barely tested by India (thanks to Sunil Gavaskar’s perverse go-slow), East Africa and New Zealand in qualifying for the semi-final where they again came up against Australia.
Denness top-scored with 27 in a total of 93 on a typical bowlers’ paradise at Headingley. Gary Gilmour, the fourth seamer, hooped it about on a green pitch to take six for 12 and then, when Australia’s top order had been skittled to leave them 39 for six, made a run-a-ball 28 to take them home. Australia were defeated in the final by West Indies, a match made memorable by Clive Lloyd scoring a superb hundred, Vivian Richards fielding like a vengeful dervish and Thomson and Lillee digging in for a thrilling last-wicket partnership bedevilled by premature crowd invasions in the midsummer twilight.
Bedser, who refused to take England’s best fast bowler, John Snow, on tour, was persuaded by his fellow selectors to stomach his presence at home, making him one of two additions to the touring party for the first Ashes Test of the summer at Edgbaston. Snow had not played for England for two years. The other recruit was called up to play his debut after scoring 75 for MCC against Australia in early July, an innings in which he hooked Thomson and Gilmour for sixes and clumped Lillee through cover in that oddly forceful but diffident manner that became so familiar over the next 20 years. At the age of 21 Graham Gooch became the youngest batsman picked for England since Colin Cowdrey was sent on the first of six Ashes tours in 1954.
Gooch remembers that the rest of the squad were stand-offish when they met the day before the match, no one speaking of tactics or even bothering to welcome him into the fold. When he went to the bar after the traditional eve of Test dinner, his team-mates were nowhere to be seen. He joined a demoralised, apprehensive and fatalistic side. When Denness won the toss the following morning and took 10 minutes with his council of senior players to tell the umpires what England would do, it is not surprising that interpretations of his decision to bowl were more psychological than meteorological. It was an overcast morning and the pitch had enough emerald strands to suggest it would reward the bowlers but more than anything the insertion suggested the captain wanted to postpone the ordeal as long as possible.
Denness must go
Where Denness saw green, his critics discerned yellow. Australia finished the day on 243 for five and the Daily Express summed up the lack of faith in the captain with its headline on the Friday: “Denness must go.” Even the Spectator pitched in, referring to the captain’s “manifest inadequacy” and when Gooch bagged a pair and England were bowled out twice on a damp pitch after the predicted rain arrived to make the uncovered wicket treacherous and lost by an innings and 85 runs, the poster on the newspaper sellers’ stands outside the ground demanded “Denness must go”.
The captain’s tone of voice betrayed him during the post-match interview. He was characteristically civil and thoughtful, his tartan trews and club tie making him look as well as sound like a stretched Ronnie Corbett. He had already offered his resignation but played a straight bat, saying his future was not his to decide. Greig was the frontrunner in the successor stakes but there were also advocates for a Churchillesque hour-of-need recall to the colours for the 44-year-old Brian Close or the 43-year-old Raymond Illingworth.
Hampshire’s Richard Gilliat was also a candidate for the “crisis-requires-public-school-educated-new-broom” school, the same voices who gave us Chris Cowdrey’s preposterous Lady-Jane-Grey reign 13 years later. The selectors, fortunately, followed the Australian model and gave it to Greig who, in the absence of Geoffrey Boycott, was demonstrably the best player. After Greig became a pariah to establishment eyes by joining World Series Cricket, it was almost taboo to acclaim his brilliance as a player: indeed as he forged a career in insurance and the media following his early retirement, it was difficult to get even him to talk about it. His critics would concede that he had a genius only for self-promotion and making money but they overlooked the fact that for all his crass attempts to provoke the opposition, he could also be canny and diligent.
He was appointed captain for the remaining three Tests the day after the Edgbaston defeat and before his first selection meeting he canvassed the opinions of the best county quicks and several umpires. “Who is the best English player of fast bowling?” he asked. “Who is the most difficult player on the circuit to get out?” The almost universal response was, of course, Boycott. But Greig persisted. “Who comes next?” The answer, a surprising one for Greig too, was Northamptonshire’s David Steele, a 33-year-old Staffordshire-born No3 in his 13th season at Wantage Road, a printer by trade who had been mentioned as a potential international only once, as a possible for the side Tony Lewis took to India in 1972-73.
The man, inevitably known as “Stainless” became the first captain’s-pick of the Greig era, joining seven survivors from Edgbaston plus Bob Woolmer, then seen as an all-rounder and picked to bat below Alan Knott at No8, Barry Wood and Peter Lever.
Steele dogged bat
Steele’s selection was no harbinger for optimism. He was seen as “dogged” at best, his resoluteness praised but little hope invested that he could succeed where the more stylish Fletcher, Denness and Luckhurst had all failed.
Greig was not the type of captain to defer a challenge and, on winning the toss at Lord’s, chose to bat. Wood survived 12 balls until Lillee trapped him leg-before and at 10 for one Steele was forced to leave his seat in the home dressing room. On previous visits to Lord’s he had stripped in the away changing room and now, at the precise moment of England’s call to action, he became discombobulated by winding down the pavilion’s stairs in an unfamiliar direction from the home corridor, trotting on down them until he found himself in the basement by the gents. What a way to go that would have been: timed out on debut. But he was quick enough on his heel to make it back to ground level, across the Long Room, down the steps and through the gate with seconds to spare.
The first glimpse of him fostered little confidence. The grey hair, the ten-to-two gait, the steel-rimmed specs all suggested frailty but there was something intriguing, too, recalling the old maxim that a great deal can be learned about a man from the tilt of his hat. Steele wore his England cap with the peak turned upwards like a jockey’s, giving him a schoolboyish air, the look of a raffishly silver Puck, Andy Warhol’s spitting image puppet and Jerry Lewis’s Professor Julius Kelp rolled into one. What the Australians are supposed to have said to him by way of greeting are in all the anthologies of quotations and, though they have been polished and embellished on the after-dinner circuit for years which makes their accuracy difficult to determine, as with David Lloyd and his pink Litesome the legend defies quibbles about its precise veracity.
“Who the hell is this?” asked Lillee, Thomson or an “Australian voice” depending on the version. “Groucho Marx?” Thomson’s welcome, though now disputed by Steele, asked: “Who’ve they picked now? Bloody Father Christmas?” And to finish it off Rod Marsh allegedly shouted to Lillee: “You didn’t tell me your father was playing in this match.”
Whatever was said it did not unnerve him and he got off the mark, not with a nudge or a block or a steer but by pivoting on his right hip and pulling a waist-high short ball from Lillee behind square for four. If he was later to be perceived as a defensive, defiant batsman, a masterly player of world-class fast bowling on relatively slow wickets, obduracy was not a hallmark of his maiden innings.
Steele then pulled Lillee for four more but his next attacking shot was his finest, a flashing hook for four which brought his Duncan Fearnley up in an elegant arc to finish above his left shoulder. This is the moment in the biopic when Steele would say: “Groucho? Father Christmas? Daddy? What’s my name, sucker?” Sadly Jim Laker, commentating for the BBC, had not read the script. “What a great shot there by Dennis Steele,” he said. “This boy is not frightened. A great shot to Dennis Steele.”
Lillee strikes early
None of his first three partners stuck around – John Edrich went for nine, Amiss for a duck and Gooch for six until he was joined by the man to whom he owed his selection at 49 for four. Lillee had taken all four wickets in a 10-over burst from the Nursery end but his new-ball partner, Thomson, was at sea on the slope. He had struggled with consistency all tour, found the pitches unhelpful, and was persistently no-balled, 22 of them plus four wides on the first day at Lord’s alone. From the start Greig wanted to make sure no one could doubt that this was not the same old stoical England. He began by smashing Lillee over mid-off for four, punched Walker off his toes for two more boundaries and drove Lillee square on the up with such timing and power that it sounded like a rifle shot.
The captain reached his half-century first and encouraged Steele to emulate him. The newcomer hit nine fours in all, played solidly off the front foot but used the pace of the pitch to punish anything short, rocking back with fine judgment. They put on 96 for the fifth wicket and were parted when Steele had made 50 off 103 balls, playing on when trying to force Thomson square off the back foot. He was given a standing ovation when he left and grown men suddenly found themselves swallowing hard and trying to explain that there was something in their eyes. The Daily Mail’s Ian Wooldridge wrote the following morning that Steele was “a man who got up that morning and said that life has nothing more to offer than play for England”. It summed up the pre-match pessimism perfectly but honoured one for whom a call-up was not feared but relished as the zenith of his career.
Knott, as he so often would, proved to be Greig’s loyal aide-de-camp, scoring 69 to his captain’s 96 and England at last had a score, 315, the first time in six Tests they had passed 300 when both Lillee and Thomson were in the opposition side. In the second innings they made 436, Edrich taking two minutes short of nine hours to score 175 while Steele contributed 45 to the cause, earning England a draw. In the following two Tests, both drawn, the one at Headingley thanks to supporters of George Davis and rain, he scored 73, 92, 39 and 66 and captured the hearts of the nation so completely that he became the first cricketer since Jim Laker in 1956 to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.
The next year, against West Indies, Andy Roberts at his most lethal and Michael Holding off his long run, Steele scored his maiden Test century and hit 308 runs in the series before being dropped for the tour of India because of his supposed frailties against spin. Robin Smith would later share the same fate. His Test career was over after 14 months at the age of 35 and with an average of 42.06.
Steele was venerated then and now because, in Clive Taylor’s immaculate metaphor, he was “the bank clerk who went to war”. It was all so unexpected that a veteran debutant would stand up to Lillee and Thomson. Of course, the pitches helped him. Thomson maintains that had he toured the previous winter Steele would have had his head knocked off, but none of that is any detriment to the affection in which he is held.
If Cowdrey’s comeback was the personification of the ancient knight doing his duty, a Sir Lancelot fantasy, Steele spoke more to the myth of the stout English yeoman, honest, courageous and indomitable, the antithesis of decadent, who restored self-respect. When the batsman retired in 1984 Frank Keating, as he usually did, bade him the most playful and heartfelt farewell: “Thanks for the memory Mr Steele.
The way you touched your cap, the way you played for tea … no, no, they can’t take that away from me.” Even 29 years on from that epitaph for those who lived through the nadir of 1974-75, memories of Stainless remain untarnished.
- theguardian
He was the vice-captain of the Thomian side in his final year and also had the distinction of captaining the Sri Lanka under 19 cricket team. Then he went on to represent and captain club teams SSC and Tamil Union in the Premier division inter-club cricket tournament.
Keith Fletcher, who had been mercilessly targeted after encouraging Tony Greig to bounce Lillee at the Gabba, made 146. At Sydney Fletcher had gloved a vicious lifter from Thomson to defend his cheekbone and deflected it on to the badge of his MCC touring cap, an embroidered image of England’s patron saint slaying the dragon, from where it ricocheted towards cover. Only profound surprise dulling his reactions prevented Ross Edwards from running forward to catch Fletcher out. “Blimey!” said Geoff Arnold from the safety of the dressing room. “St George has been knocked off his ‘orse!”
Even in T20 internationals where they were once the world champions not so long ago, Sri Lanka faltered badly suffering 10 defeats from 15 matches. They began the year promisingly with surprise 2-1 series wins in South Africa and in Australia but fell away in the remaining nine matches to record just one win.
