Not Out at Close of Play: A Life in Cricket by Dennis Amiss

Author:Dennis Amiss
Format: epub

10

Down Under, Disarray and Demoralised

Having squared the series against the odds, we returned home far tougher and more confident than we had been when we left England on that cold, wet January day three months before. Moreover, the progress we had made in the Caribbean seemed to be conclusively confirmed by a 3–0 thrashing of India during the first half of the English summer. Our batsmen dominated the series with two centuries from Mike Denness, one each from Keith Fletcher, Tony Greig, John Edrich and me, and a double-hundred in only his second Test from David Lloyd.

Our good form continued throughout the second half of the season, when we played a 3-match series against Pakistan. Although the games all ended disappointingly in draws, we had the best of the first two, but not the the final Test at the Oval when Zaheer Abbas established his status as a world-class batsman with a superlative double-century.

At the end of September, when the England selectors met at Lord’s to pick the sixteen players for the winter tour of Australia, there was considerable optimism that we would repeat the success achieved Down Under four years previously by Raymond Illingworth’s side.

As history reveals, we lost the 1974/75 series 4–1. Our defeat was so comprehensive, in fact, that there were even calls for a public enquiry to be established to explore how and why it all went so horribly wrong. More column inches in the media seemed to be devoted to analysis of the tour than any other topic of the day, including Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of Ted Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election.

As far as the tour was concerned, the general consensus was that things had started to go awry almost from the word ‘go’. Most of the senior players felt the selectors had made a serious mistake in omitting John Snow from the team. Not only was he still a potent force as one of the very few genuinely fast bowlers in the country, but on the Ashes-winning tour of 1970/71 he had established a significant psychological advantage over several of the leading Aussie batsmen, including the captain, Ian Chappell.

Snowy had been overlooked by the selectors during the series against India and Pakistan as punishment for bowling underarm earlier in the summer in a Test trial at Worcester. It was his way of protesting, not only at having to prove himself to the selectors, even though he’d already taken 150 Test wickets, but also because the wicket at New Road was so flat that he thought bowling properly was a waste of time and effort.

To give ourselves the best chance of winning in Australia we needed him in the side, and so Keith Fletcher, Tony Greig, Alan Knott, Derek Underwood and I met with Mike Denness and urged him to use all his influence as captain to persuade the selectors to let bygones be bygones and include Snowy in the touring party.

The story we subsequently heard was that the selection meeting was well

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