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Alan Biggs: My favourite players and the 1969 Gillette Cup semi-final and final

My Dad was a big supporter of Kent. Living in Chesterfield I started to follow Derbyshire as they played a lot of their games at Queen’s Park, a beautiful venue that my Dad took me to regularly as I was growing up. I remember balmy late summer evenings when we would watch cricket all day and then drift off to go to Saltergate to watch football. My interest in the game has waned somewhat, mostly through circumstance, as my job has focused more and more on football, but also due the format of cricket changing way beyond recognition from the game I grew up following. It was very straight forward back in the day. They played the county championship, then they introduced the John Player league around 1968, which I thought was a great innovation and then the Gillette Cup. It was all pretty simple.

My heroes were Harold Rhodes and Brian Jackson, who between them in one season (I think it was 1965) both took over one hundred wickets. Rhodes took 120 and Jackson 119 but Derbyshire had such a weak batting line up it didn’t lead to any in-roads in the county championship table. We were as strong at bowling as we were weak at batting. These two though on green wickets were absolutely lethal. I can picture the image of middle stumps cart-wheeling out of the ground.

There was controversy at the time though as Rhodes was called by one umpire for throwing. He had an unusual action, it was discovered that he had a hyper extended elbow that made it appear as if he could have had a throwing action.

I do recall the opening pair of Peter Gibbs and David Smith. Smith was from Bradford and was a stodgy, left handed stone-waller. He was a good foil for Gibbs though, I think was an Oxford University graduate and a very elegant player. If he got in he would produce the most flowing cover drives and off drives you could imagine. He was a player I really admired. He went on to become a script writer after his career including episodes of Heartbeat. Derbyshire were never prolific with the bat compared to other sides though.

A trip to Lords

My first trip to Lords was to watch Derbyshire in the Gillette Cup Final in 1969 against Yorkshire. It was the semi-final at Queen’s Park against Sussex that was truly memorable. It had rained all the previous day and it was a late start. The wicket was green and looked threatening but in fact when Derbyshire went in to bat it proved to be just a pudding of a pitch. They could barely get the ball off the square. John Snow was playing for Sussex, though he didn’t bowl particularly well as I recall. With a very limited batting line up, Derbyshire were all out for 136 and the game effectively looked over. But then the sun came out and something happened to the wicket. Sussex went into bat and were skittled out for 49 all out. There were 10,000 people at Queen’s Park that day and I remember the raucous cries and cheers that went up for every wicket that fell. An all-rounder called Peter Eyre took six for eighteen runs and was the hero of the day, virtually all his wickets were clean bowled out, sending the stumps cart wheeling through the air.

As for the final at Lords, Yorkshire batted first and got off to a really slow start. Derby restricted them to something like two runs per over, maybe even less. Brian Close came in and whacked thirty seven in a very short time. He completely altered the course of the game. A strong character and big man. I remember him hitting a six into the Mound Stand where we were sitting. With Barry Leadbetter steadying the innings, who scored 76, Yorkshire scored around 220, which nowadays wouldn’t be seen much of a total for a 60 over game but Derbyshire got nowhere near the total. If our bowlers didn’t win the game for us we rarely performed well enough with the bat.

Alan Biggs @AlanBiggs1

Read Alan's Memories of Yorkshire & Geoffrey Boycott here

Memory added on April 21, 2014

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