From The Archive: It's A Knockout!

As Hampshire continue their Royal London One-Day Cup campaign against Middlesex, Club historian Dave Allen, continues his look back upon the emergence of the limited overs format into the county cricket system.

IT’S A KNOCK-OUT - PART 2

In the first part of this series linked to our home 50-over matches in the Royal London Cup, I looked in some detail at the first season of 1963, when the counties competed in matches of 65-over per side, and Sussex won at Lord’s in September.

All the knock-out Finals have been played there since – in some years, two every season, although after this year the one remaining competition Final will relocate to Trent Bridge. Middlesex with ‘home advantage’, have won six of those Finals, the first in 1977 when they beat us there in the quarter-final. We got off to a bad start when Barry Richards withdrew, although his replacement, the promising Portsmouth boy David Rock, contributed 50 to our score of 247-7. It was not enough, as Mike Smith and Clive Radley added 223 for the second wicket and Middlesex won by seven wickets with 25 balls to spare.

That match, in the 14th season of knock-out cup matches, was the first time we had met Middlesex, although from 1969 county cricketers played far more limited-overs games with the introduction of the Sunday League, as all the counties played each other.  In our knock-out meetings, we fared no better in the next two, losing to Middlesex in 1979 & 1980 but despite Jeff Thomson on county debut taking 7-22, it was third time lucky the following year with Keith Stevenson taking 4-18 and David Turner scoring 69.

The Middlesex record of six of those trophies is pretty good, but surprisingly they came in a bunch from 1977-1988. That last success of theirs in the longer Nat West Trophy was just a couple of months after our first Lord’s triumph in the 55 overs B&H Cup, but while the London county have stalled, we now have seven triumphs in Lord’s Finals (and one defeat) which puts us in fourth place overall. Ahead of us are the early pace-setters Lancashire with 11 trophies but none in this century, followed by eight for Warwickshire, including two in the 1960s, and eight for Gloucestershire. After Middlesex with their six trophies come a number of sides on five: Essex, Kent, Somerset, Surrey and Sussex, but Hampshire’s record to which can be added two T20 trophies, is as good as any in recent memory.

At the other end of the scale, poor Glamorgan are the only county yet to win at Lord’s, so 2019 might be their last chance. We first met them at Portsmouth in 1967 when half-centuries for our Caribbean pair Marshall & Livingstone and three wickets each for White & Cottam saw us home by 16 runs.

You might remember that Glamorgan reached Lord’s in 2013, when they beat us in Dimi’s farewell appearance, a 40-over semi-final at the The Ageas Bowl. In the Final, they lost heavily to Nottinghamshire, bowled out for 157 in just 33 overs. They had struggled similarly in their first Final in 1977, crawling their way to 177-9 in 60 overs with Mike Selvey taking 2-22 in his 12 overs, and Phil Edmonds 2-23. Glamorgan’s most notable moment was perhaps when Mike Llewellyn (62) hit the ball into the top tier of the Pavilion but it wasn’t enough, and 85 by the Man-of-the-Match Clive Radley took Middlesex to an easy victory.

Two years earlier in a second-round Gillette Cup match at Southampton we posted in 60 overs what remains our record limited-overs total of 371-4, with Greenidge 177 and Richards 129 adding 210 for the first wicket. Roberts added 3-17 and we won by 164 runs which is our highest runs victory in a knock-out cup match against another first-class county. Our best against Middlesex was in a quarter-final by 144 runs at Lord’s in 1998 with 73* from Adi Aymes and 69 by our current cricket ‘boss’ Giles White.

Dave Allen