By Adelaide
February 11 2023

Adelaide takes us back to watching the great Basil d'Oliveira play Test match cricket.

I have not seen many days of Test cricket live in my life, all with my father. One was John Emburey's debut against New Zealand at Lord’s in 1978. If memory serves me correctly (ie I am too lazy to google it) Phillipe Henri took a catch round the corner in Emburey’s first over. I have vague memories of seeing a Test against India’s battery of spinners and of Gatt doing his usual thing (at the time) of getting out instead of getting the maiden Test century he was playing well enough to get, but I can’t put a date to those.

The other Tests that are clear in my mind were much earlier and featured the great Basil d'Oliveira. First, his Test debut in 1966 against the West Indies (attack – Hall, Griffiths, Sobers and Gibbs). In those days you could get in on the day but by the time we got there the queue was enormous and we clearly would not have got in. Cut to the two of us sitting in a wall at St John's Wood Station looking mournful wondering where to eat our sandwiches later. To our amazement, an elderly (well, at that age most adults looked elderly to me) gentleman approached us and said his friends had not turned up and he had two spare tickets. Would we like them? Oh yes! I presume my father paid him the face value, but I was suffering from too much supralunacosis to notice. Off we went into the ground, extremely pleased with life.

Dolly came to the wicket with England in a good position. He played some lovely shots but then disaster struck, in the form of a solid drive from Jim Parks. Ball hits Dolly's heel and ricochets onto the stumps. He obviously thought he was (already) out and made no attempt to get back in his ground. Wes Hall (pretty sure it was him) knew differently, gathered the ball and pulled a stump out of the ground. Wes knew the laws better than Dolly! A fielder had to touch the ball for it to be out and if both bails were off you had to remove a stump to achieve the dismissal. Quick thinking in a situation that a player can rarely come across.

As it happens, something slightly similar is supposed to have happened in the recent Test series in Pakistan, Ben Foakes dislodging one bail before he had the ball. As one remained in place, he did not need to remove the stump once he had the ball in his hands, just make sure the other bail came off.

Ah yes, the other memorable Test. Although several hundred thousand probably claim they were there, my dad and I really were at The Oval for day two and that innings against Australia, the one that made it impossible for the selectors not to take him, a "Cape Coloured" in the apartheid terminology of the time, to his native South Africa. Except, to widespread disgust, it turned out to be perfectly possible. History records what happened next. Tom Cartwright was injured and Dolly was called up as replacement. Not a very similar replacement, to be sure, but then Cartwright was pretty much unique. The South African government cried "foul" and the tour was cancelled and South Africa's sporting isolation was on the way, though the cricketing establishment still seems to have thought it would have been fine to play South Africa in 1970 until they were forced to cancel days before the tour would have started.

Without wishing to get too political, in later years I took some grim amusement from those like Keven Pietersen who claimed they had been kept out of South African domestic cricket by racial quotas. Er, insisting on a minimum number of non-white players in a team might not be ideal, but Dolly and others were also faced with a minimum number of white players and that minimum number was eleven!

The Oval Test would have been memorable in its own right, both for the quality of d'Oliveira's innings and for the finish on the last day when Derek Underwood was bowling on a drying pudding with fielders taking catches almost in the batsman's crease. Inverarity lbw a few minutes from the end, series drawn - but I only saw that live on BBC.

I haven't “done” Tests for years. Much too expensive and I suspect much too corporate for my taste. Not having Sky, all I see is whatever highlight package crumbs the free-to-air networks can lay their hands on.

Adelaide