Hampshire County Cricket Club 1946-2006

Product Information

Rain reduced Hove in 2005 to 12 overs each and Sussex won by 10 runs despite a fine all-round display by Sean Ervine with 2-28 and 46. In 2006 we went to Arundel where Greg Lamb hit 55* but Mushtaq’s 4-30 restricted us to 152-6 and Sussex won with five balls to spare. They hammered us at Hove in 2007, Luke Wright’s 98 taking them to their record score against Hampshire of 205-5 and we fell 73 short. Remarkably, they scored just one fewer the following year but this time everyone reached double figures with Carberry’s 58 leading Hampshire to a last-ball win and our record score. It was potentially a harder week because we wouldn't have Keith [Barker] in the side and there was a lot of talk about having to bowl a few more overs. In 2017 we met Lancashire 2 nd XI there in a Championship Final match which the visitors won on first innings to take the Trophy. Of our team that day we might expect to see Felix Organ in Hampshire’s RL Cup side this year, while Chris Wood, Harry Came, Matt Salisbury and Brad Wheal might be playing elsewhere in the Hundred or for their counties. The Lancashire side included Josh Bohannon, Daniel Lamb and Saqib Mahmood. is the 60 th season of single innings, limited-overs matches between first-class counties. Over those years the matches, always scheduled for one day but sometimes extended or shortened by weather, have been contested over various formats with overs consisting of 65, 60, 55, 50, 45 or 40 per side. They were the first regular county competitions to carry the names of sponsors of which there have been many. Despite all these variations the matches are together known as List A to distinguish them from first-class or Twenty 20 games. When Hampshire begin their Bob Willis Trophy match against Surrey at Arundel, the Duke of Norfolk’s ground will be the 15th on which Hampshire have played a home first-class match and the 10th home ground in a first-class county competition, although strictly speaking the new competition is distinct from the traditional County Championship.

In 1966 Richard Gilliat first played for Hampshire and between 1971 and his retirement in 1978 he led the county. There is no biography of Gilliat as such, but there is a chapter on him in a book about his family, The Gilliats, written by Ian Foster and published in 2016. The Handbook reports that Hampshire batted poorly – Richard Lewis, also playing for the first team at that point scored 24 and the Handbook praised Nigel Cowley’s off-spin but Sussex set a target of 352 and Hampshire didn’t get close. In the second innings Bob Herman hit 30 but in both innings the leading Hampshire batter was John Nash, an Australian spending a summer in England. In this match he scored 39* & 38* and at the end of the season he topped the 2nd XI averages with 557 runs at 42.84. World Cup final on Sunday ( India v Australia, 8.30 start GMT ) is being broadcast on Channel 5 as well as on Sky. No apologies for a recycled title – after seven years my initial publication is seriously out-of-date) Then in the early years of this century Brian Gardner set about creating a ground of first-class standard on the island and since 2009, Newclose has hosted many interesting matches. In one of the first, a young local prospect Danny Briggs appeared in an island side that lost to Derbyshire and later that year Mike Gatting came to officially open the ground followed by a match between Brian Gardner’s XI and MCC.Following on after being bundled out for 149 before lunch, the hosts limped to 63 all out in their second innings at Wantage Road. Smith has written two books that are essentially autobiographical in nature. The first, Quest For Number One, published in 1993, is not exactly an autobiography, but the more recent, The Judge, appeared in 2019 certainly is. It is a thought provoking and engrossing read on the subject of a man at whom life has certainly aimed a few short ones over the years. In terms of legacy and achievement the other member of the ‘class of ’68’ is one of the very best batsman to have played the game. Barry Richards thrilled county crowds for a decade. There are two books that concern the life of the great man, The Barry Richards Story, that appeared in 1978, and a biography by Murtagh in 2015, Sundial in the Shade. He is also the subject of a recent monograph from Michael Sexton, The Summer of Barry, that looks at his record breaking season with South Australia in 1970/71. His worship was answered in the form of James Fuller, who joined him in an unbroken 32-run stand which nudged Hampshire towards setting Essex a target of note. However, the visitors remain heavy favourites. Shaun ‘Shaggy’ Udal was an off spinner and an interesting character who, very late in his career, won four Test caps against India and Pakistan. Udal’s autobiography, My Turn To Spin, appeared in 2007, coinciding with his retirement.

Shane Snater had been helped off the field just over 24 hours previous, having damaged his calf while bowling, but bravely reappeared with Michael Pepper as his runner. He lasted just three balls before he was lbw to Dawson. Well played Australia – again not a thriller but a very fine all-round performance. The final figures: Vince, enjoying these opponents, hit 68 at Merchant Taylor’s School in 2014 accompanied by the former Middlesex batsman Owais Shah (49*); then Briggs, 3-20, bowled us to victory. In 2015 on our first visit to Lord’s, Carberry 72 and Shah 64 led our first T20 victory there, but in 2016, Malan hit 93 at Uxbridge which is their highest score against us, leading to victory by 69 runs In respect of the County Championship, we have all been here before, just twelve months ago, and while in the future that table will show Hampshire in fourth place for the first time, we know that Hampshire were within one ball of being Champions for the third time.

The most surprising statistic is that of the 44 other matches 22 were won batting first and 22 batting second. The toss did not help with only 16 toss winners going on to win the game, although the captains seemed to improve – they won just four of the first 20 matches having won the toss but won seven of the final eight. The other figures (rounded up or down): In 1972 and 1975, Sussex played two John Player Sunday League matches at Arundel Castle, then from 1994-2013 they played a further 20 List A matches, including three against Hampshire in 1996, 1998 and 2009. Hampshire won the first two and Sussex the third by just four runs. A more permanent mark in the record books was made by Phil Mead, who began a career that lasted for more than thirty years in 1905. A prodigious run scorer throughout his career Mead was also, in the early years, a far from negligible slow left arm bowler. He was, finally, the subject of a biography, CP Mead, by Neil Jenkinson, a book published in 1992. Tom Prest’s innings was just one of a remarkable set of performances in this year’s competition by a group of youngsters whose promise surely rivals that of the group of a dozen years ago, that included Vince, Liam Dawson, Danny Briggs, Chris Wood and Michael Bates. Arundel will of course be a home ground outside the county boundaries but even that is not quite a first. Hampshire have of course played on the Isle of Wight, and their most recent visit there last year was their third home ground on the island. In addition, after the county boundary changes of the mid-1970s, Bournemouth too became ‘away’ at home, having moved to Dorset. But neither the Isle of Wight nor Bournemouth had previously been the home ground for another first-class county, so this will be an unusual occurrence, although again not unique; among this year’s matches, with Lancashire and Leicestershire meeting at Worcester.