Cricket Champions

Cricket Champions Martin Chandler | 9:08am BST 05 October 2025 Published: 2025 Pages: 261 Author: Thorn, Richard Publisher: Troubador Rating: 4 stars With this new book from Richard Thorn the Test series time machine whirrs into life again, its destination on this occasion being 1966. There are two generations of people now who don’t fully understand the significance of that landmark year in English sport, but for anyone in their sixties or older the mere mention of it always brings out the rose tinted spectacles. Kenneth Wolstenholme’s words, they think it’s all over …… it is now are, possibly those of one deliriously happy Norwegian apart, the most famous in the history of football commentary. The cause of them was, of course, Geoff Hurst completing his hat trick in that summer’s World Cup final, immediately followed by the referee blowing the full time whistle. But the sixteen teams who lined up for what remains the solitary World Cup hosted in England were not the only sporting visitors that summer. Also present on these islands were a West Indies cricket team led by the one and only Garry Sobers. There were five Tests in the series. Three of them were played before the football began, the visitors winning the first and third with the second drawn. There was then a month with no Tests before Sobers’ men took an unassailable 3-0 lead in the fourth Test before England, with Brian Close their third skipper of the summer, leading his men to a convincing consolation victory. Sobers was magnificent. Despite the cares of captaincy he scored 722 runs in the series at 103.14. But Sobers was rather more than a genius with the bat, something to which his 20 wickets at 27.25 and ten catches attest. He made a huge contribution to each of the Tests, even if his falling into Close’s trap when he was out without scoring in the second innings of the fifth Test is much better remembered than his 81 in the first innings. The series was not however simply a one man show. For West Indies Seymour Nurse exceeded 500 runs, and Basil Butcher made a fine double century to set up victory in third Test, and if fast bowlers Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith were not the force they had been three years earlier Lance Gibbs’ off spin captured 24 wickets. Nor were the badly beaten England team a total disappointment. Tom Graveney made a comeback to Test cricket at 39 and averaged 75.60 and, with wicketkeeper John Murray and fast bowlers Ken Higgs and John Snow he engineered the comeback at the Oval that saw England rise from the depths of 166-7 to their match winning 527. With the ball Higgs took 24 wickets and in the first series of his all too brief Test career there were two memorable innings from Colin Milburn. So the Test series was a decent story in itself, and one which was told in a couple of books at the time, one of them by Sobers, or at least it bore his name on the spine. So Thorn needs to have something that sets his account apart from those, and the usual way of the retrospective tour account achieving that is to combine the cricket with a social history of the era in which a series was played. Thorn might therefore have spent time looking at the concept of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, the Labour landslide in that year’s General Election or the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the notorious Moors Murderers. He must have been tempted, but he chooses not to. On the other hand he does take one extended digression, on the subject of that other great sporting spectacle of 1966, and I have to admit to learning a good deal as a result. The key to a book like this must be in the research. It is clear that Thorn has done his homework in that respect and as a result he has successfully manage to describe the Tests in a way that gives his reader the impression he was actually present throughout. Cricket Champions is a very welcome addition to retrospective tour account genre