Summer Sports - Cricket
thought it made great entertainment and the TV viewing figures were very high.”
The media had a field day too.
“‘We’re not knocking you personally’, they’d say to me, ‘but we’ll always use Headingley to sell newspapers’.” Keith called in soil scientist Professor
Bill Adams from Aberystwyth University to assess the square. His judgment was damning. “He said the whole square needed digging up and relaying.” The problem was the age-old tradition of doping. “Yorkshire had been winning county championships year after year, so any suggestion that the wickets needed restructuring was frowned on by the management,” explains Keith. “Dope was a mixture of marl, soil,
cow dung and water, stirred in a drum, watered on the pitch, then rolled until the surface was as flat as a fart. Eventually, the wickets became so slow that I knew doping had to stop. We had to build up the wickets with hard soil with high clay content.” Even before Keith arrived, pressure
Keith holds one of his cherished keepsakes - one of the spare stumps for the England v Australia 1993 test at Headingley, under Allan Border's captaincy and Bobby Simpson’s management to mark the most runs scored in an innings by any team at Headingley - 653. The visitors won by an innings and 148 runs.
The stump is hinged and opens to reveal the signatures of both sides.
had been mounting for Headingley to adopt newer methods. “Lord’s had started to use loams on their square and a top man at Bingley Research Centre was asked to find the hardest soils he could. They were tested to breaking point and, when one was found, three inches were taken off two pitches to try them out.” “Not good, the grass wouldn’t grow
as the soil would not support a rootzone and the surface curled up when it dried out.” That was when Professor Adams’ analysis revealed the low soil fertility.
“Botham did me no favours,” laughs Keith. “If he had scored a duck, I would have had the square done the next season, relaying the Test pitch
with good quality loam.” The new square saw its first action in 1989, when England captain David Gower put Australia in to launch the Ashes series after winning the toss. “I advised David to bat first as I knew that the wicket would lose pace later on, but he decided otherwise. In his book, David claims that I misled him, but we must agree to disagree over that.”
The statistics do back Keith’s claim
that, whatever the results at the ground, his wickets could stand the rigours of Test battle. “We had the first drawn Test at Headingley since the 1960s when England played South Africa in 1992. With no rain delays, the pitch stood up to five days’ cricket.” And that proved to be a characteristic of Keith’s work. “I prepared pitches for seventeen
Test matches and had fourteen results. Never was any Test over in less than four days - there were no three-day Tests. After that first embarrassment, I soon learned that you had to have the pitch right on the first morning, with just a touch of moisture, still good on day two, just starting to go on day three, so you would be sure to have at least four days’ cricket.” The issue of moisture retention
preyed on Keith’s mind until he had his light bulb moment. Enter the Gas Board. “I called them about a machine I’d seen them using to compact the road surface. I then went to a local garden centre to buy a moisture meter so that I could test the pitch.” Sheets laid over the surface helped prevent it drying out too quickly, a major factor in Yorkshire’s record of maintaining full four-day match action at Headingley. Keith has entertained many Test
captains about the state of the pitch. “Mike Brearley would chat to me for
Memorabilia adorns the walls of Keith’s bungalow, including newspaper cuttings, a picture of himself with a young and ‘special’ Jason Booth, a page from the Illustrated London News explaining the ‘art of doping’, a practice that Keith was keen to see the back of - his efforts were hampered by Ian Botham - an aerial view of Headingley from the eighties, a framed montage of the five greatest Test innings played at Headingley, which also features Keith in a rather fetching vest! There is also a picture of his beloved springer spaniel Bracken - a legend at the club and “daft as a brush”!
50 I PC APRIL/MAY 2017
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