A riotous time - the 1968-69 Pakistan tour

Just when English cricket had had one of its more boring seasons, at least until the final minutes of the final Test, along came a tour with more real drama than Apocalypse Now. With one notable exception, absolutely nothing went to plan in the winter of 1968/69.

The tour of South Africa was cancelled on the grounds that a belatedly chosen England player, Basil D'Oliveira, was not `acceptable' to the home government. It was then announced that England would visit Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India and Pakistan, the last such overseas Test tour ever to be administered by MCC.

Finance caused the Indian visit to be scrapped, and the Pakistan series was a violent fiasco. The one bright spot of the whole sorry business was Ceylon, though even there the rumblings off the field were loud and unsettling. At night the tourists gathered in their manager's hotel room where, crackling and ominous, the radio brought news of full-scale rioting in Lahore and Karachi.

Several players lobbied to return home there and then. Everything was in the balance until the Foreign Office sent a telegram insisting that, as far as possible, 'aspects of normal life' be encouraged in Pakistan. That meant cricket.

The First Test at Lahore was constantly disrupted. There was scarcely a session without a pitch invasion: far from encouraging normal life, the match only served as a rallying point for the rioting university students and other agitators. Fears grew for the safety, let alone form, of players who had arrived in Pakistan with no idea of their itinerary.

The whole situation, Tom Graveney remembers, was 'chaotic, ludicrous and frightening'. Dressing-room speculation about the tour soon reached fever pitch, it being agreed that, as Graveney says, 'absolutely nobody seemed to be in charge'. A players' mutiny was becoming a distinct possibility.

As for the cricket, Colin Cowdrey, the captain, scored a magnificent century in the hubbub of the drums, hooters and gunplay. With help from John Edrich, who made 54, and Alan Knott, 52, they reached a respectable 306. Pakistan's reply of 209 owed everything to Asif Iqbal. The crowd duly turned up the volume even more as disaster threatened the England second innings; it took a stand by Knott and Keith Fletcher to allow Cowdrey to declare at last.

Pakistan were left a shade under five hours in which to chase 323. At 71 for 4, there was a clear chance for the tourists, if Derek Underwood or Pat Pocock could have spun through the supposedly brittle Pakistan middle-order including Asif and Mushtaq Mohammad. In the event, Majid Khan remained serenely in possession through most of the last session, eked out amidst renewed brawls on either side of the boundary rope. At the end, both teams hared for the pavilion.

Dacca, the scene of the Second Test, was in a state of siege. On their arrival Cowdrey, his vice-captain Graveney and the manager Les Ames immediately went into session with the student leaders. The oldest was 18. It was they who promised 'security' for the tourists, and reluctantly Ames believed them. Graveney baulked, expressing the view that 'there wasn't a single policeman or soldier left in the city...we were literally at the mercy of a mob'. But the captain was inclined to be cautiously optimistic too. 'We'll at least start the Test,' said Cowdrey with an emanation of the calm for which he was justly famous.

Graveney, and one or two others, were by now as good as playing under protest. In the match itself, D'Oliveira heroically scored 114. On a wicket which resembled a spinner's processional carpet with the ball turning square, both sets of batsmen aimed for survival. Several rearguard actions steered Pakistan to safety and even allowed them to make a token second-innings declaration. This time the players went through the motions against a backdrop of blinding flares, rioters with swords and knives, and the loud grief of ambulance sirens.

The city was in bedlam. Cowdrey's pocket was picked as he crossed the pavement from the team bus to the hotel. At night the glare of rockets and guns was followed by intervals - if possible more worrying - of eerie silence. Not the best preparation for a day's Test cricket under a beating sun.

The Dacca Test was drawn and the party flew to Karachi, where conditions, if anything, deteriorated. Once again Ames, Cowdrey and Graveney sought assurances about security. The manager and captain warily agreed to play on, in the interests of 'normal life'.

Graveney exploded. 'I lost my temper,' he recalls. 'I regret I swore and finally retired to a corner with the words: "You make your own arrangements. I know what I think and what the England team thinks." What the England team thought is unprintable. But apart from the ambition to return home in one piece, there was a general feeling that they had been kicked around long enough for ends other than cricket.'

The Test started as scheduled on March 6. Colin Milburn, recently arrived from playing in Australia, crashed a typically brisk ton. He was promptly engulfed in a crowd of several hundred pitch invaders, whom Graveney flailed at with his bat. More sharp words were exchanged that night in the dressing-room.

Next day, Graveney himself scored a century, his 11th and last in Test cricket. Knott also held firm. The crowd again packed its thousands onto the boundary's edge and interrupted the play every few minutes in order to unfurl banners calling for revolution.

The dam burst on the third morning. With England 502 for 7 and Knott needing four runs for a first Test century, a crowd of non-ticket holders charged the main gate. It burst with a noise like rolling thunder. Immediately the mob stormed both the pitch and the VIP enclosure, one of whose tenants, the local Board of Control's Fida Hassan, arrived ragged and panting in the England dressing-room.

'The match is over,' he announced.
'And the tour?' said Graveney.
'And the tour.'

Graveney was technically the captain, Cowdrey having flown home on the death of his father-in-law. Yet just two months later, Graveney would be passed over in favour of Ray Illingworth when Cowdrey snapped his achilles tendon and sat out most of the season. That same week, coincidentally or not, Ames filed a tour report, which Graveney considers 'unlikely to have flattered me'.

In the all-drawn three-Test series Knott, D'Oliveira, David Brown and Graveney himself all averaged over 40. Cowdrey was magnificent at Lahore, Milburn at Karachi. Fletcher and Edrich both played valuable cameos rather than impressing as well rounded, fully mature batsmen.

Brown, Underwood and Bob Cottam did most of the damage with the ball. John Snow was disappointing, with all the necessary ability but on certain wickets not always the patience to apply it. Behind the stumps Knott enhanced his already growing reputation.

If ever there was a cricketing winter of discontent, this was it. Both in the cancellation of the original tour and the subsequent events in Pakistan, politics clearly meant more than sport. Ames and Cowdrey generally came through the whole ordeal with credit.

Graveney, normally the mildest of men, showed his prickly side that occasionally gave his career a tendency towards the accident-prone. Later in 1969 he was banned and effectively sacked by England following a misunderstanding over a Benefit match. One of the greatest stylists of English cricket, Graveney also remains one of its greatest enigmas.

There was turbulence at home too. The England batting would be devastated by the loss, in one year, of Ken Barrington, then Milburn and Graveney, quite apart from the long-term injury to Cowdrey. The Cricket Council, with its component parts - the Test and County Cricket Board, National Cricket Association and MCC - duly came into being. A new 40-over competition, sponsored by John Player, was introduced on Sundays. More seriously, 'the D'Oliveira affair' would continue to reverberate, in one form or another, for the next 25 years.

Is it outlandish to wonder whether the 1960s were not just as volatile, both exhilarating and often traumatic, in cricket as elsewhere?