Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

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tennisman
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Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

Post by tennisman »

My latest blog post - a brief guide to the programmes issued at Lord's for the finals of the B&H Cup 1972-2002.

For those interested, at the top of the post, I give a potted history of the competition, the 3rd one-day competition to be launched into domestic cricket after the Gillette Cup and the John Player Sunday League, as well as a review of the programmes.

The Benson and Hedges Cup was very much cricket's league cup with a July final date, in contrast to the Gillette Cup which was cricket's end of season 'FA Cup' final in early September.

After that summary, I go through each year providing a summary of the format for the year, the scores in the final (with key player performances and Gold Award winner) and the key features of the programme with a focus on the cover designs which merged together images of cricket with those of the sponsor and their flagship brand at the time, Gold cigarettes.

I comment that albeit in hindsight, cigarette company sponsorships were on borrowed time as the health impacts of smoking became more common knowledge and government restrictions tightened up how companies like B & H could market their products to customers whether directly through general market advertising or indirectly through such sponsorships as with the B&H Cup.

The post does lay out a sort of timeline of domestic cricket between the early 1970's and the early 2000's with the Gold Award winners in the finals reminding us of many top players on the county circuit at the time both the Test players and the ones who didn't make it to international status but who were much loved at their county regardless.

The first Gold Award winner in a final in 1972 was Leicestershire's Chris Balderstone who on one occasion, left a county match not out overnight, drove to play in a League Cup match for Doncaster Rovers in the evening and returned to Grace Road to complete a century the following morning! Balderstone played for England once and after retiring, became a Test Match Umpire. In his football career, he played over 600 games for Carlisle United and Doncaster Rovers. You don't get his like these days.

In football, collecting FA Cup Final programmes has long been a popular aspect of the hobby but with cricket's cup finals, it may well be that the competitions are just not old enough yet as the cricket final programmes are collected but perhaps with not quite as much interest as their football counterparts.

Also, the collecting culture in cricket is still focused on scorecards as opposed to football-style programmes, even though there are more of these around now and not only for England ODI's but at county level too across all the formats

As always, thanks in advance for any views.

Also, comments and questions are always welcome on here, or from beneath the post on the Goals and Wickets Facebook page, the Twitter account, beneath the post on the Goals and Wickets website of through the Contact Us page on the website;

http://www.goalsandwickets.co.uk/cricke ... rogrammes/

kancutlawns
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Re: Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

Post by kancutlawns »

Brilliant, ten. I'll have a read later in the week but it saddens me that with all the cricket on Skysport but at a domestic and international level, with the exception of say the excellent Cricket's Greatest when we see clips of old B&H and World Cup Finals from the 1970s and 80s, there's almost no highlights from those great days. I guess there's more material on YouTube but the heritage of the sport is truly momentous and looking at the players that graced virtually every county in that period.
Please don't hoover up all the bollocks for yourself. Leave some for others.

JW90
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Re: Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

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The Super Cup experiment in 1999 was a complete flop, barely anybody turned up to the games. I'm sure the reduced format was World Cup related but the final three years saw none of the associate sides like Scotland, British Universities and Minor Counties involved, although I liked the regional format.

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Re: Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

Post by Holden Mcgroyne »

Has there ever been a more bizarre choice for Man of The Match than John Abrahams for Lancashire in the 1984 final ? Didn't bowl, out for a duck and I'm sure he dropped an easy catch at slip.
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Re: Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

Post by JW90 »

Ten, what did you think of the C & G (formerly Natwest) Trophy? I think it's a real shame we don't have a straight knockout competition in domestic cricket.

tennisman
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Re: Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

Post by tennisman »

JW90 wrote:Ten, what did you think of the C & G (formerly Natwest) Trophy? I think it's a real shame we don't have a straight knockout competition in domestic cricket.
Whilst I enjoyed the B&H Cup, it always felt like a secondary competition to the Gillette Cup.

In '65, I was at Lord's as a 9 year-old with my brother to watch Middlesex become the first side to beat Ted Dexter's Sussex in the competition.

I can still remember the roar of the crowd as Price bowled first Dexter and then Parks. It was so exciting.

The Gillette Cup was a special event and with those special games on Wednesdays before packed grounds, like the Lancashire / Gloucestershire match which went on until nearly 9pm (see on my blog the post about T20 and all its razzamattazz and I've put a clip from youtube of the game in there).

So I was brought up on it and always had an allegiance to it.

The B&H Cup chased the money and whilst there were some great matches and finals with outstanding performances (as noted in the post), it was always a competition too far.

The problem with domestic cricket now is that the authorities have been tinkering with it for so long that such review / change / review again strategies have become commonplace and they just won't settle on one formula. It's almost as if there are TOO MANY stakeholders and everything almost inevitably reflects committee driven consensus and is therefore never quite right.

I went to the last few one-day finals of the GC in the late 1990's and early 2000's by which time it had become the C&G and then the Friends Provident and by then, with all the cricket on Sky TV (ironically) and all the ODI's and the rise of England as the ECB's main priority, it had become difficult for them to sell all the tickets for the Lord's one-day final.

Not sure that recent efforts to hold the one-day final again at the end of the Summer has really re-created that old feel.

As I lay out on the blog in my post on Cricket's Parallel Universe (in the Other Topics column), I think the season is way too long beginning at the end of March and finishing just before the end of September. They need to simplify it all, do it in easier to understand blocks (which they say they will be doing from 2017), if they start the season with CC matches on a given day then stick to it so we know what to expect and can follow it easier (even if we can't attend), stop all this daft talk of city franchises and do a better job of marketing the T20 Blast which is a popular and successful format at the moment without any more tinkering.

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Re: Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

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I think part of the problem in terms of attendances in the latter years were that the same sides tended to reach the final. I recall Gloucestershire reaching four out of six (plus a couple of B & H finals) and Somerset qualified for three or four in the same time period so I could imagine the novelty factor went for those fans. The one-day group format seemed to have no structure in past few seasons as it was split between early and late summer in sets of matches so you had to really keep up with events.

This season, looking at the Leicestershire fixtures, we seem to have many Championship games starting on Fridays which should boost attendances. One of the main criticisms I had was that by having T20 games on Fridays then Championship matches on Sundays, the schedule took out most Saturdays during the season which seemed inexplicable.

tennisman
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Re: Benson and Hedges Cup -1972-2002

Post by tennisman »

JW90 wrote:I think part of the problem in terms of attendances in the latter years were that the same sides tended to reach the final. I recall Gloucestershire reaching four out of six (plus a couple of B & H finals) and Somerset qualified for three or four in the same time period so I could imagine the novelty factor went for those fans. The one-day group format seemed to have no structure in past few seasons as it was split between early and late summer in sets of matches so you had to really keep up with events.

This season, looking at the Leicestershire fixtures, we seem to have many Championship games starting on Fridays which should boost attendances. One of the main criticisms I had was that by having T20 games on Fridays then Championship matches on Sundays, the schedule took out most Saturdays during the season which seemed inexplicable.
Indeed, JW.

Trying to get the right formats on all the key weekend days has been an issue for some time.

Perhaps my biggest beef was that they began the County Championship matches on a Sunday but then from half way through, started them on all sorts of different days including Tuesdays and Thursdays in September.

Whether Sunday was the right day or not was open to debate (as you say, they are trying Fridays from 2017) but why they changed the start days to all over the place from halfway seemed to have no rhyme or reason.

Let's hope it all works a bit better in 2017.

I still think they should shrink the season though as football is ubiquitous from mid August onwards and you have to have something truly outstanding going on in the County Championship (as they had this year) for the focus to be maintained and not drawn back to football.

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