Six balls remain. Warwickshire need 10 to win. The sun is setting swiftly on St John’s Wood as the 1989 NatWest final reaches its climax at a sold-out Lord’s.
Among the travelling fans, stress levels are rising as quickly as the light is disappearing behind the pavilion. A first knockout trophy since 1968 is tantalisingly within reach, but 10 off the over won’t be easy.
Simon Hughes, a canny death bowler in a highly decorated Middlesex side, clutches the ball in the September gloom.
Asif Din scrambles a single to bring Neil Smith, a promising but raw all-rounder, on strike. The bespectacled 22-year-old scrapes at the wicket with his Duncan Fearnley blade. Hughes glides in, and as he bowls, a forthright Warwickshire fan barks a simple instruction from the packed stands: “Hit it!”
Smith hits it. Backing away, freeing his arms, he swipes flat-batted and connects perfectly with the slower ball. It soars through the darkening sky, high and straight back over Hughes’s head, into a sea of suddenly delirious Bears fans. “WARWICKSHIRE, LA, LA, LA!”
“Footwork not out of the coaching book,” Jack Bannister remarks in the commentary box. “The ball nearly out of the ground.” Six, in an era when a maximum was truly meaningful.
The next ball is a dot fired into Smith’s pads. Hughes sprays the fourth ball down leg. The umpire, Dickie Bird, thinks for a while before signalling wide. Two needed off three.
The over’s fourth legal delivery is driven hard into the pitch by Smith, beyond Hughes’s helpless stumbling dive. The batters sprint for two. Warwickshire have won.
“I had a system of mixing yorkers and slower balls and did it pretty well,” says Hughes. “In the semi-final against Hampshire I’d bowled the penultimate over to Malcolm Marshall and conceded about four singles. It was quite a pioneering, new way of bowling at the death. Until that final, it never failed.”
Mike Gatting, the Middlesex captain, declared later he would have put his benefit money on Warwickshire not getting the runs. “Gatting wasn’t the only one who backed me to defend 10,” says Hughes. “Desmond Haynes had it on cast-iron guarantee because he’d already spent his win bonus. He bought some accessories for his car back in Barbados, a spoiler and some alloy wheels. When I see him now he says: ‘Yozzer, you owe me five grand.’”
“For a young player it was quite a high-pressure situation,” says Smith. “The cameras, the full house.”
Of what the BBC anchorman Tony Lewis disparagingly called “the final slog” on the highlights, he says: “Simon was one of the best bowlers of a slower ball. They all have variations now but in those days not too many bowlers did. I gambled it was coming. I got a bit too far from it, which is why it looked so bloody awful.”
The scorecard supports Smith’s memory of a “miserable, low-scoring game … turgid even for those days”. The pitch lacked pace. Middlesex’s Norman Cowans bowled 12 overs for 23 runs (economy rate 1.91). Warwickshire’s innovator-in-chief, Dermot Reeve, conceded 27 off his 12.
“We’d been at Headingley in the days before, a dead Championship fixture,” Smith says. “I went in as nightwatchman on Thursday and got 160 on Friday. I hadn’t even got a first-class 50 before that.”
Haynes top-scored, grinding out a half-century before being bowled by Smith. That prize wicket combined with the previous day’s personal best boosted the youngster’s confidence for the denouement.
“Part of the day is to embrace it,” Smith says. “If you let the pressure dominate you, that’s when you don’t perform. Asif was at the other end and had quite a calm head: ‘Just get something on it and we’ll run.’
Smith had played indifferently in the Championship that season. He harboured legitimate worries about a fresh contract and his role in Warwickshire’s glory, including a decisive cameo in the quarter-final, saved his career.
“They said: ‘We were going to let you go, but are prepared to offer another one-year contract.’ I said no to one year. They came back and offered two. That gave me the confidence to push on.”
Collectively, too, victory set a platform for an era of unparalleled Warwickshire success. “The progression of the positive cricket we played through the 90s started after that,” Smith says. “It was small margins. How did we win? How do we improve?
“It led into a mentality of breaking the game down and we became a progressive side. We analysed every moment and quickly coined a phrase: ‘Every ball is an event.’ Don’t let any ball drift. In 1994, when Brian Lara came, he blew scoring rates out of the water. It gave us so much time to win games.”
Next Monday marks 35 years since a defining Lord’s occasion that impacted the entire sport’s development. Although surely the memories have faded and Hughes rarely gets reminded of it now?
“No. God, no,” he says. “My whole career is identified with that one ball. You can’t change it. I’d prefer if my career was remembered for something good, but at least it’s remembered for something.
“[But] I was so lucky. I played in four Championship-winning Middlesex teams and four or five cup-winning teams. It was an amazing period of success.”
Smith says: “I’m 57. I’m either referred to as the bloke who hit the six at Lord’s or ‘Son of …’ Despite having got nine or 10 winners’ medals with Warwickshire and been to a World Cup.”
Smith retired in 2004 and is groundsman at Leamington CC, back where he started out playing colts’ cricket. At 91 his father MJK, the former Warwickshire and England captain, remains involved.
“He sits on the roller for me,” Smith says. “He can just about climb up and down off it. He still has a sense of duty and feels he’s contributing. Cricket’s been his whole life.”
It has been Neil Smith’s life, too. Although it would have been very different but for Hughes’s slower ball and his sweet, ugly six.
This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
