Everybody remembers the ending. With one ball remaining Nottinghamshire had to score three to win, and steal the Benson & Hedges Cup away from Essex. “To bowl the last ball was John Lever, 40 years old, 40 years wise,” wrote Mike Selvey in the Guardian. “Facing was Eddie Hemmings, four days older than Lever and no less wise or yeoman-hearted. It was a shoot-out of the old brigade. A game now of bluff, double bluff and raw nerve. Gooch and Lever took an eternity to set the field. Lever breathed deep and set off.”
It was 1989; Essex were the most successful side of the decade and apparently on their way to winning everything again. Three times in the 1980s they had won the County Championship, and three times the Sunday league. This year they led them both, topping the county table after 12 of 22 games with a handy 33-point lead over Worcestershire (to put that in context, none of the next four teams were more than 12 points further back), and in the Sunday Refuge Assurance League, having played 11 of their 16 games, they were four points ahead of Lancashire at the top. The Benson & Hedges Cup could have been the first of an improbable, glorious treble.
Related: When Ian Botham played king at the panto and the 1992 Cricket World Cup
Continue reading...