The history of the John Player League deserves to have a book written about it and Patrick Eagar’s beautiful photograph of Dean Park deserves to be on the front cover of one, so kudos to Mark Sands for putting the two together. In the JPL years a world of T40 leagues there was not, and many of the game’s best played a full season in an era when the county cricket map had many grounds on it.
Stars on Sunday begins with a chapter on the International Cavaliers whose televised performances on Sunday afternoons paved the way for the start in 1969. A big expansion from a fund-raising team travelling round to a league for 17 counties and the tv contract negotiations, the format, that it was Sunday (hitherto largely a day of rest) and tensions around tobacco company sponsorship are all covered readably.
The season-by-season accounts follow with inevitably some likely to be of more interest than others for particular readers, but nostalgia to share round when the then non-TMG counties won most of the time. Having watched Hants from the first year the highs 1975, the legend of Darley Dale given a write-up that does it justice, 1978 the brilliance of Gordon Greenidge after the departure of Barry Richards, and 1986, Cardigan Connor’s decisive over at the Oval is written about in detail.
As with other Hants followers from that era, just lucky, personally actual experiences rather than tv ones as well. As for what nostalgia forgets: there were games when the team batting first made a big score, or not enough, and the afternoon subsided, and it being before Duckworth-Lewis scores were just adjusted in proportion to the number of overs lost, not ideal.
Nor was every game played at an easy, picturesque outground: at Northlands Road much of the seating was planks of hard wood, and the catering, while adequate for 1970s tastes, would be likely to disappoint visitors from 2026. But it didn’t cost much to get in, juniors came by themselves and were encouraged to play their own games, ‘the future’ as those on the PA put it, the thinking of county secretaries who took reasonable care of it and had a hit with the JPL.