Derbyshire - Gillette Cup Winners

Its a little known fact that Derbyshire won the Gillette Cup at least 5 times a year throughout the 1970's, posting huge totals on their way to national domination.

At least in my house when I was a kid.

I was in my loft the other day and came across the 1970 board game by Ariel (not the little mermaid, just in case you wondered). It was the game of my childhood, alongside "Battle of the Little Big Horn". The latter was not a cricket game, funnily enough, but a recreation of Custer's Last Stand where you had to overcome the odds and get Custer and his men across the river and to the safety of the corner of the board. It was great fun, but the odds on a win were slim for old George Armstrong Custer as you needed some flukey dice throws to do it. Manage that and you'd have been better off down at a casino...

Gillette Cup was superb. Plastic batsmen and fielders and an outfield that radiated out from the wicket in numbers 1-4 with the bands divided into lettered squares (A-M or somesuch). You would set the field for the bowling as you saw fit and then start to turn the cards. There was a bowling pile and a batting pile and the person bowling first declared if he was bowling fast, medium or slow. No variation allowed thank you, if you're fast, you're fast - don't even think about a slower ball.

You'd turn a card and it would say Good length, Full Toss or Short, then the batsman would turn a card. If the fast bowler had bowled a good length ball, you'd read the co-ordinates of the shot.
If, for example, it said G3, you would get three runs, F4 you'd get four and so on. If there was a fielder there, one run would be deducted and if the writing was in red, rather than black, it was in the air and caught.

I remember many happy summer afternoons playing this game, and you could get some great commentaries going, all of them in a Richie Benaud voice.

"In comes Lillee, the fast bowler, bowling to Wilkins of Derbyshire and its a good length ball. Its in the air.... and its six!"

The problem with the game was that runs were too easy. I came across score sheets in the box from some of those games. One of them (they recommended 20 overs so must have known something eh?) saw Derbyshire (377-4, Venkat 162, Bolus 115, Page 83) lose to a World XI (380-3, Barry Richards 110, Eddie Barlow 85, Graeme Pollock 104, Clive Lloyd 52 not out, Rohan Kanhai 27 not out). Many saw Derbyshire wins, which suggests that I found a good way to cheat which I no longer recall. It probably involved sneaking a look at the co-ordinates and nudging a fielder into position...

My son suggested that we should sort our current batting frailties by approaching the ECB to allow us to have our innings via the Gillette Cup game and then just bowling at the opposition, a tactic guaranteeing success. Whatever its shortcomings, the game was the best I came across in my childhood for cricket and in many ways superior to some of the online or computer-based games available today. One for another article I think...