Somerset County Cricket Club played Worcestershire in the 1979 Benson & Hedges Cup. The match was completed in 18 minutes, and consisted of only 16 legal deliveries. Somerset declared after just one over to protect their bowling strike rate advantage. The decision was condemned by the press and cricket officials. The Test and County Cricket Board voted to eject Somerset from the competition. Cricket’s rules were later changed to ban declarations in professional one-day cricket.
About Worcestershire v Somerset, 1979 in brief
Somerset County Cricket Club played Worcestershire in the 1979 Benson & Hedges Cup. The match was completed in 18 minutes, and consisted of only 16 legal deliveries. Somerset declared after just one over to protect their bowling strike rate advantage. The decision was condemned by the press and cricket officials. The Test and County Cricket Board voted to eject Somerset from the competition by a vote of seventeen to one. Cricket’s rules were later changed to ban declarations in professional one-day cricket, although a similar incident occurred in club cricket in 2017. The Somerset players were concerned because of the wet weather it had been under for a few days, which would be difficult for batsman to play on. Peter Roebuck suggests in his official history that the idea was used by the Somerset team in his 2004 autobiography, Sometimes Igot Forgot, that he was the first to suggest that Somerset could declare at any point in their innings. An alternative suggestion involved batting aggressively to lose all ten wickets quickly and then allowing Worcesterhire to reach their target easily. To avoid suffering a heavy defeat, Somerset’s captain, Brian Rose, suggested that it was previously taken by other cricket teams in a similar situation that could eliminate them. Somerset won the match, but were ejected from the tournament by a vote of 17 to one, and Somerset were never again involved in a major one- day cricket competition. The club had never won a major trophy in their 104-year history, and had come close to winning each of the three English county cricket competitions in 1978.
The team featured international players such as Viv Richards and Ian Botham, and was one of the most talked-about and glamorous cricket teams at the time, according to Somerset cricket historian David Foot. Somerset finished second, a similar fate to that they suffered in the 1976 John Player League, when five teams had tied on points, and Kent won on run rate. In the John Player league, they tied with Hampshire and Leicestershire on 48 points to give them equal first place, but Hampshire had the superior run rate, which was used as a tie-breaker to give the competition to Hampshire. In 1979, Somerset led the group, having won all three of their matches. They faced WorcesTERS, while Glamorgan had to play a side representing the Minor Counties. The result of the match would help to determine which teams progressed to the quarter-finals. Somerset scored one run from their over and declared; WorcesTer’s took ten deliveries to score the two runs they needed to win. After their near misses in previous years, the Somerset Players were determined that they were not going to miss out again. One of the players, Vic Marks, said later that they wanted to \”atone for the acute disappointments of the 1978 season\”. The Somerset Players wanted to increase the chances that the possible covers for the pitch would be increased.
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