Some players are generous on the pitch. Some are generous off it.
Some are both, which is why Simon O’Hagan will always love John Dye
Lord’s on the morning of September 4, 1971. My team, Kent, are taking on Lancashire in the Gillette Cup final. It’s a clash of the heavyweights, and the ground is already buzzing.
Lancashire, fresh from an epic semi-final victory against Gloucestershire, are reckoned to be the best one-day team in the land. They boast the great West Indian Clive Lloyd and leading Englishmen in David Lloyd, Barry Wood, and Peter Lever. But we’ve got our own big names – Asif Iqbal, Mike Denness, Brian Luckhurst, Alan Knott, Derek Underwood. We definitely fancy our chances.
I’d like to be able to say I was there. Instead, I was on holiday in Cornwall, aged 13, watching on a fuzzy black-and-white TV. As the players took the field, there was one in particular I was looking out for. He wasn’t a star. In fact, I feared he might not even be picked.
John Dye was a burly, left-arm quick bowler who did his stuff for Kent without fuss or fanfare. He had grown up in the Medway towns, only a few miles from where I lived. He had the physique of a prop forward but none of the stolidity. With his rolling gait as he approached the wicket, power seemed to accumulate with every stride. He was a tremendous sight. He would arch his back, plant his foot, and whip his arm through. There was a hint of a swagger.
But what really mattered to me about Dye was that he had taught me how to bowl properly. As a cricket-mad youngster, I spent my winters in the indoor nets in Chatham where Dye occupied himself between seasons. Most first-class players you grew up admiring from a distance. Here was one who had adjusted my position at the moment of delivery.
I’d also discovered what a great bloke he was – a man of the people who was good-humoured and generous and who betrayed no sense that this work was beneath him. He loved cricket, he loved to see it played the right way, and he loved to pass on his knowledge and enthusiasm.
So the player who got the nod for Kent that day – it was a close-run thing between him and the young allrounder Graham Johnson – wasn’t just John Dye. He was my John Dye. And when Lancashire went out to bat, it was Dye who was given the first over. Come on, Dye! Up he stepped, and in he came, and his second ball was a beauty which had Wood lbw for nought. Yes!
As I recall, Dye was virtually unplayable that morning. He made the ball lift, he slanted it across, and he brought it back – the thing that all left-arm over bowlers are supposed to do, but rarely can. Bob Cottam, who played alongside Dye at Northamptonshire later in the 1970s, told me “he picked up so many lbws bowling to right-handers it was unbelievable.”
Dye dismissed Harry Pilling for his second wicket, which was to be his last meaningful contribution to the match. But what a contribution it was. Clive Lloyd scored a brilliant 66 to help Lancashire to 224, and Kent’s run chase ended when Jack Bond took a magnificent diving catch at extra cover to dismiss Asif.
As it turned out, that defeat was one of Dye’s last matches for Kent. The county is notorious for discarding good players before their time and their treatment of Dye was typical. He could have taken stacks more wickets for Kent. Instead, he took them for Northamptonshire, where he was a key player in one of the most successful sides in the county’s history.
Dye was well liked by team-mates, Cottam told me, but his career was far from all sweetness and light. You could sense the outsider in him. He had his pride. Matthew Engel, then covering Northants for the local paper, tells the story of how Dye once stopped him in his car. “He wanted me to know that the paper had got his batting average wrong. It wasn’t 2.62 or something. It was 2.98. He was only half joking.”
Dye’s sacking by Kent rankled so badly that, according to Cottam, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about his time there. He was equally unhappy when, in 1977, Northants let him go, even though he was 35. But the game was changing, and Dye was not exactly the most adaptable of cricketers. His attitude to batting and fielding was that of someone who didn’t believe they were part of the job description. Dye was a traditionalist. You had your role and that was it. As Andrew Radd, a Dye fan and Northants-based cricket writer, told me: “All I can say is I’m glad John wasn’t around when Twenty20 came in.”
Radd grew up supporting Northants the way I had grown up supporting Kent. The memory of Dye that stands out for him almost mirrors my own. This time it’s the 1976 Gillette Cup final. Again the opposition are Lancashire, again Dye opens the bowling, and again it’s explosive. He bowls Farokh Engineer first ball. His match figures were 7-3-9-1.
For an unassuming man, Dye had an amazing relish for the big occasion. But the game meant everything to him at the opposite end of its spectrum, too. I like to think he discovered that when he was helping 12-year-olds like me back in 1970, because in retirement he took up as a schools coach proper, spending 20 years at Wellingborough. “He was brilliant,” a colleague told me. “The boys loved him.”
Dye, now 63, went with his wife to live in Spain a few years ago. I’d just like to say, “Gracias, John”.
SIMON O’HAGAN is deputy comment editor and former cricket correspondent of the Independent on Sunday