This week we look at another player who was a household name when I was growing up.
U is for Underwood. Derek Leslie Underwood MBE (born 8 June 1945) spent his early days watching his father, a right-arm medium pace bowler, play for Farnborough CC, where his older brother also played. He was educated at Beckenham and Penge Grammar School for Boys and in 1961 took all ten wickets for the school's First XI against Bromley Grammar School.
Playing county cricket for Kent, he made his first-class debut against Yorkshire aged 17 in 1963 becoming the youngest player to take 100 County Championship wickets in a debut season. He went on to take 100 wickets in a season a further nine times. His batting was less accomplished, averaging barely over ten runs per innings in 676 matches.
His Test debut was in 1966 against the West Indies and in 1968 Underwood took the last four Australian wickets in 27 balls in the final half an hour of the fifth Test, after a heavy thunderstorm had all but ended the match, to square an Ashes series that Australia were winning 1–0. He was named in 1969 as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year and toured Australia in 1970–71, dismissing Terry Jenner to win the seventh Test at Sydney, and regain the Ashes.
According to the retrospective ICC Test bowler rankings, Underwood was ranked number 1 in the world from September 1969 to August 1973.
Through much of his career, Underwood was regarded as one of the best bowlers in Test cricket. Although classified as a slow left-arm orthodox spin bowler, Underwood bowled at around medium pace and was often unplayable on seaming English wickets, particularly sticky wickets, earning his nickname 'Deadly', and accounting for the saying that England would "carry Underwood like an umbrella, in case of rain". Noted for consistent accuracy, his in-swinging arm ball was particularly known for dismissing batsmen leg before wicket. It was said that he would wear a hole in the pitch by dropping the ball on the same spot.
He took his 100th Test wicket and 1,000th first-class wicket in 1971, aged only 25. Only George Lohmann and Wilfred Rhodes had managed that at an earlier age. He used to say that bowling was a 'low mentality profession: plug away, line and length, until there's a mistake', and sooner or later every batsman would make a mistake. He finished his Test career with 297 wickets, and but for his involvement in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket and the rebel tour to South Africa in 1981-82, there is little doubt he would have had more than 300 Test wickets.
Underwood was almost unplayable on damp wickets, but on dry tracks he would often push the ball through a little quicker and flatter, not wanting to risk being hit over his head, which he always hated. Oddly, he rarely completed a whole Test series for England, as a succession of England captains would switch to bigger turners of the ball, such as Norman Gifford.
He scored his first and only first-class century (111) at the age of 39, in his 591st first-class match in July 1984. It was played at Hastings, a favourite bowling haunt for Underwood who, having gone in to bat as night watchman, finally reached the hundred mark in his 618th first-class innings.
Underwood retired from cricket in 1987, at the age of 42, having taken 2,465 wickets at a little over 20 apiece. He was President of The MCC in 1998 and on 16 July 2009 was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.