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How counties came a cropper on Black Wednesday
Mike Selvey
David Lloyd lifts the 1975 Gillette Cup after Lancashire beat Middlesex at Lord’s
BRADSHAW/MIRRORPIX/GETTY IMAGES
Black Wednesday, we called it, that midweek day in late June when a few of the first-class counties set out to negotiate the banana skin of the first round of the Gillette Cup, the third and longest of the one-day competitions each year. The 55 overs-a-side Benson & Hedges Cup, with its round-robin group stage followed by knockout, was all but done in May, and the 40-over Sunday League was ongoing through the season. But the Gillette was cricket’s FA Cup, the one where the so-called ‘minnows’, the Minor Counties, got their annual tilt at toppling the pros, and the season worked its way round by round to a finale of a sell-out September Lord’s final, the grandest, often most raucous, cricket day out of the year (see page 36).