‘Let Him Stew’
DENNIS LILLEE IS concise with his words and passionate about the Australian XI. Both qualities were evident a year after his retirement when he was asked about his legacy. Would he, wondered the journalist from Australian Cricket, go down as ‘a Ned Kelly anti-hero’ or ‘a pure sporting legend in the Bradman mould’?
‘If I am remembered,’ replied Lillee, ‘as someone who gave a hundred per cent at all times, I don’t care what else I am remembered for.’ In the two decades since, his legend taller and leg-cutter retrospectively deadlier with every passing summer, he has got his wish. Getting what he wishes is a third characteristic of Lillee’s.
His wicketkeeping pal Rodney Marsh can be even more concise. Sometimes Marsh’s concision turns into gruffness. ‘The team is the thing and to devote yourself anything less than one hundred per cent to that team is tantamount to treason,’ Marsh once wrote. Should anyone dare accuse him otherwise—‘I’d like to meet the idiot and personally shove the proposition down his throat or up some other orifice.’
Giving a hundred per cent is the most quoted yet least quantifiable of cricket’s prefabricated parrot phrases. It is almost meaningless—a hundred per cent of what?—and was junked anew by Matthew Hayden’s twenty-first century pledge of ‘one billion per cent’ support for Ricky Ponting. It is also immeasurable. The sport of run rates, over rates, strike rates and economy rates knows no such thing as effort rate. All anyone can do is watch a game unfold and interpret what they see. Between May and September of 1981, when Australia toured England, several people saw a lot of things they had trouble interpreting.
•••••
AUSTRALIA’S NEW CAPTAIN was interviewed by John Wiseman on Channel Ten’s Eyewitness News the day after his appointment. Kim’s hair was damp and combed straight—no curls—but as he licked dry lips and swiped Perth’s flies out of his face he looked more boyish than ever.
‘Kim, first of all congratulations. What do you think of some of this morning’s criticism?’
‘Well I don’t know who’s criticising me at all, John, but I suppose one in my position isn’t going to please everybody.’
Kim had led Australian Test teams before. That was during the World Series Cricket days when the country’s three dozen finest were otherwise engaged as Kerry Packer’s so-called circus act. This time the tidings were auspicious, theoretically: a full-strength squad with a winning chance. Theory was one thing. In reality, Western Australia’s battle-hardened Bruces—Laird and Yardley—had been left out. Human dynamite sticks Jeff Thomson and Len Pascoe were missing. ‘I always thought selectors were idiots,’ reasoned Thommo. ‘Now I know it.’ Record crowds descended on the bar of the Dungog Bowls Club. Not since 1964 had local sweetheart Doug Walters been overlooked for an Ashes trip. ‘We would listen on the wireless till 3 a.m. when Doug was playing,’ grumbled one irate Dungogian. ‘When he hit a four we’d celebrate by opening a cold one. Maybe we’re biased but, blimey, it’s a bit crook.’
Heading the unlikelier inclusions in Australia’s 1981 Ashes squad was Graeme Beard. He’d added folded-finger off-breaks to his repertoire two years earlier when his slow-mediums kept thudding into Tooheys advertising boards at a speed considerably zippier than slow-medium. Youngest of the Chappell trinity, Trevor, was also England-bound. ‘The first Australian cricketer to have won a major berth on the strength of his brilliant fielding,’ commented McFarline in the Age.
Alas, Trevor was a like-for-not-at-all-like swap with Greg. Greg ruled himself out to fellow selectors on a Tuesday. The squad—minus a captain—was announced on the Wednesday. A public explanation was forthcoming, for a fee, on a Thursday-night TV special, Greg Chappell: Covers Off. He revealed that his son Stephen no longer knew whether Greg Chappell was his absent father, a famous cricketer, or both. Business interests, including an insurance company, were mounting too. ‘March, April, May and in particular June,’ he elaborated, ‘are vital to the success of the venture.’
On the Friday, Kim was named captain. A newspaperman gave him the good news before anyone from the board did.
Where was Lillee hiding? That was an eventful week’s biggest mystery. Six months earlier he and Marsh had each rejected the Western Australian vice-captaincy under Kim. Lillee’s name was one of sixteen on the teamsheet for England. But how much was that piece of paper worth? Scuttlebutt crisscrossed the continent from east to west and back again. Finally Perth journalist Ken Casellas found Lillee in the riverside clubrooms of Tompkins Park. It was Saturday night. Lillee was puffed from twenty-five knackering overs for Melville. He was drinking his own version of a shandy—one gulp out of a can of beer, one gulp of lemonade—but there was nothing bubbly about his demeanour. ‘I’ve got an unlisted phone number and it’s been changed a few times. Still I get calls day and night from all over the world from people wanting to know whether I’m going on tour. All I want to say is I’m happy the season is over.’ The mystery deepened.
Kim celebrated his appointment by popping a couple of balls out of the park in his next innings, an unbeaten 156 in a first-grade semi-final. At the ABC Sportsman of the Year awards, he was asked if he tended to decide on a stroke before the ball was bowled. Confounding the laws of reliable run gathering, Kim answered: ‘Yes.’ Knowledgeable sorts watching in their living rooms were appalled. But vindication arrived a week before the team’s departure when he was listed among Wisden’s five cricketers of the year. Inclusion in Wisden’s famous five traditionally recognises a season’s haystack of runs or wickets. Kim was picked for his two celestial Centenary Test knocks. Anyone who reckoned it impossible to premeditate deliveries and prosper needed only to skim the highlights tape.
The thought of returning to England was sweet. It was tantalising enough for Lillee to decide to go too, although he and Marsh were permitted to skip the pre-tour detour to Sri Lanka. The Australians arrived on day one of the monsoon season. Pitches were custom-built for Sri Lanka’s finger-spinning trio. Power was switched off every morning and evening, for the system was hydro-electric and there was a water shortage. On the field, too, it was as if Australia were playing in darkness. Outclassed in the drawn four-dayer, they sneaked the skimpiest of victories in the unofficial limited-overs series, perverse preparation for an English spring.
Really, the twelve-day stopover was a fact-finding mission on behalf of board delegates unsure which way to vote on Sri Lanka’s bid for Test status. Australian officials were reportedly seen photographing stadium toilets as evidence for the ‘no’ case. ‘Come on, Aussies, come off it,’ pleaded a local newspaper. But all four games were sellouts. Sri Lankan Testhood followed months later. And Kim had not a bad word for the place, the toilets, the tour, or the administrators who devised it. He was equal to the diplomatic challenge posed by one of Rodney Hogg’s eccentric contributions to Australian touring folklore. Riled by humidity and his inability to prick a ballooning middle-order partnership, Hogg marked a cross between his eyes and nearly decapitated Ranjan Madugalle with a head-high full toss. The captain strode imperiously across from mid-on: ‘That’s not on, Rodney.’
England was three-jumper territory. Kim acclaimed the opening net session at Lord’s the best first-day workout of any tour he’d been on. This cocktail of good cheer, naivety and overstatement would become a trademark of his public pronouncements, one that bugged some team-mates. But not yet. At Arundel Castle he was out to his first ball of the tour, an Intikhab Alam top-spinner grubbering into his boot. His humour survived. Invited by the ground manager in Swansea to nominate a time for practice, Kim grinned. ‘Six o’clock in the morning—the only time it doesn’t rain in this country.’ Drizzle, sleet, frost and murk gave Kim ample chance to polish his introductory note for the Test brochure:
As I write this message I know that I am back in England. Once again we are stuck inside the dressing room watching rain stream down the windows. However, I am certain this year’s full tour of England will prove to be one of the most exciting in the long history of England versus Australia contests . . . I hope you enjoy watching the cricket and also that I will be able to say ‘hello’ to as many of you as possible.
Kim’s ‘hello, everyone’ policy extended to travelling Australian scribes. ‘We want you to feel part of the team,’ he told them. He enquired after their welfare over breakfast and hosted candid off-the-record briefings over drinks. ‘Team-mates are singing his praises daily and lauding the great team spirit,’ reported Alan ‘Sheff’ Shiell. ‘Australian pressmen will not tolerate a bad word about Hughes the man.’ English broadsheet writers stepped the pro-Kim hoopla up several more adjectives. Some felt they’d been shown few courtesies during the furry-bellied Chappell dynasty. They appreciated Kim’s plain-speaking eloquence, his insistence that nothing was too bothersome. ‘I hope he becomes what he deserves to be—the most popular captain since Lindsay Hassett,’ wrote Robin Marlar in the Sunday Times. Frank Keating found fault only with the patchy stubble clinging to Kim’s chin: ‘His clean boy scout’s face somehow goes better with the sparkling innocence of his batsmanship. Pulled this way and that by photographers, fringers, high commissioners, low commissioners, book commissioners and hall-porter commissioners, he never stopped being softly obliging.’
Kim’s next coup was to oversee Australia’s maiden triumph in a one-day series in England. Shivering and rusty, they lost at Lord’s then levelled at Edgbaston, where England needed six off the last over and Lillee kept them to three. As Kim walked into the press conference, Australian journalists rose and clapped. At training before the series decider, Trevor Chappell confessed his terror of England’s middle order, which had throttled him on wickets made for his glamourless wobblers. Yes, admitted Kim, he felt a bit the same way about Trevor’s bowling. But he stuck to the plan. Chappell’s three wickets proved suffocating.
Hunches continued hatching fruitfully once the Tests started. Twice Kim called heads and chose to bowl. No Ashes captain had gambled like that before in the first two Tests of a series. Australia won at Trent Bridge and had marginally the better of a soggy Lord’s draw. At Trent Bridge, Kim kept the cordon stacked with four slips and the ball in the hand of a 25-year-old debutant with a centipede moustache. Terry Alderman’s hula-hooping outswingers knocked nine Englishmen aside. Chasing 132, Australia’s seventh-wicket pair were meandering towards victory when Kim joined Alan McGilvray and Christopher Martin-Jenkins in the Test Match Special box.
McGilvray: Weather good, perfect conditions. Now Lawson . . .
Hughes: Whewwwwsh.
McGilvray: There’s a big sigh from Kim Hughes. Yes I know how you feel. Now Dilley is on his way to Lawson, and Lawson turns it . . .
Hughes: ONE MORE.
McGilvray: One more, says Kim.
Not for a second did he disguise nerves or excitement.
McGilvray: Dilley moves away from us to bowl to Lawson. A full toss and . . .
Hughes: GOOD SHOT! FOUR! GOODY!
Kim clapped his hands and shouted advice and bellowed over the top of the two commentators.
McGilvray: Chappell, you must stay there and pick up these four runs. And Kim, if you’d like to leave anytime . . .
Hughes: Yeah, I might, ah, just wait one more ball.
A strangled titter.
McGilvray: Right, one more ball, all right.
Hughes: I might just sit in my seat.
CMJ: Terrible isn’t it, Kim?
Hughes: Ay?
CMJ: Terrible isn’t it?
Hughes: Aww, I don’t know how anybody can captain for more than a game.
That night it was possible to picture Kim Hughes, twenty-seven, captaining his country for so long as he craved. The Ashes urn had been England’s property since 1977. But the handover was nigh, surely. Several uproarious hours later at the team hotel, Marsh, Lillee and Kim were seen deep in discussion, shoulders entwined. Kim cheerfully told anyone who’d listen about how Marsh had held up a glove and halted play with Lillee poised to tear in at Willis.
‘You’ve got all the angles buggered up,’ Marsh roared.
‘Oh,’ said Kim. ‘What do you want?’
Marsh reset the field. Deep cover point was relocated twenty-five metres sideways. Two balls later Willis hit straight to him.
‘I’m hardly a captain at all,’ Kim was saying that night. ‘But Hughes, Marsh and Lillee is a bloody good captain.’
•••••
COMING UP TO the Third Test at Headingley, Australia’s coach Peter Philpott sensed Kim was in trouble. Over a beer, he voiced his worries to Marsh, the vice-captain.
‘Rodney, we’ve got to try to help him.’
‘He’s got the job,’ said Marsh. ‘He’s a big boy. Let him stew in it.’
Marsh’s words still grate in Philpott’s head:
It wasn’t a pleasant relationship between Kim and the other two. They thought he was a soft boy. They were two hard men and they didn’t have much respect for him. They respected his batting but not his captaincy or him as a human being. I don’t think they respected Kim as a man. They didn’t hide that. In fact they allowed themselves at times to do just the opposite. You couldn’t help but watch and be disappointed at the way they threw the boy to the wolves—threw him to the wolves and didn’t throw out a line to help him.
Philpott found Kim faintly immature. ‘I think Rodney and Dennis saw him as a kind of little golden boy.’ Captaincy was the main volcano of contention. Dennis thought Rodney should be in charge. Rodney thought Rodney should be in charge. It reminded Philpott—up to a point—of Australia’s 1957–58 visit to South Africa. A freckle-faced pharmacist still living with his parents led that tour. ‘Neil Harvey and Richie Benaud would have been flabbergasted when Ian Craig was appointed captain over them,’ says Philpott. ‘But they gave him total support. Ian was only a kid and they helped greatly. That didn’t happen in 1981.’
With Australia one Test up, the cracks were undetectable to outsiders. Esso scholar Carl Rackemann was borrowed from Surrey’s 2nd XI to fortify Australia’s sniffling pace attack against Warwickshire. Thirty-six more thrilling hours he’d never known: ‘My impression of the dressing room was that everything was pretty positive, pretty good.’ Similarly, the reporters who rained a standing ovation upon Kim after the second one-dayer had no inkling of the bloodletting behind slammed doors. In the first match Australia bowled sloppily, fielded scruffily, and Philpott told them so. Second time round they were a team rejuvenated. Henry Blofeld’s report in the Australian concluded: ‘For me, Peter Philpott and Geoff Lawson were the men of the match.’
Blofeld’s article whipped round the dressing room. Fair enough, thought the players from New South Wales, Philpott’s home state. Bulldust, chorused the rest. ‘The Western Australians, they were livid,’ Philpott remembers. ‘Kimberley was very upset. And the lines were clearly defined.’ To suggest any correlation between Philpott’s salvo and the team’s salvation was tripe, the players huffed. And if there was . . . Well, if that was the case then the little man in the tracksuit was plainly exceeding his brief.
When Marsh and Lillee addressed Kim by his nickname, something about the way croaky voices draped over the first syllable—‘Claaaaa-gee’—made others think of grown men patting a boy on the head. Body language—folded arms, rolling eyes—often spoke loudest. Pinpointing what ailed this team wasn’t always easy. It was a feeling people got. Lawson believes Lillee and Marsh spent ‘nearly every waking hour’ undermining Kim. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that,’ counters Wood. ‘We were playing very well.’ For Graeme Beard: ‘We were a bunch of fellas playing cricket for Australia and it was fabulous. I got on well with all the blokes.’
Was it a united side? Beard goes quiet.
‘Well. Probably not. A difficult situation.’
And that’s all you’ll say?
‘Mmmm,’ says Beard. ‘Well. Yeah.’
The cracks were small in those early days on tour but they were there. And they were not like cracks in a vase that could be sealed with putty. These cracks were like a run in a stocking. They were only going to get bigger. They opened up the moment the team left for Sri Lanka minus Marsh and Lillee. ‘That was very significant,’ says Philpott. ‘In the bonding period, they weren’t there.’
Philpott planned to build unity through practice, then more practice. But the Sri Lankan leg was hectic. When time did allow for nets, it was too hot to move or too wet to try. Then they hit England. Philpott recalls:
For six weeks we sat in front of the fire and froze. And in that situation the unpleasantness tended to grow. The infection spread. It all made it harder for Kimberley, so much harder. I don’t think he was up to handling it. Not many blokes would be. If they’d made Allan Border captain he would have been in much the same position. Rodney and Dennis wouldn’t have been so anti-AB, but they wouldn’t have sup- ported him greatly because Rodney still would have thought he should have been captaining.
Marsh and Lillee departed eleven days late. Marsh’s knees, creaking from years of bending, jolting and fetching, the wicketkeeper’s daily lot, appreciated the rest. Lillee had a sinus-clearing operation and deemed Sri Lanka an infection risk. His strategy backfired. He sweated away his first three weeks in a north London hospital’s isolation ward. Team-mates donned face masks to visit him. He’d picked up viral pneumonia on the journey with Marsh, or perhaps from his son, who had a chest cold. Either way, chances were his health would have been tiptop had he flown with everyone else, although everyone else probably didn’t mention this to Lillee, not even from behind face masks.
Defying medical advice, Lillee played and bowled manfully. Exhausted, he lolled in the outfield between deliveries versus Middlesex. Some observers sensed a sit-down protest against Australia’s underperforming batsmen. Admonished by Kim and manager Fred Bennett, Lillee’s reply was true to character: ‘Have you ever seen me let down Australia in a Test match?’
The bowlers had reason to quibble. Dirk Wellham’s 135 at Northampton on 13 July was the first first-class hundred—two months into the tour. Not since 8 September 1880, and Billy Murdoch’s 153 against England, had Australians found three figures so elusive so deep into an English summertime. Most dismaying was the captain’s form. A 61 at Canterbury, where he drove Bob Woolmer over a refreshments tent, was his only fifty in twenty innings. On seaming wickets he was tiptoeing negligently across the crease and getting suckered lbw. At Lord’s for the Second Test, he and Alan McGilvray discussed England’s penurious off-spinner John Emburey.
‘Watch this fellow, Kim.’
‘He can’t bowl. I’ll take the mickey out of him.’
‘Well, I think he can bowl a bit. I’d be wary of him if I were you.’
Square cutting the seamers thrillingly, Kim skipped to 42. Emburey limbered up. Whether his third ball was flat or tossed up no one truly knows, so prematurely did Kim scurry down, as if determined to shovel McGilvray a catch in the commentary box. He didn’t middle it. Mid-off caught it.
So often it ended like this. First ball of a new spell. Two minutes before drinks. Third ball after lunch. Last over of the day. It happened too often to be slack concentration. Nor could it be so simple as the reverse: that he was concentrating too hard. It was as if he was twisting between extremes, him and them, between the urge to entertain and the need to consolidate, listening to his instincts but unable to hush the voices all around, believing the whole time that cricket should be a game, but if it was a game did that mean entertaining was the thing or was winning the thing, and when the tempo was raised by a break in play or change in bowling the buzzing in his head got so loud that something had to explode. It had always exasperated team-mates. Now he was captain and still doing it.
Wellham, more compact and elegant than his reputation for stickability suggested, was mooted as a possible twelfth man at Headingley, some promotion for a novice of four Sheffield Shield games. Two days beforehand he was bedridden with flu. Mooching around the nets would only make him sicker. So he left a message and snoozed all day. Upon stirring, Wellham found it had cost him his chance. ‘I was a bit annoyed. I supposedly had a black mark. But I was new. They didn’t know me so they didn’t know whether I was sick or not. I guess nobody asked.’
More unsettling was the aftermath of the Lancashire game at Old Trafford. Wellham persevered through gloomy light—‘the first time I saw Michael Holding in real life’—for 19. In the showers afterwards he felt the hot spray of his captain’s urine. It was no big surprise. Wellham had been warned about Kim’s shower-time habit after a few drinks of unburdening himself over the nearest bystander. But nor was it pleasant. ‘Just schoolboy humour,’ Wellham recalls. ‘I wasn’t thrilled. That’s OK. It was a juvenile bit of fun. You know, a party trick. I thought it was silly but I thought he was a much better player than I was.’
The trick won Kim few laughs. ‘Dennis and Rodney would have thought that was absolutely inappropriate,’ says Wellham. ‘They would have thought that was more ammunition.’ Wellham’s response was to stay under that shower and scrub himself clean. ‘I thought it was a silly thing for the Australian captain to do. But that was Kim, part of his make-up, part of his reputation, a trick up the armoury.’
Winning has a cohesive effect on teams. Piddling issues drain away. In the Third Test at Headingley, on a wicket jagging every which way but predictably, John Dyson ranked his steadfast 102 the innings of his life. Kim batted four and a half hours, a man in a straitjacket, intent on showing neither extravagance nor weakness. On 89 he was clobbered in the groin. He afforded himself the briefest of convalescences—and got out next ball. He declared at 9–401. ‘Four hundred,’ said Kim, ‘is worth a thousand on this pitch.’
England tumbled for 174. Following on, their seventh wicket fell for 135, lurching towards a 2–0 series scoreline. ‘At seven down,’ says Beard, ‘Steve Rixon and I put the champagne bottles in the bath, ready to lay ice over them.’
•••••
ALL THINGS GOOD, UGLY and illusory about this Australian team were contained in Peter Willey’s dismissal. Gradually, Kim became aware of Willey’s delight in stepping away and skimming the ball over gully. Kim switched Dyson from the slips to a deeper fly slip. Lillee advanced. Willey cut. It was too close for the stroke; arms got tucked up; the ball soared. Dyson froze so still a butterfly could have landed on his shoe. The ball floated into Dyson’s chest. ‘Superb captaincy,’ beamed Richie Benaud in the commentary box. ‘One of the best pieces of tactical thinking I’ve seen in a long time.’ England skipper Mike Brearley agreed. ‘Such immediate rewards for intelligent and inventive captaincy,’ he wrote, ‘are rare.’
Benaud and Brearley were alert and astute but not in this instance all-seeing. They missed Lillee requesting a fly slip the moment Willey arrived. No, said Kim. The ball sailed where fly slip would have been. The protagonists mumbled their way through the same rough dialogue.
Can I have one?
You may not.
Sheesh. There it goes again.
The second time it happened, Lillee clamped hands on hips. Marsh wandered over to yarn with the captain. How about a fly slip? The captain gave in. Willey got out. The celebrations over, Kim and Lillee walked the long hike back to the top of his run-up. Never were they closer together than two metres. Both were silent. Kim crept backwards while polishing the ball on his pants. Lillee faced forwards. Neither looked in the same direction or at each other. Eventually Lillee half turned, still walking, and glared at the ball, implying ‘give it here’. They reached the top. Kim shook Lillee’s hand—a gesture Lillee did not invite or reciprocate—and passed him the ball.
Willey’s downfall brought in Ian Botham, playing his first Test since Brearley succeeded him as captain. In his last outing, at Lord’s, Botham slithered through the old white gate after a pair of noughts while MCC members all around him avoided eye contact. But the harried look in his face had vanished. He was bearded and carefree. He off-drove classically, edged a couple over fielders’ heads, then welcomed incoming No. 9 Graham Dilley: ‘Let’s give it some humpty.’
Minutes before this, Lillee bet £10 on Australia losing. Ladbrokes’ odds were 500–1. Only a mug would let those odds go cold. Marsh, initially reluctant, punted £5. ‘That bloody bet. Had Greg been captain they’d never have done it,’ believes Adrian McGregor, Chappell’s biographer. ‘Or if they did it would be a big joke and Greg wouldn’t have been happy. He’d have thought it disloyal.’
Nobody thought much at all of it at the time. Nobody considered defeat possible. England were three wickets from despondency and 92 runs shy just of making Australia bat again. Botham had already checked out of the hotel. His swings, misses and top-edges began as defeatism and quickly became something else. Left-hander Dilley, blond-haired and blue-helmeted, clouted crooked deliveries through cover like a Graeme Pollock doppelganger. Botham was either driving majestically or pull-slogging flatfooted. One ball caught the splice and zoomed for the stratosphere. Kim jogged and fetched it, frowning, off a boy in a margarine anorak.
After Dilley came Chris Old. Old studied Lillee, Marsh, Alderman, Kim—‘all signalling different fielders to go in different positions’. Botham stuffed England’s tuckerbag with 117 runs in partnership with Dilley, then 67 more with Old. That evening, dapper stumper Bob Taylor ducked into the Australian rooms with bats under his arm for autographing. ‘Fuck off with your fucking bats,’ he was advised.
Irritation had set in. But not despair. At breakfast, Kim and the Sydney Sun’s Frank Crook discussed the inevitability of an Australian victory and the improbability of the board reappointing Greg Chappell. ‘I don’t think they’d dare,’ said Kim. Botham ransacked 37 last runs with Willis. He bounded off—to a knighthood, ultimately—149 not out. Australian victory, no longer the only possibility, remained a formality: 130 to get.
The first over was busy. Wood clumped two leg-side boundaries and was judged caught behind when only the bowler appealed: ‘A shocker. Must have hit some footmarks.’ Dyson and Trevor Chappell travelled serenely to 1–56. Operating uphill and upbreeze, Willis threatened no one. ‘Too old for that,’ he griped to his captain. Brearley baulked at his uppity fast bowler. Five minutes later he reconsidered, offering Willis the wind and the Kirkstall Lane End.
A ball theoretically too full to endanger brain matter kicked at Chappell’s head and he parried a catch to Taylor. Enter Kim, a picture of circumspection for eight scoreless deliveries, until he went fishing outside off and his feet forgot to go with him. It was the last over before lunch. The timing may have provoked wry half-smiles. Half-smiles soon tipped upside down. Graham Yallop guided Willis from his throat into short-leg Mike Gatting’s meaty hands. ‘I can remember the panic,’ says Wellham, an interested spectator, suddenly unable to look away. ‘The game had been light-hearted and jovial. Then we hit the wall and couldn’t contain it. If you’ve got a more subdued leader, you’ve got a less attacking leader. But you might have someone better able to withstand the barrage.’ Lunch was served—and barely picked over—at 4–58.
Border failed to impede a massive Old in-ducker. Dyson hooked and gloved. Marsh hooked from outside off stump and picked out long leg. There seemed an intangible aimlessness about the batting. Bright and Lillee pulled and slashed for four commonsense overs, worth 35 runs. Willis kept banging the ball in and seeing it jump. His reward was 8–43. Nine wickets melted for 55. Australia lost by 18. Nobody quite understood how. The haunting sensation was heightened by the sight of the flop-haired Willis, his eyes vacant and lifeless, hanging loosely in their sockets, like the imperilled damsel in a Mario Bava film.
So ended history’s only Test known by a suburb and two digits: Headingley ’81. Kim’s errors have become legend, part of the mystique. Once Botham attained blast-off Kim was too slow to spot the tipping point, too gung-ho to retract his fieldsmen, too reluctant to rest Lillee or Alderman. Ray Bright dropped hints. Yet not until 8–309—174 runs later—did Kim summon Bright’s slow left-armers. Trevor Chappell maintains he wasn’t even consulted; it seems trying a part-timer either never entered Kim’s head or fell out of it very quickly. Then there was his enforcing of the follow-on, sentencing Australia to bat last on an under-watered pitch. The theories have multiplied with hindsight.
All evidence suggests Kim did fret about batting last. After winning the toss he took ten minutes and two pitch inspections, accompanied by Marsh and Lillee, to make up his mind. The follow-on was simply irresistible. Bright was Victoria’s last Test spinner until Shane Warne’s emergence. But there, resemblances end. Bright’s trajectory was generally flat, his turn measured less in inches than in figments of a batsman’s imagination. Kim did overbowl Lillee and Alderman. But he’d been successfully overbowling them for two entire Tests and three-fifths of another. Besides, his only other frontline quick, Lawson, fell over a foothole and wrenched his back.
Blaming Kim for Headingley ’81 underplays another sig- nificant factor. Luck. Botham’s 149 might rightly be considered a once-every-130-years event. How his windmill wind-ups—those that connected, those that didn’t—evaded hands and stumps so repeatedly defies rational explanation. ‘Bloody lucky innings,’ Lillee called it. ‘I expected to get him virtually every ball.’ England’s turnaround was so fast, so implausible to the fieldsmen in the middle, that it became almost an hallucinatory experience, as if they were onlookers not participants. ‘I still have nightmares about that Test,’ Wood admits. ‘All along we thought we’d win. So we didn’t question it.’ Too late, the faint prospect of defeat dawned. ‘We started thinking we should have tried something different,’ says Wood. ‘But Kim probably thought Lillee and Alderman were having great tours and eventually Botham would nick one and get out. It just didn’t happen. It kept rolling on and on and on. Horrible experience.’
Or as Lawson puts it: ‘Twenty-seven years later people still ask me what would you do differently at Headingley? Well, apart from maybe giving Ray Bright a few more overs, what else could we have done?’
Kim reached the same conclusion in minutes. Outside the pavilion, his fine words were generously acclaimed by a delirious crowd. ‘I’m proud the Australian team has been part of one of the greatest Tests of all. Of course I’m disappointed we didn’t win. But we know we gave immense enjoyment.’ Later, among reporters, good manners deserted him. ‘We didn’t do much wrong except lose.’ And Botham? ‘He is a player who wins games and the only one England have got.’ That was skipping a little too conveniently over his own team’s frailties, of both the cricket and the human kind.
•••••
WHEN PRINCE CHARLES married Diana Spencer on 29 July, Kim was not among the estimated billion watching a TV set. He had a tour to run. He glanced at the replay while unwinding in his eighth-floor room of the Albany Hotel in Birmingham, scene of the Fourth Test. The match would prove the noisiest ever played in England, reckoned the home players, as if the wedding guests had decamped from St Paul’s Cathedral and flocked to Edgbaston for the reception.
The cricket was worthy of the din. England were skittled for 189 and Australia responded with 258. Kim’s boundary-laden 47 was top score. At England physio Bernard Thomas’s garden party, he told Brearley: ‘I only hope we don’t have 130 to get again.’ England stuttered obligingly to 8–167, 98 ahead. Then Emburey and Old, a nudger and a swiper, hoisted 50 more in one of the tour’s most telling half-hours.
If Australia’s chase of 130 at Headingley reeked of aimlessness, a touch of catatonia pervaded their pursuit of 151. Border camped three and a half hours for 40, Yallop two hours for 30, Kent 68 minutes for 10. Kim’s hook stroke on 5—slammed flat and hard off one leg, his posture geometrically impeccable—summed up the man. ‘Ah,’ purred the BBC’s Mike Smith, ‘it’s a beautiful shot.’ Smith paused to admire the ball’s flight. ‘But straight down that man’s throat. A beautiful-looking stroke . . .’
Botham’s 5–1 in 28 deliveries applied the finishing gloss. Australia all out 121. Kim’s kicked-puppy demeanour inspired one of Richie Benaud’s shiniest lines: ‘Hughes there, looking like he’s just been sandbagged.’ Bob Taylor likened him to ‘a shellshocked soldier . . . Not for the first time I found myself wondering how much respect he was given by the former Packer players.’
While Kim grieved publicly, Marsh sought refuge alone in the downstairs dressing room. ‘I don’t recall the tears welling up inside,’ Marsh wrote later. ‘But suddenly I was sobbing.’ As he sat and he wept, Marsh reflected on Australia’s batsmen. Mostly he thought about Kim. ‘I thought what might have happened if Hughes had not played a stupid hook shot when the Poms had two men stationed out in the deep. Christ, a captain is supposed to lead by example.’
Trailing 1–2 when he might have led 3–0, Kim finished that night dancing on a table at Bob Willis’s benefit function. Resilience was one of Kim’s less appreciated but undying characteristics. Memorable was his conversation with Brearley: ‘I suppose me mum’ll speak to me. Reckon me dad will too. And my wife. But who else?’ Kim neither excused nor apologised for hooking. ‘I’m a natural strokeplayer. That time it didn’t come off.’
Brearley agreed with his logic. ‘And I admired his dignity.’
Kim and Lillee were unlikely holidaymakers together on the Isle of Man, house guests of racehorse mogul Robert Sangster and his socialite wife Susan. It was a kaleidoscope of race meets and casino jaunts. The series resumed in Manchester with the Ashes alive, the spirit a cropper.
•••••
THE AFTERNOON BEFORE his Test debut, Mike Whitney was handed his room key at Manchester’s Grand Hotel and told to settle in. Be back in the foyer in one hour for the press conference announcing your selection, team manager Fred Bennett instructed. Whitney went upstairs. He unlocked the door. Cricket gear was strewn everywhere. ‘There were more pills in the room than a fuckin’ pharmacy.’ He wondered who his room-mate could be. Then he realised. In the corner was a suitcase, sumptuously crafted, adorned with the letters D.K. Lillee.
Whitney flopped on the bed. He could actually feel his own eyes bulging. ‘Here he is. My hero. You’ve got to remember, back then Dennis was D.K. Lillee, man.’ Several times that night, Whitney woke and snuck a peek at the sleeping body across the room. ‘I’ve gotta be dreaming. Nup. There he is.’
Next day, Test match morning, Whitney couldn’t see the other players anywhere. ‘Where’s the bus?’
‘It’s fuckin’ gone,’ said Lillee.
‘You what?’
‘Nah you’re cool. You’re with me.’
A mate of Lillee’s drove them to Old Trafford. Whitney was wearing jeans and one of John Dyson’s tracksuit tops. ‘Who are you?’ the gateman demanded.
‘I’m playing. Mike Whitney.’
‘Who?’
Getting in was Whitney’s second biggest worry. His main thought was to find Kim, fast. Ascending the staircase, he elbowed past Geoff Boycott—‘Cor, lad! Ah, young Whitney’— in his scramble to the visitors’ dressing room. There was Kim.
‘Oh, mate . . .’
Kim stopped him. ‘You’re with Dennis, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s no excuse. But if you think it’s special, it’s not. Dennis does this to every debutant on their first day.’
Whitney’s story set him apart from other debutants. A left-arm quick with a broad chest and big heart, he grew up on Sydney’s beaches and played for Randwick fourths in 1976. His progress was slow. A reputation for disappearing on the second weekend of grade games when the surf was up didn’t help. You could almost see the sea-salt specks in his black curls. Plucked by New South Wales after three-quarters of a season in first grade, Whitney took 11 wickets in four games and followed the sea to England, playing league cricket for the fishing village of Fleetwood.
His pace and late swerve won him a county call-up for Gloucestershire. Eight overs in a Sunday league game against Surrey changed his life. Whitney took 2–9. Watching on TV were the touring Australians, hobbled by injuries to Hogg, Lawson and first-choice replacement Rackemann. Three days later, Bennett rang. Whitney was on the balcony at Cheltenham, anxiously surveying the early overs against Hampshire. He dismissed the phone call as a scam: ‘Listen man, Malcolm Marshall’s hit two guys already and I’ve got to bat today.’ He hung up.
Bennett tried again. ‘Fred Bennett here, from Balmain club in Sydney.’
‘Fred,’ gasped Whitney. ‘It is you.’
Whitney drove the hundred miles to Manchester. ‘How ya going, Mr Hughes?’
‘Call me Kim.’
‘Call me Whit.’
He felt both starstruck and at home. Introduced in a bar to champion fast bowler John Snow, Whitney blurted: ‘Hey, you’re the bloke they threw beer cans at at the SCG. I was there.’ Kim could not have helped more. Nor could Lillee. One night Lillee invited the self-described ‘young punk fast bowler’ to a party in Chelsea. ‘There were chicks running around everywhere,’ Whitney remembers. ‘A lot of married couples as well. And the house was fantastic.’
Lillee asked the owner of the house if he knew the Kim Carnes song ‘Bette Davis Eyes’. Lillee sang a bit to him: ‘And she’ll tease you; she’ll unease you; all the better just to please ya . . .’ The guy knew the song well. In fact, he had the cassette tape in the music room.
So Dennis and I walk through this door and into this massive room. Big stereo. Tapes everywhere. Dennis puts the tape in, turns it up, the guy flicks a few switches and suddenly it’s all through the house. Bette Davis eyes. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Dennis was dancing on his own. For me, coming from Matraville, the son of a truck driver and a mother who never had a pair of shoes till she was twelve—she came from a real poor family in Paddington—this was outrageous.
Whitney witnessed strange on-field occurrences too. He’d see Kim make a field change and Marsh shake his head for several seconds before letting out a big sigh. ‘That’s heavy shit on the field,’ says Whitney. ‘It’s like, oh, hang on, Rodney doesn’t agree.’ Once the field was set, Marsh would sometimes whistle—‘and move the guy back five metres. Now, that’s completely usurping the captain’s authority.’
Whitney would watch Kim attempt to give Lillee a breather. Lillee would fume. ‘I can just imagine Dennis: Fuck that, I’m not going off. I’ll get a fuckin’ wicket here. Gimme back the ball.’ Whitney would be dumbfounded. ‘Is that Dennis saying: You can’t tell me when to stop. I don’t care who the fuck you are. I’m D.K.?’
Whitney slanted one across Botham to have him caught behind. It was his third Test wicket. It felt like a big one, putting a cork in the run rate and keeping Australia’s chances afloat. Marsh caught it, lifted one hand in gentle appeal, saw the umpire’s finger rise and then frowned, flicking the ball from glove to glove, not a ghost of a smile. Whitney recalls:
I’m running down the wicket going ‘Yessss!’ Then I’ve realised there’s no joyous celebration. And so I’ve just sort of walked back to my mark. Man, what went on there? Botham was carving us up and I got him out. I thought I’d get a pat on the back. I don’t know why Rodney did that. I don’t know whether he told Kim ‘don’t take the second new ball’, or ‘we should have a different field’. But I remember he took the catch and stood there with his hands on his hips. Amazing. I’ll never forget it. I thought I’d done something wrong. I really did.
Whitney’s Test call-up startled others besides him. ‘Graeme Beard must have felt snubbed to be passed over,’ wrote Brearley in Phoenix from the Ashes. Actually, Beard felt no such injustice. He’d been trundling off-breaks since Colombo. Australia needed a firebrand. ‘If Dyso and Woody got a couple of broken fingers,’ he points out, ‘they wouldn’t have said: “Let’s put Beardy in to open”.’
Beard never added to his three Tests and two limited-overs internationals. His lower-order brio and frugal, multi-pronged bowling might nearly have made him a half-the-horsepower Andrew Symonds prototype. Except: ‘I didn’t like playing one-day cricket.’ He felt uncomfortable equating dot balls with good balls. Bowling against New Zealand in the 1980–81 one-day finals, he fizzed down a leg-cutter, elicited an outside edge and watched it roll for four. ‘Jeez,’ thought Beard. ‘That’s not a good delivery at all.’
His last ball in international cricket was Trevor Chappell’s underarm to Brian McKechnie at the MCG. ‘That was worse than Headingley,’ says Beard. ‘It really wasn’t in the best cricketing spirit.’ Beard was on the square-leg fence. Had he been bowling, he suspects he’d have lacked the chutzpah to refuse Greg Chappell’s underarm request. ‘I think Greg was astute enough not to ask somebody he thought wouldn’t do it.’
Six months after the 1981 Ashes tour, Beard retired. He was thirty-one. He’d started at New South Wales on $12 a day and always relied on a schoolteacher’s wage. But he never pictured himself in the classroom at forty. He contacted Frank Mitchell, general secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union and father-in-law of cricket writer Jim Woodward. ‘I didn’t have an industrial background,’ says Beard. ‘I went along purely for the experience of a job interview, expecting they wanted a Labor Party member.’
But Mitchell said: ‘I know about you. We’ll give you six months—and if you like it, fine.’
The other thing Mitchell said was: ‘I can’t give you time off for first-class cricket.’
It was only out of courtesy to his wife that Beard didn’t say yes on the spot. The job was national industrial officer in the Sydney office. He’s still there today. ‘A fellow who had been there twelve years said he woke up each morning and wondered what was on his desk. That appealed to me.’ In the following two seasons the first-class careers of three friends—Ian Davis, Peter Toohey, Trevor Chappell—wound down prematurely and unceremoniously. Beard felt glad he’d got out. He remains grateful to have played in the era he did. For today’s cricketers the game is a job, with the choices, commitment and risk that entails. ‘These days,’ says Beard, ‘I wouldn’t have had enough confidence in my cricket ability to have taken the punt.’
After farewelling the people he had known fleetingly as Test team-mates, Mike Whitney returned to Fleetwood. ‘Welcome home, Mike!’ trumpeted a banner across the village’s main road. Years later, a member of Allan Border’s triumphant Australian sides, he finally felt able to see the 1981 tour in perspective. It was his most amazing adventure. It was also ‘the maximum lack of respect to the Australian captain. Rod and Dennis gave Kim no support at all . . . Looking back now, he was under enormous pressure, getting squeezed from all angles.’
In a career spanning a dozen years and 118 first-class matches, Whitney was never late again. ‘Never late for training, never missed a plane, never missed a bus, never missed a warm-up session. Because I didn’t think it was the right thing. The only time I did it I was with my hero on my first day of Test cricket.’
•••••
CATATONIA TURNED TO RECKLESSNESS in that Fifth Test. Kim’s three-ball innings set the pattern. First he played and missed. Next he blasted over Willis’s head for four. Third ball he shuffled indeterminately in the vicinity of an off-cutter and was lbw. The modest seam trio of Willis, Botham and Paul Allott tweezered Australia out for 130—that number again—in 30.2 overs.
Dual punishment followed: the cane from Botham, blitzing 118 in two hours, and Chinese water torture in the shape of Chris Tavare, whose 78 occupied seven. Fans grateful for past miracles granted Botham a standing ovation to the wicket, little realising his masterwork was nigh. Three singles decorated his first thirty deliveries. He strolled to 28 off 53. Kim called up the second new ball. And, as Brearley phrased it, the sky was Botham’s target not limit.
Going from 28 to 100 took 33 balls. As an echo of his Headingley humdinger, it lacked only the element of chance. Two blind hooks were possibly unique. Confronted by perfect Lillee bouncers, Botham swivelled to hook then ducked late, eyes to the ground, but carried through with the shot anyway. Twice fine-leg Whitney thought the ball struck Botham’s unhelmeted head. Twice the ball bounced off Botham’s bat—a paddlepop stick compared with today’s superspringy megawillow—and into the crowd. The bowling was nearly as culpable as the batting was breathtaking. Lillee and Alderman, as at Headingley, erred wide of off stump. The space liberated Botham. Scorer Wendy Wimbush’s wagonwheel pencilled a picture. Other than one swept and three hooked sixes, Botham’s leg-side scoring strokes amounted to three singles and a two.
Set 506, Australia mustered 402. The unlosable Ashes were lost. Awaiting his second innings, Kim sat on the balcony, pads on, not watching openers Dyson and Wood. He was reading the Screws—News of the World—shrouded in newspaper. Just visible over the top were his green cap and right index finger. The finger drilled hard into his temple.
There was little point feigning comradeship now. One clique, the World Series Cricket camp, tended to drink in one corner. Kim and others drank in another. A few floaters drifted in between. Wellham found Kim chatty and helpful but tried not to talk to incoming or outgoing batsmen. During one moribund run chase, it was suggested the batsmen should bat carefully—anathema to Wellham, who’d been educated to play balls on their merits. ‘I was told to shut up, to get back in my box,’ Wellham recalls. ‘That was by AB.’
At Edgbaston, Yallop’s arrival provoked three Willis bouncers. Kim announced, ‘I’ll take Willis,’ and shepherded the strike. ‘Just Kim being his usual confident self,’ says Lawson. He did not want to lose a wicket. He considered Yallop vulnerable. So he turned his back on clear-cut singles. Willis tore through the creaseline unleashing deliberate no-balls at Kim’s skull instead. Kim slapped him through gully and snicked him between slips, clapping hands mockingly, and screeching at himself: ‘Concentrate.’
Yallop was first off at lunchtime, humiliated and furious. And not alone. As Wellham recalled the dressing-room scene when Kim ambled in: ‘Lillee and Marsh were threatening mutiny . . . I had always felt the Australian team was one for all and all for one. The latter part of that phrase seemed to be more appropriate than the first.’
Willis was not the only fast bowler hunting Kim. ‘In the nets,’ says Lawson, ‘Dennis would bowl bouncer after bouncer at Kim on dodgy practice wickets.’ As the tour unravelled, the bouncers increased. Lawson’s bewilderment grew:
If it was once he might be doing it for a good cricket reason. But it happened a number of times in ’81. I don’t think it happened every time. But often. Often Dennis would wait to see which net Kim was going to bat in and then go and bowl at him. He might have been bowling line and length at Border. Then Kim would come in and it would be a different kettle of fish. It was pointed and obvious and I don’t think it served much purpose. It didn’t serve any positive purpose for Kim. And the team certainly didn’t think it was very positive. But no one was going to say: ‘Dennis, you shouldn’t do that.’ Because he was Dennis. He did what he wanted. The person who should have stopped Dennis was Rod. And he didn’t do it.
The run in the stocking was a gaping tear.
•••••
IN A DIVIDED cricket team, responsibility for fixing the divisions falls on the captain. If the captain is raw and himself the prime target of the divisions, then the senior players might do something. If the most senior duo happens to be chief instigator of the divisions, then the coach usually intervenes. But Peter Philpott had his own traumas.
For starters, he was not called ‘coach’. His job should have been prestigious: the first appointed coach of an Australian touring party. Yet his title was ‘cricket manager’, or sometimes ‘assistant manager’. New South Wales players admired the way cricket’s spirit, technicalities and arcane charms roamed Philpott’s veins. Western Australians were split between those who reckoned a coach had four wheels, not two legs, and those who expected him to come from the state where real men resided. ‘The West Australians were very unhappy,’ says Lawson. ‘All of them. Their view was, we win the Shield every year, we should have Daryl Foster.’
An effervescent exponent of and crusader for the slumbering art of leg-spin, ‘Percy’ Philpott played eight Tests in the mid-sixties. Since 1978–79 he’d coached New South Wales. During the New Year’s Test against India, Greg Chappell invited him backstage and suggested he apply for the Ashes tour. They chatted for hours. Philpott felt torn. He was a happy housemaster, cricket coach, rugby coach, English and history teacher at the King’s School in Parramatta. But he was not one to decline opportunities—especially when cricket called.
He’d lived life fast since he was four. That was when rheumatic fever left him with a damaged aortic valve and doctors fearful he wouldn’t live past thirty-five. Philpott says: ‘It was like I was trying to stack two lives into my first thirty-five years, to get my full life finished before I went.’ This urgency partly explains, he believes, the open heart surgery he underwent in 1980, aged forty-six. He’d bounced back since then. Of course he told Chappell yes. He went to the headmaster and arranged leave without pay.
Two things happened next. Chappell chose to stay home: a blow, because although Philpott rated Kim a gorgeous batsman they barely knew one another. Then, two weeks before departure, the board decided Fred Bennett and Philpott should share a player’s salary. ‘Instead of earning $16,000,’ says Philpott, ‘it was $8000’—a squeeze for a family man heading abroad for four months. ‘Had it not been so late I would have made myself unavailable.’ But school leave had been sorted. And there was England, an Ashes summer, cricket to look forward to.
His first conversation with Kim occurred on the plane. Differences soon emerged. Philpott felt Chappell craved a coach in all but title: a confidant, a strategic and technical adviser, a practice mastermind. Kim seemed to want a managerial dogsbody. When Kim glued Lillee to one bowling end and Alderman to the other, Philpott warned a captain must treat his bowlers like precious trinkets to extract their best. ‘Very early in the piece I’d say Bright, Hogg, Lawson and Beard felt unwanted. Poor old Dennis at times couldn’t stand up. It wasn’t an attack at all. It was two bowlers.’ Kim would listen politely and do nothing.
On the team bus one night a chant started up. ‘Perr-cy’s a tourist, Perr-cy’s a tourist, Perr-cy’s a tourist.’ Whitney was one who didn’t join in. ‘I couldn’t work out why they were calling him a tourist. I was like, well, I’m a tourist too. I’m in England. On tour.’ Philpott, it emerged, had taken his mum and fiancee to Ireland for a week’s break. Some players were half-joking, Philpott thinks. ‘But there would have been a couple who were being nasty. I was too well aware by then of what was happening to get myself upset about that. I felt terribly disappointed and sorry. It was all such a sorry mess.’
Kim, he felt certain, wanted Daryl Foster, coach of Western Australia. They’d worked together since Kim was sixteen. Philpott suspected Alderman and Wood were Foster men too. Wood thrived on hard physical work. Philpott was a non-believer in sand-dune sprints and cross-country shows of endurance. ‘A lot of fitness-oriented coaches I see are covering up a lack of technical knowledge of the game,’ he says.
Animosity revolved around states’ rights more than coaching wrongs. The seventeen-man squad included five West Australians and seven New South Welshmen if you counted latecomer Whitney. Philpott, manager Bennett and scorer Dave Sherwood added up to five against ten. Yet WA had won six of the last ten Sheffield Shields, New South Wales none. Secede or get nasty is the dilemma millions of Western Australians, believing themselves rich in gold and minerals but poor in legislative clout, have confronted since European settlement in 1829. In 1981 Western Australia’s cricketers, some of them, got nasty.
‘Oh dear,’ says Foster. ‘That’s the first I have ever heard of that. Honestly. I always accepted that I would never ever coach Australia.’ It is a job he would have cherished, he says, and one to which he aspired. ‘But quietly, within myself, without ever overtly promoting myself. It would have been lovely.’ Foster is serious, soft-spoken, dazzlingly successful and has never had one conversation with a single person of influence about the Australian coaching job. He knows why. He’d been hearing why his whole career. One wintertime he offered to help opener Bruce Laird devise ways of rotating the strike against the West Indian quicks.
‘Stumpy,’ said Foster, ‘why don’t you learn to cut? I reckon it’s one or four runs every time against these guys.’
And Laird replied, in the nicest possible way: ‘Foss, how many Tests did you play?’
Philpott did not feel hurt that certain players preferred Foster. What hurt was that when Foster missed out they did not get behind the man in the job. It was a replica of the captaincy shambles. Once Marsh wasn’t named captain he and Lillee could have backed Kim doubly loyally, lest anyone accuse them of putting a grudge ahead of Australian cricket’s best interests. Instead, feels Philpott: ‘They weren’t disappointed at Kim failing.’ And they weren’t shy about letting their lack of disappointment show. ‘I don’t think they set out to destroy him. Basically, they just did. When things were going bad he needed their support and there was no active attempt to help the boy.’
Philpott felt powerless. He had no rapport with Kim and no agreement about his own job description. He set up practice nets, monitored warm-ups, assisted individuals who asked. He wishes now that he’d said to Kim: let me help you. He wishes he’d sat Lillee and Marsh down and threatened to drop them from the team. He thought nobody would listen. He wishes he’d more quickly overcome his disappointment about Chappell not touring. He wishes Kim had been willing to embrace him.
In the long run I was able to walk away and go back to teaching. Kimberley couldn’t. Kim had a cricket career which he couldn’t just walk away from. All the divisions and nastiness . . . He must have been hurt, must have been hurt, if he was able to recognise what was happening. I’ve always prided myself on bringing sides together and making them happy. This was the only time I didn’t feel that happen. And I’m talking about hundreds of teams in cricket and rugby where you all suffer together and laugh together and enjoy it together. It was the only time I haven’t felt totally at home and part of a team. And I still don’t bloody know what I could have done about it.
Apparently oblivious to all of this was Fred Bennett. At tour’s end he congratulated Philpott on a job well done. ‘You available for the next one?’ he asked.
‘Whaddya mean, Freddy?’ Philpott replied. ‘Is the board offering me a contract?’
‘No. You’d have to apply tour by tour.’
That settled it in Philpott’s mind: ‘The board had no bloody idea. No idea.’ Didn’t they realise he had a living to make?
‘Oh no,’ said Philpott. ‘No way. Go away. Never again.’
•••••
BETWEEN THEIR BLUSTER about giving one hundred per cent, cricketers regale us with the wonders that abound once they ‘cross the line’. ‘When we got on the field,’ says Lawson, ‘when we crossed the line, my memory is there was nothing negative. I wouldn’t put losing down to the dynamic between Dennis, Kim and Rod. I put it down to Beefy Botham playing well and the cricket gods being on England’s side.’
Had effort rate been invented, Lillee and Marsh might nearly have topped the tables. Lillee uprooted thirty-nine batsmen in six Tests despite snuffling, wheezing and nipping off for more changes of clothes than a pop diva. Marsh’s 23 catches propelled him past Alan Knott’s world wicketkeeping record. We delivered our hundred, they can comfort each other in old age. Page 311 of the relevant Wisden says so.
Camaraderie, trust, empathy, mutual respect, good humour and desire to see your team-mates succeed are not recorded in scorebooks. What does it cost a side if these elements are missing? A hundred runs? Fifty? Thirty would have been enough to overturn the Headingley and Edgbaston defeats. Conqueror of the Poms: that could have been Kim. Is not being disappointed when the captain fails, as Philpott alleges of Lillee and Marsh, the same as being happy, even subconsciously happy, to see the team struggle? Rob Steen and Alastair McLellan touched on this in their book 500–1: The Miracle of Headingley ’81. ‘Might it possibly be,’ they asked, ‘that heads made promises hearts were unable to keep?’
Intriguing questions, ones that the pair whose reputations have furthest to sink may never countenance. Upon his confetti-free 1987 comeback to cricket, Lillee consented to TV interviews on two conditions: no questions about a possible Test return, and none about you know who. Lillee’s reticence remains undimmed. ‘I have spoken to Kim Hughes regarding your book. As it is unauthorised, I am unable to help out.’ Marsh’s reply arrived a day earlier—oddly, as if the two of them had conferred. ‘Thank you for the invitation to participate in your venture,’ wrote Marsh. ‘I have no desire to do so but wish you luck.’
All we can do is listen to those who were there. Even to many who weren’t, something rotten and malignant inside this Australian team was apparent. Leg-spinner Tony Mann, always chipper, and fond of Kim, Lillee and Marsh, followed the series at home in Perth’s Swan Valley. ‘It happened because they weren’t all there with one aim in mind,’ says Mann. ‘Obviously I’m about tenth-hand on this. But it was almost as if they said: “Oh well, Kim’s had his day and we won’t support him and we’ll get rid of him.”’ Philpott has no doubt that issues only loosely connected to cricket helped lose Australia the Ashes. ‘The divisions? Oh yes. Particularly after Headingley. I’ve never seen an Australian side drop its bundle like they did. Our body language went down the bloody hill.’
Returns dollied rather than slung into the keeper’s gloves; players leaving a bar as others entered; Marsh’s frown when Botham got out. Little things had a seeping effect. ‘The team has to function as one unit, otherwise energies are lost out the side door,’ says Whitney. ‘Even off the field those things damage you. It’s a mental game. If you’ve got things wavering through your head that aren’t plain and succinct—this is how we’re going, this is what we’re doing—then the team starts to go through the motions.’
We are still in the fields of the subconscious here. On the fields of play, nobody suggests Lillee and Marsh did other than bustle and sweat. Even so, certain curiosities stick out. The TV commentators thought Lillee’s Headingley line of attack—one foot outside Botham’s off stump—peculiar. They were mystified when he repeated the tactic at Old Trafford. Alec Bedser, England selector and a plonk-it-on-a-sixpence medium pacer himself, remarked: ‘Lillee bowled like an idiot to Dilley and allowed him to get fifty. It makes me wonder about Lillee. Why did he keep bowling outside the off stump?’ Dilley wondered likewise, before deciding his Englishman’s inferiority complex was playing tricks on him.
Marsh’s kamikaze contributions to Australia’s two shambolic run chases are worth recording. He made 4 both times. At Headingley he was caught hooking from outside off stump. At Edgbaston he heaved across the line and missed an inswinger, also from outside off, forty minutes before weeping tears over the captain’s ‘stupid hook shot’. No one thinks Marsh got out intentionally. Acts of wantonness routinely scarred his batting around this period. But could Marsh and Lillee’s failings in Australia’s hours of greatest tumult have been unwittingly connected to their lack of disappointment at seeing Kim Hughes go belly up?
Their 500–1 wager muddies matters. It reflected nothing more sinister than temptation, naivety and disrespect for the captain. Lillee has promised he did not bowl to lose and pledged to ‘flatten anyone’ who says he did. He has rightly explained that had he known Australia’s fate he would not have bet ten quid. He’d have bet his house. His first thought, as it happens, was to bet £100, but team-mates talked him down, and in 1981 a £100 bet, for a £50,000 profit, would indeed have got him a house, a big one, with Indian Ocean views.
A draw at The Oval ended the series, Kim’s batting travails turning vaudevillian. First he trod softly enough on his stumps to run three before realising he was out. In the second innings both the timing (last over before stumps) and mode of dismissal (lbw for the seventh time in the series) seemed apt. ‘Getting out lbw is an easy fault to rectify,’ he’d chirped beforehand. Consistent only in his inconsistency, Kim collected single and double-figure scores in every Test—7 and 22, 42 and 4, 89 and 0, 47 and 5, 4 and 43, 31 and 6—a prank matched only by South Africa’s Russell Endean in series of five games or more.
Englishman Alan Ross, connoisseur of Baudelaire and batsmanship, concluded: ‘Boyish and unassertive as captain he was never dull; the Australian batting sometimes was, largely because he was rarely there long enough to put a proper gloss on it.’ Back home, Greg Chappell savoured family time and rounds of golf at Indooroopilly and Royal Queensland. During tense periods in the cricket he paced the house as he watched on TV. Chappell told Adrian McGregor he consulted ‘Rod, Dennis and other England tourists’ about the captaincy. Their verdict ‘was universal’. They allegedly said: ‘For God’s sake take it. If you’d seen what happened in England. Don’t bail out on us.’ It’s a version of history which Lawson disputes:
I certainly didn’t say that to Greg, I can assure you. I mean, Greg wasn’t a very warm kind of person and you didn’t confide in him. Maybe Rod and Dennis did because they were all mates from the seventies, but I can’t believe anyone else in that team would do that. They would not go to Greg and say: ‘We don’t like Kim Hughes as captain.’ I find that incredibly hard to believe.
One final chore beckoned before everyone could go home. A day–night game was scheduled on a synthetic pitch under cheapskate floodlights at a football field, Cheltenham’s Prince of Wales Stadium. It was a 40-overs-a-side ghost match, ignored by most newspapers, granted not one word in Wisden, with only a couple of internet scorecard relics to say it ever happened. The Australians wished it wasn’t happening. The pseudo-lights were suitable for a drive-in, not cricket. Wellham, a debut centurion at The Oval, took the field, annoyed, with a pulled leg muscle. ‘When I said I couldn’t play my word wasn’t valued because I was a junior.’ Australia got rolled in 24.4 overs and Gloucestershire won easily.
Exactly what happened afterwards remains hazy. This much seems certain: Kim and Lillee had a disagreement. They wrestled each other. They came close to hitting each other. And Kim walked back to the team hotel in his underpants. Wood’s recollection is that ‘Dennis went to the bar and fuelled up’ before his turn to bat—which may have angered Kim. Alternatively, Lillee may have been the angry one after Kim won the toss and elected to bat last in semi-darkness. Or maybe it was simply the end of a long tour.
Lillee appears to refer obliquely to the incident in his book My Life in Cricket. But, for reasons unknown, he says it happened after the Fourth Test and consisted of a ‘mess-around all-in wrestle’ between several players. He makes no mention of his own involvement. He lends a jocular air to proceedings. It was ‘quite humorous’ and ‘a funny day’. The way Lawson tells it:
The plane was going that night and we all went for a drink. Kim and Dennis tore the clothes off each other in a public bar. It was bizarre. It was quite physical, yet no one hit anyone. They just tore the clothes off each other, tore their shirts off, and Kim walked two hundred yards to the Waldorf Hotel in his jocks. We were all thinking, well, these West Australians are funny people. It was really Kim saying to Dennis: ‘I don’t care what you do to me—I’m going to do it back to you.’ It wasn’t necessarily a cricket thing. It was a maintain-your-ego, maintain-your-status, look-after-your-self-esteem thing. They did a bit of wrestling but they didn’t throw any punches. They didn’t do anything really nasty. It was incredible really. The red mist came down and they just tore each other’s clothes off.
Wood’s recollection differs only in that, the way he remembers it, Kim and Lillee were screaming at each other. ‘We were laughing at the start,’ says Wood. ‘But in the end it wasn’t too pretty.’
It was the story of the tour.