SIX

Hungry? ‘I’ve Had Twenty Malt Sandwiches’

The Family Farm at Wandering was an hour and a bit’s drive from Perth. Seventeen-year-old Geoff Marsh knew the road well. A driver could get some thinking done on that road. One Friday night, the night before his first encounter with the world’s most famous bowler, his head was full of Lillee. ‘Keep thinking about it and he’ll get you out,’ Marsh told himself. He pulled over at a pub, bought three stubbies and drove on. ‘Every bloody time I think of Dennis,’ he promised, ‘I’ve got to have a sip of beer.’ The three stubbies were drained before he got halfway to Perth. Next day Lillee couldn’t shift him, 79 not out he made. But in his head he’d imagined Lillee and brave Bruce Laird and the entire Western Australian team as gods. The whole state had. Righting old injustices, smashing the eastern staters, they were brilliant cricketers and beaut blokes. And Kim was one of them.

Lillee and Rodney Marsh rejoiced in him. His arrival dumbfounded them. Suddenly, it seemed, there were three. ‘The larrikin in Kim,’ Ian Brayshaw recalls, ‘appealed to the larrikin in Rod and Dennis.’ Kim was funny and chirpy, bringing bounce to the flattest social occasion, a forceful character among strong-willed personalities. ‘He was well loved,’ says Inverarity. ‘He had a generous heart and was a great optimist. He was fun-loving and fun-seeking and easily excitable.’ He was passionate about cricket. He knew he was good at it. He let others know that he knew. That was just like Rod and Dennis too.

‘Mad gambler,’ says Tony Mann. Kim would bound up to team-mates and say: ‘Toss you for fifty.’ Mann played along just once. The coin landed right side up and Mann pouched the $50 note. ‘Thanks very much.’

‘No, no, we gotta keep going.’

‘Rubbish.’

His poker resembled his batting. Cocky, a bluffer, he never owned up to a dud hand. Near-penniless newcomers were hopelessly outflanked. Kim would chuck another twenty on the table and ‘nah I’m out’ Geoff Marsh would sigh, even when his hand was stronger. Once on an away trip, at Devonport’s Sunrise Motor Inn, Marsh had a dream hand. All he lacked were the facial muscles to disguise it. When Kim tried to bluff him out of it, Marsh bluffed back. ‘Is that you, Dad?’ he whispered into the phone, pretending to ring Wandering. ‘Dad, how much did we get for the wheat crop last year?’

‘Wheat crop!’ whooped Kim, slapping down his cards and joining his team-mates in a hysterical heap.

Word of this unshrinkable free spirit reached the Australian dressing room. ‘Kim was built up by Rod and Dennis as the next Bradman,’ says Cosier. ‘They didn’t say it in those terms because they didn’t like Bradman. But they were always talking about Claggy and what he did and how good he was gunna be. They thought he’d be one of the greats.’ Marsh saw plenty of himself in Kim. Sir Rod Eddington, who after finishing at Oxford ran British Airways and myriad multinational boards, used to roll out his left-arm orthodox in the University of Western Australia’s nets. His good friend Marsh would wallop him into Reid Library, at the opposite end of the oval. ‘Rod, as a batsman, played absolutely like Kim,’ says Eddington. ‘It was premeditated, measured aggression. It was, I will not let these bowlers dictate. My memories of Marshy are that he recognised Kim as a very special player.’

That opinion never budged. But reservations soon mounted. One afternoon Kim was treating the WACA Ground like an amusement park, swinging Rodney Hogg to all corners. Eventually Serjeant got down the striker’s end. Incredulity dawned: Hogg was raining down meteor showers. Seeing the ball was problematic, hitting it a lottery. The lower order would be wiped out in minutes. ‘Mate,’ said Serjeant, ‘they won’t want to face this.’ He calculated that Hogg might last eight overs. Kim made mincemeat of the sixth. ‘Two to go,’ Serjeant reminded him. Hogg bowled only one more, making way for a part-timer, whom Kim cut instantly to first slip. Hogg came back and Serjeant’s fears came true. ‘We had an obligation,’ says Serjeant, ‘to ensure those other players weren’t exposed. Kim entertained the crowd and was magnificent. But was it good for the team? Uh-uh. And that’s Kim the man. He wouldn’t change.’

Team-mates say Inverarity would admonish Kim privately, strategically. Rodney Marsh and others would openly fume: ‘Why the fuck did you do that you silly prick?’ Taming Kim was the subject of regular chatter. Kim would nod. Then he’d do things his way. Would he listen? He’d listen to Frank Parry. And Frank was telling him to keep on entertaining. The Western Australian public adored him, the players less so, some of them anyway. ‘I think players better than me,’ says Ric Charlesworth, ‘might have felt threatened by him and resented his flamboyance and brilliance.’

Kim’s approach won matches and spread joy. They just wished he’d spread less joy and win more matches. Lillee and Marsh, hellbent on victory, wished it with gusto. ‘Kim played as though every new match was another chance to go have a whack and some fun,’ says Mann. ‘And good luck to him. But I think Dennis and Rod felt he wasn’t switched on to being successful. There was certainly something different about them all. They didn’t get on.’

Lillee and Marsh stopped forewarning others of the golden boy just over the horizon. Then Kerry Packer helicoptered in. ‘Anybody who had two eyes in his head would have had Kim Hughes playing World Series Cricket if they wanted the best players,’ says Charlesworth. Then Kim announced that he hadn’t joined because he didn’t care to. And a once happy relationship wilted some more.

•••••

MARSH WEARS A WARRIOR’S SMILE and bandages round his aching right knee in a photograph in his 1982 book The Gloves of Irony. The caption reads: ‘Sometimes it hurts—but the paycheque eases the pain!’ It was an unusual sentiment for a cricketer to put his name to. Even now, when their paycheques contain sufficient zeros to soothe most kinds of suffering, players cite honour and mateship as motivation before they mention money. Late in the summer of 1982–83, Lillee muttered ‘clap you bastards’ to the Adelaide members as he hobbled off, a throwaway grumble from a sore fast bowler. Yet it was symbolic, too, as if he finally found the words to sum up the lack of gratitude he reckoned he’d been shown for a quarter of a lifetime’s footslogging.

Like all Test cricketers, Marsh and Lillee felt chuffed to be among the chosen few. But they felt something else too. They felt cricket owed them. Marsh banked a tenth of what his golfing brother Graham did. For Lillee, whose happy childhood had nonetheless involved ‘a struggle to make ends meet’, the struggle continued. One kindly doctor said he could pay a dollar a week off the medical bills for his back. Such was the lot of the Australian cricketer. For a century they’d had reason to feel short-changed; ‘raped’, trade union leader Bob Hawke called it. Usually the prestige outweighed the grievance. With Marsh and Lillee it was hard to tell. Their winning bet against Australia at Headingley was a squaring up of sorts. When Lillee tugged an aluminium bat out in 1979–80 it was in the hope that the business he’d co-founded might sell a few thousand more of them. Asked to explain themselves, their response never varies. I gave, says Lillee, more than I took, thus introducing yet another statistic to a game replete with them.

Some traditionalists found them repulsive. Wicketkeeper Bob Taylor liked Lillee after hours. On the field he turned into ‘a moron’ cultivating the persona of a ‘male chauvinist pig’. E.W. Swanton, who wanted Lillee jailed for manslaughter should his throat-tickling of English tailender Geoff Arnold prove fatal, pointedly excluded Lillee and Ian Chappell from his essay collection As I Said at the Time. ‘The reader,’ wrote Swanton, ‘must draw his own conclusions as to my reasons.’

Kim never took any objections he had to Marsh and Lillee’s faces. But remember his words? ‘I have always played the game because I’ve loved the game, not because of how much money I can make.’ Long, long after, his own pockets full of rebel rand, Kim’s disquiet rumbled: ‘When people are making large sums of money the game gets away from the basics. Australian sporting heroes or teams have been built around the colours you wear. And I believe what happened was there were people who maybe got a bit carried away with their own importance.’

It is ironic that by the time Marsh and Lillee wearied of talking Kim up, they had planted in some the urge to tear him down. ‘It put others offside,’ says Cosier. ‘He wasn’t embraced quite so much as he should have been, not quite so closely as maybe others were. They didn’t appreciate the building up of this kid before he’d actually done anything . . . There was an element that was almost anti-Claggy because of the West Australian push for him.’

Marsh’s own absorption into the national side could not have happened more differently. He arrived a nerve-addled stranger for the Gabba Test of 1970–71. The afternoon before the game, Ian Chappell invited him for a round of golf with Doug Walters and the great Ray Lindwall. The four of them downed some clubhouse beers beforehand. They sank a few more afterwards. Then they dined out with Lindwall’s wife Peg. At 11 p.m., maybe a little later, Marsh floated back into his room. ‘I owe—and will always owe—a hefty debt of gratitude to Chappell and Walters for making me feel . . . that I belonged,’ he wrote. ‘I’ll never forget that.’ Did it slip his mind in 1977, before the Oval Test? Where was Kim’s welcome mat that black night in London?

Lillee always treasured the kindnesses of Tony Lock, his first state captain. ‘The old campaigner was like a father to me, encouraging me to bowl fast and never criticising me for inaccuracy as long as I was fast.’ Who among Kim’s team- mates said similar, that he should keep bombarding boundary fences and not fret overmuch about the odd foolhardy dismissal?

Ian Chappell built the Australian team and culture that Greg Chappell inherited and Kim walked into. Ian had taken to wearing cowboy-style boots off the field. Jackboots remained popular dressing-room apparel among senior players. Cosier recalls:

As progressive and different as the Chappell era was from the eras that had gone before, they still had the same hangover from Benaud, Simpson, Lawry. Sit down, shut up and we’ll tell you when to speak. And if you get a couple of hundreds and start to look all right then we’ll let you talk sometimes. And if you’re really good then you can open your mouth whenever you want to. All right? There was still that really hardline ethic that you had to earn your stripes.

To earn his stripes, Kim had to change his spots. And that was never likely. ‘If Dennis and Rod were demeaning him from a cricket or personal point of view, he didn’t take any backward steps,’ says Geoff Lawson. ‘And both those guys didn’t like people standing up to them. So that made it worse. But that’s Dennis and Rod’s fault rather than Kim’s.’

Opponents got put in the freezer for failing to greet senior Australian players by their Christian names. Kerry O’Keeffe wrote: ‘If, say, Rod Marsh, on passing Glenn Turner at the pre-game nets, offered “Good morning, Glenn, how are you?” and only received “Morning, all right?” Marsh would feel aggrieved.’ It was what Mike Whitney did utter that bothered Marsh during the first innings of the inaugural Sheffield Shield final in 1982–83. Marsh hooked one bouncer for four and the next into Steve Smith’s lap. ‘Fuck off,’ recommended Whitney, pointing directions to the WACA pavilion, a route Marsh knew like the back of his Kookaburra gloves.

‘Pardon?’

One muscular chest bobbed towards the other. ‘You think I’m scared of you?’ said Whitney. ‘Get off the ground you fuckin’ prick.’

Had Marsh lifted his bat in anger, Whitney believes he would have punched him. That night, feeling apologetic, Whitney held out a hand not a fist. Marsh told him to clear off: ‘You think you’re a big fuckin’ whirl. But you can’t fuckin’ play.’ Whitney yanked back his hand. The instinct to deck Marsh bubbled again. Before he could, the manager dragged Whitney to the visitors’ dressing room and locked him in. ‘Rod and I didn’t speak for nearly ten years after that.’

The confrontation reveals something of Marsh’s beliefs concerning proper deportment for junior players. Marsh wrote: ‘Michael is yet young and will no doubt learn in time that such conduct is, by tradition, the privilege of the superstars, the Dennis Lillees, if you like. It is certainly not the stuff expected from apprentices.’ If that reads like double standards, hypocrisy of another kind bugged Whitney. ‘Rodney thought me telling him to fuck off after I bounced him out was a terrible thing, that I’d showed absolutely no respect. Yet they didn’t think what they did to Kim in England in 1981 was bad. How,’ asks Whitney, ‘could they be so right there and so disgusted with my behaviour?’

That first Shield final was a classic of the genre. Twenty of the twenty-two players represented Australia. Swear words outnumbered dot balls. ‘It was like the end of the world,’ Geoff Marsh remembers. Momentum seesawed until the fifth afternoon, Kim’s studious half-century navigating Western Australia to within 113 of victory. On the short stroll to lunch Kim scoffed at New South Wales captain Rick McCosker: ‘There is no fucking way you blokes can bowl us out. You’re not good enough and never will be.’ He’d bullseyed the wrong target. McCosker was too gentlemanly to return lip, too shrewd not to pass Kim’s message on. Eleven stirred-up New South Welshmen steamrollered the last six wickets after lunch. Kim went first, slashing at Lawson’s second delivery with the new ball. ‘A real loose cannon,’ reflects Tony Mann. ‘As a youngster growing up you could see he was going to have a very turbulent sort of career. And it did turn out that way.’

Whitney caught Wayne Clark at mid-off to seal a poignant New South Wales victory: by 54 runs, on hostile terrain, against their bloodthirstiest rivals. He heard his name called out and trotted up to accept his winner’s memento, a medallion in a brown box. The West Australians sat all in a row. As Whitney sauntered back past them he flicked open the brown box and snapped it shut in Marsh’s face. In the return game next season he succumbed in the old familiar way—caught Marsh, bowled Lillee—and heard an old familiar voice. ‘How ya going now, tough boy?’

Whitney stripped off his gloves, helmet, dropped his bat and exploded. ‘Who wants to go first? Or do you both wanna come round the back together?’

Lillee told him not to carry on, said it was all part of the game. Whitney said it wasn’t. ‘I was going to leather them,’ says Whitney. ‘Because I was an idiot. And because I was aggressive. And because I really took offence at the way they played the game.’

•••••

AT EVERY STEP—first grade, first class, Test cricket—the pattern repeated. Kim had to prove himself to grizzly, sceptical men who had heard plenty about him before they met him. He had to be spectacular and unique or else they’d reckon him overhyped. Then they would never respect him. But he also had to fit in, to not stand out. So he had to be unique but the same. Grog was an added complication. People drank when they won, they drank when they lost. Grog soothed, rehydrated, helped you forget, made you get along, filled hours, oiled conversations and hid you from the ever-gaping public. It gurgled out of cracks in dressing-room walls. The higher the standard, the bigger the schooners.

‘The Sheffield Shield tour was laced with alcohol,’ says Charlesworth, one of the WA team’s few non-drinkers. ‘You played, you drunk, you played, you drunk, you played, you drunk. Then you’d have three days off and you went to the next place.’

The Test scene was the same—only without the three-day break if you were on tour. On Kim’s first Test trip the pinnacle was Doug Walters’s 250 in Christchurch. ‘Freddie had the usual Freddie night the night before and the previous night and the night previous to that,’ Cosier recalls. Cosier’s demise for 23 brought Walters moseying out at 4–112 on an up-and-down wicket, the sky cloaked in cloud. Instantly Walters saw only stars. In delayed response to a Richard Hadlee bouncer he toppled backwards and lay slug-like. ‘We thought Douggie had been killed or had a heart attack,’ says Cosier. ‘Then he dusted himself off and didn’t miss another ball. It was like he’d woken out of a stupor.’

Unbeaten on 129, Walters drank from stumps to 2 a.m. with batting partner Gary Gilmour, slurping out of Kiwi beer bottles on Kerry O’Keeffe’s bed, humbugging him to join them. O’Keeffe estimated their blood alcohol levels at 0.25 per cent when the partnership resumed. Under the weather, they bunted over the infield, which saved gallivanting singles. The 217 they put on remains a seventh-wicket record. The trend had been set early.

On Kim’s next tour the journey was longer so the bingeing started sooner. Walters swigged forty-four tinnies and Marsh forty-three aboard the Qantas flight to Heathrow. Points were awarded and tallies monitored on a sick bag. ‘Does it have to be beer?’ asked Kim. It didn’t, and Kim promptly consumed six, a dozen, twenty-one or twenty-two brandy and dries, depending on whose foggy written recollection you trust. Kim himself remembers having ‘eleven or twelve’, the ratio of dry to brandy decreasing as he gulped. What is agreed is that Kim was winning as they flew over Queensland and sleeping thereafter. He’d passed out—blotto—on his first long-haul flight for Australia.

The players landed squiffy but unsated. In Bath, Dymock remembers Marsh and Walters being late to bed and rewarded with light fielding duties, Walters loping from fine leg to fine leg. ‘I don’t think Kim would go along with that way of playing cricket,’ says Dymock. In Dublin, the Australians outswilled the Irish. ‘Never in the history of Australian sport,’ McFarline recorded, ‘has so much hospitality been enjoyed by so few in such a short time.’ Dymock’s diary entry captures the flavour:

Arrived about midday. Driven in cars to Shelbourne Hotel where we had couple of Guinness pints. Went to Guinness brewery in cars at about 1.30. Few drinks, then lunch at about 3 p.m. Few more beers, then back to hotel. Changed and then in cars to Phoenix Park races. Few more drinks, a few bets, etc, till about 9 p.m. Met Lord Killanin at races. Returned to hotel, had hamburger with Ray Bright and couple more drinks. Retired about 12 o’clock.

Kim drank like he batted, with a swagger. He was fast to get into it, fast to get wobbly, fast to get out. Brandy and dry was his favourite. The Western Australian guys, wives too, often visited each other’s houses. ‘Haven’t you got any wine in the place?’ Mann asked one evening at Kim’s Drabble Road home in City Beach. Kim suggested the pantry, where Mann, Clark and Malone found and refrigerated several untouched relics from old man-of-the-match awards. Three or four bottles later Kim asked if it was any good.

‘’78 Veuve Clicquot,’ Mann replied.

‘Was that one 150 bucks a bottle?’ asked Malone.

‘Nah,’ said Mann. ‘I think it’s only 140 bucks.’

‘What!’ Kim was thunderstruck. ‘Give us a taste.’

In Chappelli Speaks Out, written by old friend Ashley Mallett, Ian Chappell outlined his philosophy towards cricket and drinking:

I always used to say to Rodney Marsh, ‘Mate, when you win you drink to celebrate and when you lose you drink to drown your sorrows and after about four or five beers you are not quite sure what you are doing anyhow.’ I always thought it was very important to celebrate a victory, because you work your butt off to win, and I couldn’t see any point in working so hard to win, then just coming into the dressing room, throwing all your gear together and saying, ‘Bye guys, see you next time’ . . . And I realised after a time that they would be sort of saying to themselves, ‘Gee, this is fun when we win, we have a bit of a party, so the more times we win the more parties we have,’ so that became a bit of a psychological ploy.

When in Chappelli’s team, most tended to do as Chappelli did. When O’Keeffe didn’t, heeding Keith Stackpole’s tip that if he ‘sucked piss with Douggie’ he’d blow cold next morning, he found Walters lying in wait on his return from the movies. ‘Skull,’ Walters would crackle, ‘what flavoured milkshake did you have at intermission? Chocolate or vanilla?’ Lawson debuted the season after Ian Chappell retired. His teetotalism confounded older team-mates whose shout it was, resulting in unsupped beer glasses gathering grime on the hotel bars of several countries.

Nobody imbibed Chappell’s advice so wholeheartedly as its original recipient. Yarns of Rodney Marsh’s drinking prowess are recounted slack-jawed: of the night he disappeared into an outside shed in England and Lillee found him sitting on a mop bucket, complaining ‘Every time I try to get off this toilet something grabs me by the balls’; of how he mislaid his room key in Launceston and gashed an arm smashing a window to get in; of the way he’d say ‘I’ve had twenty malt sandwiches’ when reminded that he hadn’t eaten since the teabreak. Some people use the phrase ‘Chappelli clone’. Then along came Kim. ‘Kim was, if you like, a product of Rod Marsh,’ says Daryl Foster. ‘Kim was one who socialised a lot and enjoyed socialising. He was a very, very fine socialiser.’

Kim’s state debut was Marsh’s first game as captain. Foster sensed the culture evolving, the nights lengthening. ‘Especially when we were away,’ Foster recalls, ‘I had to hang around the dressing rooms until about 9.30, pack Rod’s gear up, get him in a taxi, get him over to the pub, or if we’d finished the game get him ready to get on a plane.’ For junior players, too, the working day continued after the clock struck six. There were beers to be ferried from fridge to senior players. Stories were handed down, advice passed on: nuggets and beer was a diet on which the young cricketer could learn plenty. ‘It was very instructive for them,’ says Foster. ‘But I think the destructive part might have been that they’d get drunk, or even if they didn’t get drunk a lot of alcohol was consumed.’

Many drank sensibly. ‘You knew when to say no, when to go to bed, how much sleep you needed,’ says Geoff Marsh. ‘You just knew.’ Lillee, if he was bowling next day, upped the coke content in his Bacardi and coke. Lillee was shrewd, and older. ‘So many young players who didn’t have the capacity of a Rodney Marsh fell by the roadside,’ says Foster. ‘Their careers were considerably shortened, in my opinion, by the fact that they played up too much, the alcohol consumption was too much.’

The question of how much equalled too much was seldom raised, let alone scientifically investigated. Rodney Marsh’s batting started off puckish and grew notoriously skittish. He averaged 33 in the first half of his Test career, 19 in the second half. ‘I used to think Rod used his drinking exploits and his late nights and his failure to eat proper food as a crutch—to really perform on the field,’ says Foster. ‘OK, I had a few last night, but I will never be slow up to the wicket, I will never stop diving.’ Marsh blamed his batting decline on the preoccupation West Indian fast bowlers had with his windpipe: ‘I just don’t know how to combat it.’ And that was quite plausible.

Foster wondered, as well, about Kim, whom he found emotional, delightful, sensitive, vulnerable, vivacious, someone people flocked around at parties, and happy to be so, because that meant they liked him. ‘He had a very good cricket brain but I think somehow or other he got a little bit lost; lost in what was really expected of an Australian captain.’

‘Daryl didn’t drink,’ says Geoff Marsh. ‘He never drank beer. So . . . nah.’ He disagrees that the culture changed. Blokes drank before; blokes drank after. ‘Still the best times I’ve ever had in my cricket career have been in the West Australian dressing room when we’ve won a game or a Shield.’ Geoff Marsh recognised the good in playing, drinking, learning, bonding together. His experience of the dressing room almost paraphrases the vision Ian Chappell had. Marsh says:

Guys just had this thing about this dressing room. You played for each other, for the team, for the moment in the dressing room. That’s the thing everyone loved doing—getting in that dressing room after a good day and having a couple of drinks and a laugh. They were my great memories . . . sitting in the dressing room and talking to your Inverarities and Chappells . . . When you got the opportunity to sit and listen to them you just did. You didn’t open your mouth until the right time and you did a lot of listening in those days. And that’s when you learnt.

Guys also had a thing about aeroplanes, something those who over-indulged or oversaw proceedings have occasionally wished to forget. Greg Chappell, Ashes captain in 1977, was majestically coy about Walters’s 44–43 victory in his post-tour book. ‘It is,’ Chappell wrote, ‘a long flight, twenty-odd hours, and with the players trying to get some sleep and watching movies, it was, I’m glad to report, quite uneventful.’ David Boon’s feelings lie somewhere in the mudflats between denial and pride. Quiet as granite about the 52-can marathon fellow passengers witnessed in 1989, he willingly lends his body to Victoria Bitter commercials. His talking ‘Boony Doll’, a plastic insomniac on the mantelpieces of VB-buying households, emits prerecorded wisecracks such as: ‘I’d go to the pub if I could walk.’

Boon’s fifty-two beers beat Rodney Marsh’s inflight record, not his forty-three of 1977 but his forty-five of 1983, en route to the World Cup, when his captain was an emotional, delightful, sensitive, vulnerable and vivacious young man who hoped to be liked and whose challenge was to be different yet the same.

•••••

KIM’S ALL-WHITE UNIFORM, right down to his sweat-bands, was the only thing not colourful about his time in the two-year war between old cricket and Packer cricket. Needing to fight fire with fire in the divided summer of 1977–78, the establishment rubbed two sticks together. They brought out one touring side, India, whose five Tests and zero one-day internationals were sticky-taped over three months. Bishan Bedi’s men saw more of Australia than most Australians, every state capital plus Port Lincoln, Hastings, Griffith, Nambour, Wongan Hills, Launceston, Newcastle, Canberra, Geelong. They came laden with graceful batsmen who played geometrically conventional strokes, plus multiple slow bowling varieties: Bedi’s butterfly-like left-arm orthodox, Bhagwat Chandra- sekhar’s whirligig wrong’uns and toppies, the off-spin of Erapalli Prasanna and Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan. This was cricket not just traditional but unusually pure, a strength and weakness in the battle to woo the terry-towelling masses.

Razzmatazz, Kim knew, counted plenty. Dancing feet rushed him to and got him out for 99 in the tour match, attempting to swat Prasanna over the long-on pickets when ordinary batsmen might have contented themselves with tip-and-run. Kim was unrepentant. ‘I’m a pretty happy sort of bloke and I enjoy my cricket, and seeing we’ve got opposition I am conscious of providing entertainment for the public. Cricketers now have a duty.’

Rated a sure thing for his first home Test at the Gabba, he was named twelfth man after breakfast. Picked instead were Peter Toohey, captain Bob Simpson’s Western Suburbs clubmate, and Victorian Paul Hibbert, whom Simpson likened to a beloved old opening comrade: ‘He reminds me so much of Bill Lawry it’s embarrassing.’ Tony Mann was another Gabba debutant. ‘Kim carried on in the rooms like a pork chop,’ Mann remembers. ‘Just typical Kim Hughes.’ Disappointed maybe, but easygoing too, assured of a starring role in the future, whatever the future might be.

The series moved to Perth. Kim was in. He took centre stage in the West Australian’s full-colour wraparound, plucking a sitter off the slips cradle to the mock amazement of team-mates and catching the equally appreciative eye of chief cricket writer Ken Casellas. ‘For sheer uninhibited skill,’ wrote Casellas, ‘Hughes ranks as Australia’s most exciting strokemaker.’ Dropped twice in two deliveries on his way to 28, he retreated first ball in the second innings and was lbw to Madan Lal. Twelfth man duties were resumed in Melbourne.

Sydney was the setting for a tantalising 22-minute duel with Bedi. Watching from side-on in the old Bob Stand was twelve-year-old Steve Waugh. Almost thirty years later, Waugh recalled Kim’s on-driven six into the gutter of the members’ top balcony as ‘an astonishing blow’. But Bedi was an artist of once-a-generation cunning. The first time Englishman Derek Randall faced Bedi he excavated two runs in ninety minutes while waiting for a bad ball. The second time he reversed his strategy and was immediately out slogging. For their third encounter Randall resolved to scamper and smother: ‘I ran out to meet the first ball, fell head over heels and saw myself stumped in undignified confusion.’

Kim had even fewer clues to go on. So barren was Australia’s spin landscape that Jack Fingleton wanted Malcolm Dolman, a teenage club chinaman bowler from Adelaide, in the Test side. But Kim had enjoyed the sight of that six. ‘He thought if he could do it once,’ Sam Gannon remembers, ‘he’d do it every time.’ Two balls later he straight-drove Bedi for four. Next he shaped to cut. Off stump almost caught fire. ‘Didn’t know Bish bowled a quicker ball,’ says Craig Serjeant. ‘No one in Australia had seen it and it wasn’t discussed in team meetings. You knew he may have a slightly faster, flatter one—but this came out like a rocket.’ All the same, a twelve-year-old might have predicted Bedi would try something devious. ‘A victory,’ Waugh deduced, ‘for brains over brawn.’

Scores of 17 and 19 guaranteed the return of twelfth man brackets in Adelaide. In, out, in, out, in, out: Kim still hadn’t played two Tests in a row. The series was a slow-burning thriller. The Indians landed down under for their first tour in ten years complaining that the bright light made competent fielding impossible. They blew two Tests narrowly, won the next two comfortably and were 6–415, seeking 493 for victory, in the last. Then Kim, substituting at gully, thrust two hands at a ball that looked like decapitating him, the series-swinging catch, snuffing out Karsan Ghavri’s ominous stand with Syed Kirmani. ‘One of the great Test series of all time,’ says Simpson, ‘and a great, great tour. We killed World Series as far as crowd attendances and public interest went. That was very satisfying.’ Australia’s 3–2 triumph was completed on the extra sixth day, Simpson’s birthday, his forty-second, no less.

Bradman’s example swayed Simpson. Bradman was thirty-eight when he resumed Australia’s postwar captaincy after an eight-year hiatus. Simpson, three years older, had been out of the game two years longer, not that he advertised this to bowlers. ‘I never get tired when I bat,’ he commented after his gargantuan 176 in his second Test back. Simpson’s state comeback game presented his first up-close glimpse of Kim, who responded with a characteristically hyperactive 85. ‘Immature,’ was Simpson’s impression. Then he laughs. ‘Well, everyone was immature.’

Twelve freshmen, some unlikelier than others, wore baggy green that Packer-ravaged summer. Lively left-armer Sam Gannon had returned from a Greek islands holiday with wife Jill after being bumped from Western Australia’s winter practice squad. He reaped 7–161 in his hometown Test debut then headed to Melbourne, where he had Sunil Gavaskar dropped in single figures. ‘Soon after that,’ Gannon recalls, ‘Simmo was saying he wanted me to bowl negatively to Gavaskar, just prevent him scoring, don’t try to get him out.’ It muddled Gannon’s mind. If he followed instinct ahead of instructions, would that spell the end for him? ‘I thought, hang on a minute, I’ve got to try and survive here. So I bowled in a negative way and Gavaskar ended up getting 118.’

For Tony Mann, seventeen eventful years had elapsed since his maiden first-grade season at fourteen, when three cheap wickets didn’t stop the Claremont Oval tea lady denying him cake: ‘Sorry son, men first.’ Thrilled to be playing, Mann was slightly miffed by the choice of leader. ‘The obvious captain,’ he says, ‘was Inverarity. Obvious captain. And they brought back bloody old Simmo, who to his credit did quite well. From my point of view it was a disaster because I hardly bowled.’ Mann trundled 552 balls in four Tests, fellow leggie Simpson 524 in five. His first international spell netted him 3–12. ‘Piece of piss, this Test cricket,’ thought Mann. In the subsequent tour match he felt every Indian batsman’s eyes on every delivery he let go. Any air of mystery was history. ‘Gavaskar played me with a stump virtually. Quite often he didn’t pick my wrong’un, but he had such skill and got so far back that he’d just zip me round the corner. I sit back years later when Shane Warne’s got 0–150 on debut and I think, well, they’re bloody hard people to bowl to.’

Mann’s muscular, matchwinning 105 as nightwatchman was the sensation of the Second Test. He got to Melbourne for the Third Test and saw a banner strung across Bay 13: ‘HIGGS A CERTAINTY’. In Sydney he went wicketless and runless, out second ball each dig, and was never picked again. He didn’t make enough of opportunities, Mann is quick to admit, although one of the few cricketing keepsakes on display at his home is a framed Allan Langoulant cartoon from Perth’s Daily News. As a baggy-eyed Simpson stomps off, turbaned Indians whooping it up in the background, a cherubic fellow who looks a lot like Tony Mann asks: ‘Tell me, Simmo, if Chandrasekhar was in your team would you give him a bowl?’

Out of the XI for the decisive Adelaide Test, Kim was among those visiting that city’s health department on Australia Day, his twenty-fourth birthday, for yellow fever injections. Simpson’s fifteen-man squad arrived in the Caribbean to the standard rum-punch-and-steel-band reception. Instantly Kim began pounding a drum of his own. In the first net session at St John’s his snappy footwork before two thousand locals impressed John Benaud, batting dynamo turned newspaperman. Benaud declared the Hughes–Serjeant middle order showdown ‘a no-contest’.

The team flew to St Kitts, Kim chalked in at No. 3 for the tour opener against Leeward Islands. A stomach ache made him think he’d swallowed contaminated water. On the morning before the game a doctor dished out anti-nausea pills. At training in the afternoon Kim flopped himself down on the cool Warner Park grass. Night fell. The pain intensified. Manager Fred Bennett summoned a doctor, a different doctor. Along narrow stone streets in the hotel manager’s car, Kim was bustled to Basseterre’s Joseph N. France General Hospital for an emergency operation on something pre-tour jabs could not have forestalled: a gangrenous appendix.

The appendix came out. Kim felt better, well enough to slouch boundary-side for the third day’s play. His temperature zoomed and he returned to hospital. ‘I can’t take a trick,’ he told visiting team-mates. ‘I’m either twelfth man or sick or injured.’ Years later he’d recall: ‘I was frozen with fear and pain.’ He felt far from home, unsure what was wrong, shacked up at the Antigua Beach Hotel and Trinidad Hilton on a largely futile anti- biotics course. ‘Kim was in a dirty pool in Trinidad,’ says Serjeant, ‘and his wound became infected and was pouring out pus three days later.’ Serjeant, a pharmacist, was a rapt observer of the Caribbean hospital system’s idiosyncrasies. Twice the appendix wound was reopened, drained of pus, resealed. ‘I remember them squeezing it and filling up a bottle with this gangrenous stuff,’ says Wayne Clark.

The tour management considered sending Kim home. He pleaded with them to let him stay. Kim was anxious not to let down his family and supporters. The management relented. He first graced an outfield one month into the tour, spilling two catches against Barbados as replacement fielder. His misfield at point in Georgetown enabled Larry Gomes to run three for his maiden Test hundred. After six weeks the outlook brightened. In dismissing Guyana’s Sew Shivnarine—caught Ogilvie, bowled Hughes—he joined Freddie Stocks of Nottinghamshire as the only men to score a hundred in their first first-class innings and take a wicket with their first first-class ball.

At picturesque St George’s, against Windward Islands, on a pitch dry, brown and speckled with little hills, Kim entered at 4–40 and square cut treachery to tatters. ‘I guess his sheer majesty in the circumstances,’ John Benaud recalls, ‘might have been a tiny preview of those couple of brilliant digs at the MCG and Lord’s.’ On 30 he square cut once too often, swaying back and missing Hubert Annibaffa’s arm ball. He’d fallen the same way in Guyana. ‘This bloke just doesn’t learn’—or words similar—remarked Simpson, within earshot of others.

Crabbier words were heard as the Australians readied themselves to bat a second time in the Barbados Test. ‘Arse of the team.’ ‘Just an arse.’ That was Simpson’s plain-spoken verdict on Kim, say Wood, Clark and Serjeant. Kim wasn’t playing. Wood remembers Kim hearing it and leaving the room: ‘He said it in front of him, that’s my recollection. And Kim actually walked out and sat with the photographers.’ Simpson cannot remember it and does not believe it: ‘I wouldn’t have said it. No way in the world.’ But several people say it happened. ‘Who are the several?’ wonders Simpson. ‘Western Australians?’

Simpson’s supposed anti-WA chip was a fable handed down the decades, along with the evil Subsidy, inverted saucepans for caps and blinkered eastern-seaboard selectors. Before he even knew Simpson, Clark was warned: ‘Just be careful walking down the stairs in front of him.’ Its origins harked back to Simpson’s five seasons in the west in the fifties and sixties. Its reasons are unclear. Perth, after all, was where the national selectors finally noticed Simpson, where in twenty-four career matches he averaged 85. Simpson speaks fondly of the long unroped boundary, where outfield returns sometimes necessitated three men if the Doctor was blowing, and of the light: ‘You could almost read the Kookaburra brand on the new ball.’ Him resenting WA cricketers is pure fiction, says Simpson, not that it surprises or worries him. ‘I’ve always felt West Australians have more trouble than the rest in settling into an Australian team. They feel the world’s against them. Or they did in those days.’

Misgivings about the captain were not merely geographical but generational. Young batsmen taught to get bodies behind fast bowling thought they spotted fear in Simpson’s method of creeping to leg and cutting or letting balls roar over stumps. Spectators hooted, bowlers pawed the turf, team-mates har- rumphed among themselves. What they were really seeing was time-tested pragmatism. ‘You was never going to get hit, man, because you was never there,’ said Wes Hall, a phantom from Simpson’s first Test life. Simpson’s 102 against Barbados echoed his 117 against the same opponents thirteen years earlier. He’d legside-swiggled his runs then too, Hall confirmed. ‘I had total admiration,’ says Wood, Australia’s bravest batsman in 1978 and half Simpson’s age. ‘The guy was forty-two and up against the quickest bowlers, wearing the baggy green for protection.’

Some saw Simpson as a competitor not a mentor, blaming others rather than his own shortcomings, expecting everyone to match his exacting standards, suspicious of media darlings. ‘Kim’s ego and Simmo’s ego was an enormous match-up,’ says Cosier. Wood feels Kim and Simpson ‘didn’t get on . . . they certainly didn’t see eye to eye’. ‘Divide and conquer’ is how Cosier describes Simpson’s leadership style. Players were unsure where they stood. ‘One minute he’s patting you on the back,’ says Clark, ‘and then you hear he’s nailing you behind your back . . . You just thought, fuck, what sort of captain’s this?’ Serjeant confronted Simpson about it at the behest of four or five others. ‘I’m probably more of a diplomat than some of them were,’ Serjeant explains. The conversation didn’t go well. ‘He sort of listened,’ says Serjeant. ‘But afterwards our relationship wasn’t like it was previously.’

Future detractors would collect near-identical grievances about Simpson the coach. Complaints always mingle with praise for the purpose and discipline he entrenched, for his salvaging of players’ true potentials, for the gutbusting fielding drills. As Mike Whitney says: ‘I’ve seen guys collapse and vomit on the practice area and Simmo’s still hitting balls at them, saying “get up, get up!”’ At pre-game training in Gwalior in 1986, wicketkeeper Tim Zoehrer pouched skyer after skyer, lunging wider and higher, Simpson pinning him back, back, back, until finally he reverse-tumbled into three rolls of barbed wire and got hooked in mid-air. Zoehrer recalls: ‘I was hanging off a barbed wire fence in India with blood pouring out of my back and two army blokes trying to rescue me, their machine guns whacking me in the head. It’s not a pleasant thing.’

Players certainly noticed when Simpson didn’t take training. At Sabina Park on the 1991 tour he was bitten by a mosquito and bedridden with an infected leg. Whitney remembers Allan Border plonking his men down after practice and revealing that Simpson had a list. ‘So I’m telling everyone,’ said Border, ‘you better go up and say: “Hey Simmo, how you going, hope you’re feeling OK.” Just five minutes. Because there’s going to be a lot of ticks and one cross for anyone who doesn’t go.’

Whitney went with Greg Matthews. ‘Hey Bobby, how you feeling, how’s the leg?’ But Simpson was doing the asking, not the answering.

‘How did training go today?’

‘Yeah really good.’

‘How did Veletta go?’

‘Yeah great. Waggy was in there, y’know, batting hard, fielding.’

‘What about Tub? How’d Tub go? Tub do a lot of catching?’

‘Yeah man. He was there doing his slips stuff . . . OK Bob, we’re gunna head. Yep, yep Bob, yep, yep, good to see you.’

Shuffling out, they passed the Waugh twins shuffling in: ‘How was it?’

‘Well, he’s going to hit you with a shitload of questions about who’s puttin’ in and who’s not puttin’ in.’

‘OK, cool.’

Says Whitney: ‘Like AB said, he had a list. He was sticking names on. How bizarre is that? But that’s the way he ran the thing.’

Back in the final fortnight of the 1978 tour, Kim missed selection for the Jamaica match and therefore the last Test too. ‘Kim Hughes is the most frustrated, disillusioned young man in the West Indies today, and with good reason,’ reported Alan Shiell. ‘Hughes will continue his familiar role of spectator/amateur photographer . . . Never at any stage has Simpson considered Hughes a Test prospect.’ Shiell went on to quote Simpson’s explanation: ‘We are here to win a Test. We are not a benevolence society.’

Simpson stands by what he did and said. ‘You don’t give a person a game just because they’re disappointed. You’re not there to hand out caps. No one on that tour believed Kim was fit enough. Talent didn’t come into it. In retrospect he probably should have been sent home to recuperate.’ Eighteen months after Australia’s 3–1 defeat, Simpson wrote in Australian Cricket that the Kim he’d captained possessed ‘too much natural ability’ and ‘played by numbers’: ‘It got to the stage that I was able to nominate the ball and shot he would get out to.’

That wasn’t Simpson being a competitor rather than a mentor. It was the truth. ‘Simmo,’ says Serjeant, ‘was doing what Lillee and Marsh wanted to do, imposing some discipline, because he had the power to do it, saying you’re not going to play because you don’t fit my team rules. And I don’t think you can argue with that.’ Simpson reflects:

You don’t have generation gaps, you know. You don’t have trouble with young players. You have trouble with players at the end of their careers. So in that regard it was a reasonably good, happy tour. I always felt I had huge respect from the players. They respected me for making the comeback to help Australia—and also, I suppose, to help them.

Simpson spent much of his cricketing middle age, the eight years between captaining and coaching Australia, as a newspaper columnist. He was no likelier to file a puff piece than he was to clap a misfield. And he found fault with many a pratfall of Kim’s. Yet he also wrote admiringly of Kim’s ability. He did so consistently, uncharacteristically, even extravagantly. You had to read between the lines, but you could almost sense affection there. As for Kim, he once observed of Simpson:

Simmo was always on about attitude . . . He was a classic example of always batting at practice as he wanted to in the middle. Many of the young Australians learnt from him. He taught us that Test cricket was a game for people with the best mental attitude.

‘That,’ says Simpson, ‘was the right lesson.’

•••••

FEARLESS PRONOUNCEMENTS BOUNCED out of Kim’s mouth as the Ashes summer of 1978–79 got into swing. He plundered 127 against Queensland when nobody else got to 25 and proclaimed it his ‘most important’ innings. A 48 against Victoria was his ‘most satisfying’ because of the classy attack. He spoke reverentially of Yorkshireman Geoff Boycott’s stonewalling capacities. He had heeded advice from Barry Richards about grinding out an innings, premeditating nothing. Six appeal, he now realised, had distracted him. He’d ‘done myself an injustice’ by shooting skywards instead of along the ground. And no longer would he see off the rottweilers only to lose concentration against the labradors. ‘I have found I am most often out to fellows who bowl ordinary medium pace, and wide,’ said Kim.

Now a new tendency emerged: to declare a lesson learned before the lesson was over. Kim was 4 not out when Botham came on in the First Test in Brisbane. He steadfastly ignored three juicy outswingers. He drove at the fourth and snicked it.

Bill O’Reilly judged Australia’s 116 all out above par in seamier conditions than any he remembered in forty-seven years of playing and watching Tests in Australia. England’s batsmen coped well enough, chiselling 286. Kim reappeared at the crease on the third afternoon thinking it could be his last international innings for many moons. He wore his green cap and mitten gloves. Straightaway he looked better balanced and more assured than his helmeted new captain Graham Yallop. He hooked Willis on to the Gabba dog track, normally Kim’s cue to swipe all Willis bouncers for attempted sixes. But Brearley posted a second man in the deep and he didn’t risk it again. Botham, slower, was a different matter. At fine leg Boycott heard a whistling coming at him—‘like a shell’. He was still twelve yards away when it clanged the advertising sign on the full. ‘Had I got in the way,’ Boycott reflected, ‘it would have taken me with it.’

Kim hooked and pulled a couple more like that. Others he ducked. Slow bowling meant fast scoring in Kim’s head. Yet he greeted Geoff Miller’s looping straight-breaks with a bat even straighter, crouching low. When he attacked, he often lunged. He never quite flowed. Forty minutes he spent in the nineties. Forty times, conceivably, he visualised the buzz among spectators if he were to loft them a catch and hoist his hundred in one blow.

Singles carried him from 97 to 99. In Old’s next over he blocked six balls. The seventh angled in from outside off stump and he paddled it for two. He took off his cap, ruffled a curl above his forehead. He lifted his bat to the crowd—once, quickly—then dragged it down, fossicking at some imaginary pitch debris. He looked shy.

Instead of raising his ton with a six, Kim celebrated with one. He took three strides at Miller, landed two strides short, but still cleared the dog track and clattered the concrete outside the members’ bar. It did not save a Test but it gave the Poms something to chase. He was last out for 129. Apart from Yallop’s 102 no one else reached 20. Kim hoarded fifty-two singles and batted four minutes shy of eight hours. Never before in his life had he lasted five hours. ‘They didn’t,’ said Kim, ‘serve up much tripe.’

At once he became a big hit among children. Kim made cricket look like serious fun, not hard work. And he was himself so childlike. He could pass for head boy, still. He was especially popular in bush households, so faraway from the brain cortices of Kerry Packer’s henchmen that they could have been living in the Bavarian wilderness. They didn’t get Channel Nine and missed every ball of World Series Cricket. Australian Cricket Board cricket was the only cricket they knew.

Those qualities that enchanted children were not necessarily good for Kim’s average. Promoted from five to three in the order, he returned to ways less Boycottian. A switch of bowler, a scheduled interval, an approaching milestone: all of these heralded doom. Twice he flung himself overboard on 48 and once on 46. The Third Test was a lark: out first ball in the first innings, out first ball of a new Botham spell in the second. In the Fourth Test he ran at Willis, drove gaily and picked out cover first ball after lunch. ‘Some sort of mental seizure,’ diagnosed Frank Tyson, christening him ‘Impetuosity Hughes’. Flailing again towards cover, he succumbed second delivery with the new ball in the Fifth Test. In the Sixth he nibbled at ball one of a fresh Willis spell.

All that was missing from his 48 in Melbourne was a spinning bow tie and a water-squirting flower in his buttonhole. For once in a bowler’s summer he had seemingly hit on the right mix of aggression and tact. Hendrick bowled four consecutive maidens at Kim then excused himself to replace a broken bootlace. Botham stepped up. ‘Bowl Hendo’s length,’ chirped Boycott; not full, but not quite short, though Botham’s only thought clip-clopping in was to get the first one up and straight. It was neither. Yet the stupefied roar Hendrick heard from the dressing room could mean only one thing, a wide floating loosener, which Kim had pranced at and cuffed to extra cover. It was as typical of Kim as it was of Botham. ‘No wonder they call you Golden Bollocks,’ Hendrick offered in congratulations, musing afterwards: ‘How many times has he bowled crap, come off at 0–60 and ended up with 6–90?’

Many on their couches pined for a Brearley–Inverarity captaincy duel, two grey-headed chess grandmasters cracking knuckles. The only pawns Yallop moved were his slips, operating under an innovative but ill-fated rota system. ‘It would have been nice if it happened,’ says Inverarity. ‘But it didn’t, and that was that. It was never a point of great disappointment.’ Inverarity admired Yallop’s batsmanship. ‘But there was no evidence at all that he was a good captain. In terms of the aggregate talent, it was not that England were better than Australia but that they were very well led and Australia were not well led.’

The 6–0 victory Yallop foreshadowed at his Eagle Farm airport press conference petered out to a 5–1 defeat. In Perth he asked Cosier to sledge Boycott from silly point. When Cosier baulked, Yallop repeated the order. ‘So I went up there,’ Cosier recalls, ‘and I hardly said boo. I’d been brought up in an era when an average player doesn’t sledge a good player.’ While Cosier was standing there, Hogg asked him to ask the captain for a leg gully.

‘You ask him,’ Cosier replied. ‘He’s just there.’

‘I’m not talking to that prick. You ask him.’

A series low-grade but high in spectacle was energised by Hogg’s 41 wickets and the Dalek-like qualities—bulletproof, pitiless, staccato—he assumed in Boycott’s mind. At one point on tour Boycott endured 857 boundaryless minutes. ‘Hey Geoff,’ cracked Hogg before the WACA Test, ‘you’d better have some good insect repellent tomorrow because I have a couple of trained flies who are going to land in your eyes every time I bowl to you.’ Allan Border debuted in Melbourne. On his first Test day he hit a single off the last ball of the penultimate over when Wood was 97. For perhaps the only time in sixteen seasons, Border was roundly booed. Wood was chiefly responsible for another amazing stat: the run-out of an Australian opener in every Test. His habit of advancing several speechless strides, whether running or not, was the cricketing equivalent of the hangman’s itchy nose. ‘It began to look as if the wicket could do with traffic lights,’ wrote Ray Robinson.

Kim’s series average bottomed out at 29. When Western Australia played in the Gillette Cup one-day final at Hobart’s TCA Ground, Kim nodded towards Mount Wellington. ‘I’ll put one over the top of that,’ he told team-mates. ‘I can’t resist having a go at that.’ A single got him off the mark. It was time to make good his promise. Down the track he hopped, blasting Jack Simmons a return catch. WA lost.

Gentlemen of influence in Australian cricket saw in this young man the characteristics of a leader. Just a week later Kim succeeded John Maclean as Australia’s vice-captain, their sixth in twelve games. Autumn arrived. Pakistan lurched into Perth for the last of two Tests. Yallop pulled a calf muscle batting for Richmond. Kim was captain of Australia.

•••••

TEN GAMES as North Perth skipper was the extent of his leadership experience in adult cricket. Nine times Kim-led teams went belly up. Outdoing West Perth four Christmases ago saved him from an imperfect ten. But he wasn’t daunted, merely nervous, and not so nervous that it inhibited creative thinking. He made players who barely knew each other room together. He called extra team meetings. He trained his men from mid-afternoon till dusk. The idea was to grow spirit, vigour and purpose where before sloth and aimlessness had flourished. Advice poured out of him, some of it unusual. Left-hander Jeff Moss, about to play his first Test, was surprised to hear his new captain mention to the batsmen: ‘Don’t pick the ball up.’

Anything went in a series Imran Khan rated the ugliest he’d known. Pitch-gardening in the First Test, Hogg’s green thumb triggered the umpire’s raised finger when Javed Miandad broke the stumps and appealed, an old Karachi street cricket trick. Kim’s 84 and Border’s maiden hundred swept Australia to with- in 77 of the 382 required. Sarfraz Nawaz, swinging a wrecking ball that looked more like a beach ball through Australia’s innings, demolished those aspirations with 7–1 in 33 deliveries.

That was then. This, Kim announced, was ‘a new era’. It sure looked unfamiliar: eleven Australians boasted sixty-one Tests between them. Needing only to draw the Second Test, Mushtaq Mohammad instructed his team to aim no higher. That was Kim’s first stroke of luck. And he was at home. On his side was a whole city. In his corner was a friend, Daryl Foster, temporarily filling the new gopher-style position of team liaison officer. At his fingertips was a commemorative silver coin marking Western Australia’s 150th birthday. With it, Kim won the toss, inserted Pakistan and smiled as they slid to 5–90 at lunch.

Concentrating was difficult when there was so much to think about. He stationed himself at second slip. Twice he dropped Javed: sitters, both. Javed proceeded to 129. Bat in his hand, Kim flicked at a straight ball from Sikander Bakht and missed, lbw for 9. Australia’s Border-fortified 327 put them 50 in front. In the nets on the third morning Kim was bowling at his batsmen, filling in the minutes, when he trod on a ball, tripped and didn’t get up. The right ankle was sprained, and badly, the rest day reducing neither swelling nor pain. Fielding on it was a no-no. ‘There is no point in me trying to be a foolish hero,’ said Kim, a captain rendered lame in all but quotability.

While Kim was away the alleycats played. Asif Iqbal, dealing in threes and ones, engineered a pesky last-wicket stand with Sikander. ‘I was on the boundary,’ says Moss, ‘and if the ball came down I had to let it go for four rather than let them have a single, so we could get the other bloke on strike.’ That didn’t work. Pakistan’s lead mounted. Twelfth man Trevor Laughlin, fielding in Kim’s stead, had another idea. Thanks to some improbably swift singles, Sikander had faced only three balls in thirty-nine minutes. A batting rabbit who knew how to hare, he was leaving the non-striker’s end long before the ball did. Laughlin told bowler Hurst. Bowler Hurst removed bails. Sikander was ‘Mankaded’—by metres, and without warning. Would Kim have instigated it? He did not condemn it.

‘It was just part of cricket,’ said Kim.

Payback was on Pakistani minds when Rick Darling’s gentle drive rolled to mid-off Sikander, whose even gentler return eluded the bowler. Andrew Hilditch, three Tests old and a caretaker captain already, picked up the ball to spare Sarfraz the bother. Instead of ‘thank you’, Sarfraz said ‘howzat?’

‘It just wasn’t cricket,’ said Kim. Umpire Tony Crafter, a Mankad and handled-the-ball virgin two days before, suddenly had one of each for the scrapbook.

Australia began the final 15 overs with rain beckoning, the sky blackening, 68 needed and Kim preparing to don pads should things get desperate. A six off Imran eased the pressure. ‘Just one of my normal ones over midwicket,’ says Moss. ‘Just a front-foot, ah, slog.’ Moss was nine years old when ex-Test opener Leo O’Brien discovered him at Lindsay Hassett’s Elwood coaching school. He joined Melbourne as ‘a ten-year-old with a fat backside who used to get in the way at practice’, in the words of club committeeman Clive Fairbairn. Now thirty-one, Moss turned Mudassar Nazar to fine leg, becoming the first player since Frank Penn in 1880 to hit the winning stroke in his one and only Test. ‘I didn’t think you were up to it when you were selected,’ Moss’s room-mate and new friend Geoff Dymock confided that night. ‘But you did well.’

The Fourex and soft-drink bottles Kim brought into the opposition rooms went untouched by pursed Pakistani lips. The winners hadn’t all been grinners either. Hilditch’s well-meaning bowling counsel provoked directions—from his own men—as to where he could stick those three Tests’ worth of wisdom. But if not for his ankle, Kim could have jumped with joy. There was the congratulatory prime ministerial telegram from Malcolm Fraser. There was the page one team photo, all beers and flashing teeth, with Kim and Border hugging up front, future captain, future champion. It was possible to believe that Kim’s new era he’d mentioned was something to rejoice in.

•••••

MIKE COWARD is no fisherman—‘not interested’—which explains how he got chatting with the Travelodge Motel maid. It was the rest day, mid-morning. Fellow broadsheet scribes McFarline and Mossop—‘the morning mafia’, the afternoon tabloid contingent called them—had left at 4 a.m. in pursuit of marlin off Rottnest Island. Most of the players headed to Rottnest too. Coward was working in his room. Catch of the day came to him. ‘Oh,’ said the maid, ‘nice old bunfight last night.’

A party, it transpired, had been held on the sixth floor where the Australians were rooming. Some Pakistan players joined them from the third. The party was a ripper. Beer bottles were tossed from balconies into the swimming pool and car park. Broken glass dappled the concrete. A car was damaged, a motel door broken. Parents stopped children from approaching the pool. Several guests complained to the motel manager.

Coward’s instinct was to leave it alone. Earlier that summer an exploded TV set and a flaming hotel curtain had gone unreported. But this was different. This time, Coward points out, police were summoned:

The newspapermen in those days were very much prepared to take a sympathetic view. We didn’t react like the English papers, and probably our papers, would react today. Perhaps we were wrong but that’s the way it was. A different world. But once the police were involved you knew you had a responsibility, because if suddenly there was a court appearance and you hadn’t done your job properly you’d be in more trouble than the early settlers.

A delegation of players sought unsuccessfully to stop the story. The journalists were discreet, writing a ripple not a splash, but it was enough for one or two players to fear exorcism from the forthcoming World Cup in England. Kim rang board chairman Bob Parish, pleading alternative punishments. Kim apologised to the motel manager. The motel manager delivered a ticking off. The busted door was paid for—$140.

Jeff Moss missed it all. He ate out with his wife and brother. And Kim departed for his own home well before the end. Word was that, before bed, he left proof of how much jollity had been had on his driveway. Was this the new era? It was the night of his third day as Australian Test captain.