The View From the Scrapheap
IN THE CITY WITH the most sparkling light for playing cricket, six planks of electric lights sprout out of the main cricket oval. They resemble cigarette lighters more than candlesticks: purely functional, strictly inelegant, grey and thick, butchering river views from street corners miles away. Their shadows dangle over the school next door, Trinity College, permanent reminders to teacher Graeme Porter of days he might nearly have forgotten. ‘In so many respects that part of my life is finished,’ he says. ‘It’s over. And it’s interesting, I don’t have a lot of memorabilia at home. It kind of happened, that little brief moment for me, and it’s over, over and done with. Nice, but it’s gone.’
Some of it was nice, at least, like being picked for the 1979 World Cup. He got called out of class on a Friday to answer the phone—Robbie Burns from the Daily News. ‘You’re going to England.’ No, no, Porter tried explaining. He’d wintered there before but was staying put this time. ‘No,’ Burns interrupted, ‘you’re going to England,’ and Porter started setting him straight again when Burns said for the third time: ‘You’re going to England because . . .’
And not long after that his Cannington Senior High maths class was huddled round his feet, over his shoulders and pulling chimpanzee grins for the press photographer. Porter had played fourteen first-class matches, never done better than four-for. But the selectors calculated that in English conditions he might swing the ball so far it boomeranged. They were desperate, too. ‘I had never thought about it—never even gave it one thought. At all. I think people sort of said, well, who the heck’s he?’
The World Cup was Kim’s first adventure as full-time captain. Porter got married a fortnight before departure. One warm-up match was drowned out, he missed the next two, then played against Hampshire; 6–2–6–1 read Porter’s figures when rain sent everyone scurrying. ‘All I remember is being basically awestruck, enjoying every moment.’ It didn’t win him a berth against England at Lord’s, scene of four Australian run outs and a six-wicket hammering. But the night before the Pakistan game Kim confided that Hogg was either crook, injured or both. ‘Interesting person to tour with,’ says Dymock. ‘Hoggy didn’t turn up to first practice. Too bloody cold. Didn’t get out of bed.’ Porter emerged from sleep filled with curiosity. Then, on the way to the nets, it happened. ‘Kim just mentioned it: “You’ll play!”’ ’
It was Jeff Moss’s limited-overs debut too. He got to 7, knelt to sweep and missed, the ball trickling off his pad. He was still on bended knee when Hilditch—shrieking ‘Yes! Yes!’—was sixteen yards down the track. ‘I probably should have said no,’ Moss concedes. ‘But he’d been in a while and that’s how you were brought up. If someone’s calling yes, you go.’ Out by half the pitch, Moss’s one-day career really would have lasted one day, had rain not forced a spillover on to a reserve day. But that was later. First, Kim won the toss and threw the new ball to Porter:
There wasn’t a lot of guidance, I have to say. I don’t recall anyone coming up to me, even through my spell, and saying we’re going to try this or that or whatever. I don’t think anything special was said. It almost felt like just another game, just another grade game, except we were at Trent Bridge and there were lots of people around.
The nerves that hovered he kept hidden. Bowling at Dickie Bird’s end helped. ‘He would chat to me,’ says Porter. ‘I was getting in close to the danger area and he’d say “you gotta keep outta here”. But in a nice way. It was relaxing.’ Uprooting Sadiq Mohammad relaxed him some more. Alan Hurst dropped short and was whacked high. Porter switched ends and pared back. By seventies standards Pakistan’s 7–286 verged on mountainous. Porter’s 1–20 off 12 overs kept them, briefly, to a molehill. Defeat by 89 runs tipped Australia over the cliff.
There was nothing to gain and dignity to lose against Canada. Glenroy Sealy, thirty-eight and unknown, hustled four fours in four balls to end Hogg’s opening over. Hurst’s five wickets put a brake on bedlam. Porter’s six overs and 2–13 capped one of the cucumber-coolest initiations in limited-overs legend. ‘I was really quite chuffed, quite confident,’ he says.
Now there was the long shot of a six-Test trip to India to consider. While they were in England a settlement had been reached. Packer’s wish—the TV rights—was granted, his players to return to cricket’s official stage. But not yet. War was over, a truce declared; however with Packer players unavailable until the following home summer, selectorial rations remained in force. Porter was going to India.
‘We should have a few laughs about India,’ says Hogg. ‘But we don’t talk about it much. We went everywhere. It wasn’t one of these little six-week tours that Australia go on and stay in the best hotels. It wasn’t really an Australian cricket tour at all. It was like one of those Channel Nine Getaway shows—and throw some Test matches and a bit of cricket in.’ Porter bowled just 78 overs in 78 days, each one longer and more excruciating than the day before. Seldom was he picked. It didn’t feel as if he was even being looked at. He couldn’t practise during matches because the practice strips were on the field. So he sat. The guidance that hadn’t been forthcoming still wasn’t, and he began to crave it:
I lost confidence. I lost total belief. I felt I shouldn’t have been there and I lost the belief that I could actually play, almost to the point where I didn’t want to play. There certainly wasn’t any help, no ‘you’re close here, all you have to do is this’. There was none of that, none whatsoever. I don’t have any fond memories of India, to be perfectly frank, because of the state of mind I finished up in when I got back.
Was he doing something wrong? Was he a chance of playing? He didn’t know. Should he ask? He knew he lacked the self-confidence for that. But still he grappled with whether the expectation was for him to say something or to keep worries inside. ‘What do I do?’ The thought spun round and round.
He did not talk to Bob Merriman, managing his first Australian squad. ‘I didn’t find Bob that easy to sometimes chat to.’ He did not approach Kim. Not so long before, he’d watched late-night Wimbledon finals at the Hughes family home. ‘Mmmm. Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I felt Kim had his own troubles, trying to lead the side. No. I don’t know. That’s a tough one to answer.’ Only Border offered anything, in the Delhi nets. He showed Porter how to sweep spinners from down low instead of standing up.
Others battled. Graeme Wood opened in the First Test. By the Sixth Test Hilditch, Darling, Yallop and Yardley were preferred openers. ‘That tour was one I tried to erase from the memory banks,’ says Wood. ‘When I first went to India I couldn’t stand it. I hated it. I hated the food, I hated the place, I hated the environment.’ Porter was wonderstruck inside the Taj Mahal and on snow-tipped mountains near Srinagar. He liked the hotels. And on the tour’s sixty-first day, against East Zone in Cuttack, he finally took his first wicket. It was also his last. Batting in the second innings, a lengthy stay in the offing, he had just settled in when the other batsman got out and Kim declared. Kim declared so fast that Rick Darling was already walking the drinks out and had to turn back. Porter recalls:
I thought, I’ve obviously got no hope here, have I, of pushing my claims? A little bit of anger did well up in me—to think, well, clearly I’m not thought of on this tour. I walked past and I threw my bat into my bag. And that was it. That was the end for me. Shattered—yeah, I suppose that’s probably a good word. It took me a long while, a good couple of years, to recover from that.
Nine days after he got home, with Packer’s men back and jousting for their official cricketing lives, Western Australia met Victoria in a McDonald’s Cup one-dayer. Wood was in bed when he discovered his green Australian blazer didn’t entitle him to a yellow WA cap. His dad Mal read it in the paper and banged on the bedroom door: ‘Mate, you’re not in the side.’ Porter was named in a fourteen-man squad. He arrived at the ground, 13,581 people there, on match morning. ‘You know how you walk into a room and you get a feeling? Well, I got a feeling that I wasn’t in this team.’ The selectors confirmed it half an hour before play. ‘As soon as the game started and the selectors had gone I picked up my bags and left.’
Did he cry? Porter goes quiet. ‘I don’t know. I may have. I may have.’ He laughs—a warm laugh. ‘Look, I don’t recall, but I think I probably would have.’
He became WA’s sometimes anywhere man, in, out, bowling second-change, batting at nearly every cranny from one to eleven. That went on for a couple of seasons. His head still hadn’t left India. ‘I was still wondering whether I was good enough.’ He’d scour the small print for his name. One day his father said: ‘Just get out of thinking about what’s happened and what’s passed and just enjoy playing with your team-mates.’ And that’s what he did. For four years he was a Saturday club cricketer. In 1985–86, Fremantle versus Melville, he helped bowl Melville out, walked off and was led aside by state selector Allan Edwards.
‘Are you interested in playing the one-day games?’
‘Absolutely.’
Western Australia won that year’s McDonald’s Cup and reached the semis the next year. Across two seasons Porter conceded 2.56 runs an over. Ungetawayable. And ungetdownable. And just like that he bowed out, happy. He knew how close he’d gone to fading out.
He never spoke to Frank about India. He is sure Kim has no inkling either. He never felt tempted to tell him. ‘Can’t do anything about it. No, it’s over. I’ve never had the urge or the feeling to talk about it with anybody. Apart from now.’
He wears a Trinity College badge during school hours: ‘GRAEME PORTER’. So that is how you spell it. He sighs. ‘I’ve actually rung a couple of places. There was one on the web, might have been Cricinfo, and they had my name incorrect. They had a “contact us” sort of thing so I wrote to them and got a response and it was changed. I know it’s a little thing but I really do get annoyed.’ He still gets ‘Graham’ in various WACA publications, despite mentioning it to Western Australia’s stats guru Bill Reynolds. He gets it in all kinds of places where editors should know better: Wisden Australia’s births and deaths section, the Penguin History of Australian Cricket, Bill Frindall’s book of one-day scorecards. ‘I’ll try again. I do, as I say, I do get annoyed with that.’
•••••
WAYNE CLARK WAS EIGHT when the future started to make sense. He had a fast bowler for a teacher in grades 3 and 4, Laurie Mayne, whose craft took him to the West Indies, India, South Africa. ‘Heck,’ thought Clark, ‘that’s what I want to do—if I’m not playing league footy.’ The revelation brought clarity. The clarity proved long-lasting. When Packer’s persuaders came poaching, Clark rang the Australian Cricket Board enquiring how far away was Test selection. The board said not far so Clark stuck with the board. Seven weeks later he was opening Australia’s attack against India and outstriking Jeff Thomson with 28 wickets in five Tests. His bowling action, reckoned dubious by some, was filmed and cleared.
Chucking—and ducking—were bones, frequently broken ones, of contention on the Caribbean tour immediately afterwards. Peter Toohey was pinged on the forehead by Andy Roberts and incoming batsman Steve Rixon took guard in a puddle of blood. The astronaut strolling into battle in Bridgetown was actually Graham Yallop under a batting helmet, Test cricket’s first. He benched it in the subsequent tour game, incentive enough for Colin Croft to break Yallop’s jaw in two places. When Cosier’s thumb was chipped in Grenada in the tour’s eighth week, John Benaud drily recorded: ‘It gave manager Bennett the chance to keep intact his record of visiting a hospital in every centre the Australians played.’
Australian eyes locked on West Indian elbows, Croft’s and Garner’s especially. Watching Croft’s arms was like deciphering the brand name on helicopter propellers. Bruce Yardley, inching wider and wider of leg stump, square cut him to a stupor against Guyana, then began tapping his own elbow and lecturing: ‘Keep your arm straight.’ Croft silently resolved to knock Yardley off his podium. ‘Crofty’s eyes were always glazed,’ batting partner Cosier recalls. ‘But this time they looked like they were spinning. He went off his tree. Next ball he’s gone back and Bruce’s left foot is on the uncut grass, three feet outside leg stump. And Crofty’s hit him in the back of the head. It would have clipped the peak of short leg’s cap. Bruce went down like a sack of spuds, doing the dead-fish flap on the wicket.’ Blood was sponged and jelly legs tested. In the distance skulked Croft, hands in pockets.
Croft wasn’t umpire Douglas Sang Hue’s concern during the First Test. ‘He came in at lunchtime,’ Clark remembers, ‘and said he was going to call me.’ Clark swapped ends. Nothing happened. He played the next three Tests. ‘I never doubted I was all right.’ But he did think back to the previous summer’s film footage. ‘Once the mud’s thrown, it sticks a bit.’
If Laurie Mayne fired young Clark’s mind, watching Graham McKenzie bowl taught him where to put his feet, legs and chest. Clark was strong, side-on, streamlined. But stress fractures had forced some subtle restructuring. ‘Because I had such a side-on action—a bit like McKenzie, I always set myself on him—I probably opened up a bit.’ Clark’s bouncer, a mean one, was the worry. When Sang Hue returned for the tour match in Jamaica, and so the grapevine had it the Fifth Test, Clark took a breather. ‘I had a crook back,’ he says. ‘But I probably could have played.’
Sang Hue had signed up to umpire Packer’s Supertests. Simpson’s Australians didn’t trust him as far as Charlie Griffith—whom Sang Hue declined to no-ball in 1965—could have thrown him. Acting Australian skipper against Jamaica was Jeff Thomson, who had outlined his personal philosophy on captaincy two years earlier. ‘It would interfere too much with my social life . . . Imagine coming back to the motel to a bundle of messages—from blokes.’ After a couple of hours Thomson introduced Yardley to the attack: ‘Maddie [Ian Callen] is fucked and I’m fucked so you and Higgsy will have to bowl all day.’ Yardley had received the same Sang Hue note of caution as Clark during the First Test. Now, Sang Hue no-balled Yardley’s fifth—‘try bowling the rest with a straight arm,’ advocated Thommo—and seventh deliveries.
Clark’s ‘crook back’ was timely. But time, unbeknownst to him, was running out. A Peter McFarline article over the winter read a lot like his Test obituary. Clark rang him: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Well,’ he heard McFarline say, ‘your name and Yardley’s name have gone to the International Cricket Conference. There’s an agreement going back to the Bradman days. You won’t play against England.’ He would, McFarline added, play in the two-Test series against Pakistan afterwards.
Clark phoned the board. ‘They were weak as piss. Ray Steele I talked to. No one would give you an answer. The press blokes knew more than anyone.’
Clark was picked against Pakistan, as foretold. He did not go to England for the World Cup. Neither did Yardley—who wasn’t required for England trips in 1980, 1981 or 1983 either. And in the long Ashes summer of 1978–79, Clark watched Australia’s 5–1 extermination on TV:
I was pretty bitter. Because everything McFarline said came true. We were getting belted and the wickets were absolutely ideal for me—and you had Dymock coming in and fuck knows who else. That did make me pretty annoyed. I’ve very rarely spoken about it to anybody. Not too many people know that happened. I just got on with it. No good being a bloody sook. But deep down it really hurt. Because I’d stayed with traditional cricket and hadn’t gone to World Series I thought there might be more support. But they just washed their hands of me. That was the bit that really pissed me off. There was no real explanation, no effort. It couldn’t have been because I wasn’t performing. I’d proved I could play at that level . . .
His voice trails away. ‘Anyway, next question.’ Not once was Wayne Clark no-balled for chucking.
•••••
AN EXPLANATION, any explanation, would have helped Craig Serjeant too. Over coffee at the Waldorf in 1977 he and Kim had pondered what the galaxy might look like minus Packer’s stars. I’ll be captain, bragged one. Nah it’ll be me, retorted the other. ‘Banter. That’s all it was,’ says Serjeant. ‘Cer- tainly on my part.’ But it was a time when no notion was too harebrained. When they got home Serjeant was named vice-captain against India. He’d played three Tests in his life and flunked two of them. He had no leadership ambitions, no experience either. But did a single selector or board messenger discuss his appointment with him? ‘No,’ says Serjeant. ‘Not one.’
He saw the words ‘heir apparent’ in a newspaper report. ‘That scared me. I grappled with that.’ Simpson was the emergency captain. Simpson was turning forty-two. ‘If you’re the heir apparent, what does that mean?’ says Serjeant. ‘How long’s this guy around for? Is it one series? Is it four series? You know, what is it? That was mentally tough for me and I didn’t deal with it. It was the worst thing that happened to me in my career. If you’re inexperienced at that level you’ve got to deal with one thing—playing. And I had this other thing going round my head.’
Three more things were soon circling: Bedi, Prasanna and Chandrasekhar, three trinkets out of a cereal box he had never opened. Balls bounced on the wickets out west on which Serjeant grew up. They rarely spun. Two ducks in the First Test in Brisbane gave him three in a row. The going got little smoother thereafter. He lost his spot by series end and his vice-captaincy for the 1978 West Indies tour—‘a terribly hard tour but really enjoyable’, now that heir apparency was some other sucker’s burden. Serjeant hit a Test hundred in Georgetown, hotfooting singles with Wood, their 251-run partnership resuscitating Australia from 3–22 to 362 tense and far-fetched runs for victory. While they were batting Kim sketched a graph on a shred of paper, crossing off every logic-defying run. ‘You bit them up and chewed them into little pieces out there,’ hoorayed Simpson.
Wayne Clark is thankful for the ten Tests he did play. Serjeant is perhaps the only cricketer who said no to Kerry Packer and wishes he hadn’t:
My decision was based on my preconceptions of me being a professional person first and a cricketer second. I made the conservative decision. In hindsight it wouldn’t have had any impact on my professional career and it was the wrong decision. I actually made the wrong decision. I should have joined World Series. I think I would have been a better cricketer. As a professional cricketer you get more time to practise. Parts of my game would have changed. I would have spent more time doing different things. Wonderful in hindsight.
Runs were scarce on his return from the Caribbean. The position he vacated was gone forever. The World Series Cricket era took many wicked twists. Serjeant’s twelve single-figure scores in twenty-three Test innings seem particularly unfair. ‘In the end my confidence just fell apart,’ he says. ‘If I’d had Kim’s confidence maybe it wouldn’t have.’
•••••
DISAPPOINTMENTS LANDED IN THREES for Gary Cosier before the Gabba Test of 1978–79. ‘I was actually a bit disappointed when they announced the captaincy,’ he says, ‘because I thought I could have been a better captain than Graham Yallop.’ Cosier had guest-skippered South Australia on occasion. He liked Yallop. But when the selectors asked Cosier to share his on-field nous with Yallop, his first thought was: ‘Well, fuck me, if they want me to help Graham they could have made me captain and he could have helped me.’ News that Cosier was to open the innings, never his natural habitat, was his second disappointment. And then he realised who he’d be opening with. Graeme Wood patted the fifth ball of the summer to cover-point David Gower and bolted. Cosier responded, and kept running, all the way to the pavilion.
From there, disappointments piled up and became career threatening. First ball of the second innings, he drove, missed and was bowled by Willis’s half-pace full toss. Fourth evening of the Second Test, journalist Dick Tucker mentioned over a beer that Cosier was already dropped from the next game. Something similar happened to John Benaud during the Melbourne Test of 1972–73, except that Benaud’s guillotining was official, not bar-room tattle. What’s a cricketer dumped mid-match to do, Benaud would later reflect. ‘Expect his captain to ring up the chairman of selectors? Confront the selectors himself? Go out and get pissed, maybe? Call Lifeline?’ What Benaud did was middle everything on his way to a century next day. And Cosier had Benaud on his mind as he dashed to 47. Then he swept at Geoff Miller—‘got hit in the middle of the chest’—and was adjudged lbw.
He took some while to get up and leave. His replacement in the team was a diligent left-hander with a greengrocer’s friendly moustache. ‘I went out and Allan Border came in. Worst decision of all time.’
Cosier’s 46 Test average before World Series Cricket wriggled its way to an eventual standstill at 28. ‘It kind of ruined the way I played,’ he says. ‘I went from being an aggressive player to a bloody stupidly aggressive player. There were all these World Series promos—Hookesy’s clearin’ pickets, that sort of stuff—and I thought, bugger this, these people are here to watch us. Let’s give them something to watch. That was a personal decision and it was stupid.’
Maybe a World Cup could prove not just his salvation but his making. ‘I reckon Cosier will eat bowlers like Miller for breakfast,’ was captain Kim’s pre-tournament tip. But Cosier found himself batting low, bowling plenty. He was run out for 6 against England. ‘Trevor Laughlin turned his back on me. I’ll never ever let him forget it. He said “yes”, I got halfway down, and he just turned his back and put his bat down.’ Against Pakistan, Cosier lasted one ball—long enough, almost, for his red hair to go grey:
Majid Khan was bowling and Majid was the gentlest off-spinner that’s ever, ever bowled. He bowled a half-tracker, it was super-slow and I spooned it straight back to him. First ball. Javed went crazy in the outfield. It was unbelievable. I don’t think I’d ever played a shot like that in my life. Normally I would have gone whack over the top. But I guess I wanted to consolidate myself.
He did not bat against Canada. The worst stroke of his international cricketing life was his last. ‘Just a shocking shot,’ says Cosier. ‘Just awful. A three-year-old wouldn’t have hit it back to him. Anyway, so be it.’
For some, World Series Cricket was a beautiful golden coach, carrying them to Test matches they would otherwise never have played. For others, it was a pumpkin, with pips.
