The manuscript for The Cricket War was completed in March 1993, the research and writing having taken about six months. At the time, I was working for The Independent Monthly. In fact, I used the mercurial Mac Classic in my partitioned cubby hole to do most of the writing; and if I needed to talk to Craig Serjeant on the phone for five hours, as I felt I did, I made sure I used the office phone. I’m probably overdue acknowledging the Independent Monthly’s proprietor, Max Suich, for his oblivious patronage of what became my first cricket book.
In this edition of The Cricket War, I haven’t tampered with the judgements I made fifteen years ago. They were always preliminary, and what I failed to foresee is perhaps more instructive than what I perceived. Teams would be playing dead for dollars within a couple of years of my thanksgiving that they had not; teams seeking more money would be threatening to strike (Australia), then actually sitting-in (West Indies) within five years. Perhaps I succumbed to wishful thinking in failing to factor in the animal spirits of the market that Packer liberated.
Every journalist is handicapped by asymmetries of information. You gravitate to those areas where source material is most accessible and plentiful; you shrink from those where findings are harder to reach. I had no institutional cooperation from the Packer organization—in fact, I was told informally that they did not approve of the project, and Packer himself did not even respond to an interview request. But players, it turned out, were enormously helpful and full of goodwill: I remember prowling round the back of the Channel Nine commentary box during the 1992 Boxing Day Test to grab Greg Chappell and Michael Holding; David Hookes with his feet up on a console in a studio at 3AW; tagging along with Ray Bright in his van for a day; bugging Martin Kent while he was meant to be managing the Queensland Sheffield Shield team. What was hardest to adduce, however, was the perspective of the administrators, in those days as approachable and cooperative as Andrei Gromyko during Cold War debates at the UN. My examination of Cricket Australia’s records in the course of writing its official history has since added much to my understanding of these administrators’ dilemmas and disappointments, and also something I did not understand clearly enough fifteen years ago: the overwhelmingly favourable commercial terms on which PBL Marketing struck its commercial relationship with the Board. At the time I wrote The Cricket War, the ‘peace agreement’ was the most confidential document in Australian cricket; it’s really only when you read it that you understand Packer’s consummate skills as a businessman.
World Series Cricket, however, isn’t simply to be understood by what it accomplished; it should be assessed for what it made possible. Before Packer, the idea of Australian cricket having a ‘market value’ would have been unthinkable. Packer didn’t spend $12 million buying the game; he spent $12 million turning it into something that could be bought. In theory, it could have been bought by others, and the impresarios of the rebel tours were able to make off with key assets. In fact, Packer so skilfully barred and gated the way here that international cricket in his wake was a monopoly more strongly fortified than before. But thirty years after the World Series burglary, authorities have ears cocked for the bump in the night of other private promoters. If anything, players are more susceptible to inducements than they were when they were paid a pittance. Now that everything has a value, nothing is beyond price. And although that discovery would probably have been made anyway, John Cornell and Austin Robertson made it a decidedly memorable one.
World Series Cricket also fundamentally changed expectations among cricketers—and these have continued to rise. Australian cricket now has something it did not have fifteen years ago: after the false dawns of 1977 and 1988, the players finally cobbled together their own trade union, the Australian Cricketers’ Association in 1995. It gives the players a collective voice, provides infrastructural support and mechanisms to resolve disputes. By the same token, it doesn’t answer everything. The game has been blessed by success and public support; if this weakened, how would the burden of sacrifice be distributed? Asked to comment on the consequences of the French Revolution, the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously replied that it was too early to tell. It was too soon to guess at the full impact of World Series Cricket when The Cricket War was first published, and it still is.