Three of the party landing in London on 29 May 1975 worked for banks back in Australia. Two were insurance salesmen and two accountants. An architect came with familiar companions, a teacher and a trainee engineer, although his friend the antique salesman could not make it. A real estate executive and a cigarette salesman kept spirits buoyant, especially in the company of a journalist.
The group was an Australian cricket team touring England, the second Ian Chappell had brought, and very much in the mould of its precursors: semi-amateur, part-time players, paid accordingly. It was a honourable tradition. Butchers, bakers and undertakers have blended beneath ‘baggy green’ and, more than any other nation’s, Australia’s cricket lore is written in team terms. With shorter hair and sharper razors, Ian Chappell’s seventeen could have been stepping from a P & 0 steamer.
Chappell’s grandfather Vic Richardson had led Australia forty years earlier, and the inherited characteristics showed. In his very first Test as captain at Sydney in 1971 against England, Chappell had been next in when a wicket fell five minutes before stumps. Although there is no time to get ‘in’ under such circumstances, and always ample to get out, the captain batted.
On twenty-seven of the forty-eight occasions he batted in the number-three slot for Australia, the score had not reached 20. Leaping to attention at the premature fall of a wicket, he seemed to seek walls to put his back to. His trademark became a hook of often premeditated defiance.
Illogical defiance, too. In the five minutes Chappell batted in Sydney, Australia might have lost a valuable top-order wicket. His powers against spin might occasionally have been better used at number five. And resolving to hook every bouncer ‘as an example’ did sometimes cheapen his wicket. The best of all possible captains would probably have attained Zen-like detachment, assessing the asset to be preserved, hour, state of wicket and match situation. Ian Chappell, rationally speaking, was too willing a self-abnegator to be a great captain. But the same attachment to cricket’s anachronistic, highly irrational, damnably inspiring traditions made him a remarkable leader.
Chappell’s on-field values circulated easily. Get in line. Don’t walk, even on edging a catch, but accept the umpire’s decision. Battle ends at stumps, and nothing on the field cannot be settled off it over ‘a beer and a yarn’. Cricketers who made a modest ration of ability last were especially respected. Where the shades were grey, as in questions like sporting links with South Africa, he took the career cricketer’s side: sport and politics were separate.
As Australia sought emblems in the Whitlamite nationalism driving and dividing Australia round Chappell, however, evidence of change seemed to be everywhere. ‘In Bradman’s day Sydney editors banned any reference to the play Lysistrata,’ wrote Ray Robinson in his elegant appreciation of Chappell in On Top Down Under. ‘By Chappell’s time families could see Diane Cilento playing in Aristophanes’ comedy on television … On the day Ian was reappointed skipper for the 1974–75 Tests against England, an unwed mother Helen Morgan, twenty-two, was selected as Miss World.’
Chappell did indeed regard a spade as a fucking shovel. Cricketer’s chins were not policed, and curfews were for college kids. Leg-spinner Kerry O’Keeffe recalls team meetings of elaborate simplicity: ‘Ian would go through the other team by name. “Boycott?” “Bounce the cunt”. “Edrich”. “Bounce the cunt”. “Willis”. “Slog the cunt”. “Underwood”. “Bloody tight. Hard to get away. Slog the cunt”.’
To drink all night and bat all day was the fullest expression of an insouciant circle, and Chappell was more supervisor than regulator. He told players when he assumed the captaincy that his hotel door would remain open until 3am. Those still socialising as that hour approached would remark that there was ‘still time to go and see Bertie’.
Regulation, though, began at the gate. ‘It pays a captain to be friendly with his men off the field,’ Vic Richardson had written. ‘But once they walk through the gate, there must be no doubt who is in charge.’ And Chappell could be, idiosyncratically, strict. For sins the night before a 1975 tour match, for instance, all-rounder Gary Gilmour was sentenced to a session and a half of bowling, and a fielding beat from third man to third man. ‘By tea, Gus was absolutely cactus, heaving his guts out,’ a fellow tourist relates. ‘And Ian grabbed a can, ripped off the top, and went over and stuck it in front of him. He just said: “Gus, I hope you’ve learned something today”.’
And in the meshing of generations, the captain kept old gurus. With Bill O’Reilly, for instance, he would discuss their shared distrust of coaches. With Richie Benaud, who became something of a paterfamilias, he could talk over man-management and a mutual disdain for administrators.
It worked. At times, such as at the Oval in 1972, and at Port-of-Spain in 1973, magically. Pound-for-pound Chappell’s side now has few historical equals. It included four of Australia’s most complete Test batsmen: Ian and Greg Chappell, Doug Walters and opener Ian Redpath. Its best pace bowler, Lillee, and its fastest, Thomson, had the support of the scam of Walker, the spin of Ashley Mallett, and the sticky gloves of Rod Marsh.
Like its predecessors, the 1975 team was a true ensemble. Only the captain and his brother, Walters, Marsh, Mallett, Lillee, and middle-order batsman Ross Edwards had made the 1972 trip; and the last three had in the interim known long absences from the team. Only five of the 1975 side had played more than twenty Tests. The still-fragile Lillee had survived only seventeen in four years as a Test opening bowler.
Yet that 1975 team was the best of its time. Its confidence was not yet arrogance, its unity not quite chauvinism, and it drew strength from praise and detraction alike. Injuries were ignored, apparently out-of-form batsmen played blinders, tailenders acquired defensive strokes for a day that had eluded them for a lifetime, medium pacers charged in believing they were expressmen. Faces changed, but the face of the Chappell era did not.
The 1974–75 home summer left behind had been arduous and exhilarating. Never had Australian cricket seemed more robust. Never had players felt their own semi-professional status more demeaning.
Entertaining, competitive cricketers, they were in demand abroad, while making Australia an attractive destination for touring sides. Since Chappell’s elevation, Australia had hosted a Rest of the World combination, Pakistan, New Zealand and England, while visiting England, the West Indies and New Zealand.
But cricketers remained voyeurs of their own popularity. During the team’s emphatic capture of the Ashes from Mike Denness’s Englishmen in 1974–75, less than 2 per cent of the bumper gate-takings came the cricketers’ way, and the Australian Cricket Board held to the philosophy that true patriots would pay to play for their country. Home Test fees rose $20 to $200 between 1970 and 1975, while in the Whitlam wage surge Australian workers awarded themselves pay rises of a third.
Jack Fingleton had warned thirty years before that ‘no ordinary mercantile concern could afford to carry a cricketer … incessantly absent from his employment’, and it had only grown harder to hold an outside job. With unemployment reaching a post-Depression peak of 5.2 per cent after the 1974 credit squeeze, absentee athlete employees were a corporate luxury.
The formula lost appeal to the likes of Graham McKenzie, Keith Stackpole, Paul Sheahan and even Richie Benaud’s talented twenty-eight-year-old brother John. Redpath and Mallett—with businesses and careers at sensitive stages—continued only by assessing each tour and season as it arose. Through Ian Chappell Enterprises Pty Ltd, incorporated in September 1973, the captain was one of a kind in ‘living from cricket’, though most of his income came from advertising for Gillette, Chrysler and TAA, contracts for three books and a syndicated newspaper column. He described his actual earnings from cricket were ‘fish and chip money’.
The ACB seemed, as it ever has, inept, niggardly, and heartless, though the tendency to cast the administrative class of the 1970s as villains is something of a convenience. They too were amateurs. Chairman Tim Caldwell could not attend an entire Test from 1932 until his retirement as an ANZ Bank executive in 1974. His successor Bob Parish had worked in the family timber business since 1932. Treasurer Ray Steele was a retired lawyer. And as the Sheffield Shield declined in the late 1960s, administrators understandably viewed big Test gates as something to salt away.
Pay disputes had become as traditional as the Ashes. During the Adelaide Test in February 1975, one was averted only narrowly when the ACB rewarded players with a bonus and a credit to their two-year-old provident fund (which provided for a small ‘tide-over’ lumpsum payment to retirees according to their Test experience).
A more sustained increase in player payments also met a blank response when Chappell sought it at the ACB executive committee. The meeting was nominally led by Caldwell, who had assumed the chair vacated by Sir Donald Bradman in September 1972, but Bradman’s presence representing the South Australian Cricket Association was pervasive. ‘When I came to the two matters on finance he sat forward, listening intently,’ Chappell wrote. ‘After I finished each point, he explained in his distinctive tone and in no uncertain terms that the board couldn’t entertain such ideas.’ The oft-quoted retort of board secretary Alan Barnes to press comment about player payments was: ‘These are not professionals … they were all invited to play, and if they don’t like the conditions there are 500,000 other cricketers in Australia who would love to take their places.’
Three senior West Australian members of the 1975 team—Marsh, Edwards and Lillee—provide a good peer sample at the end of three hectic years. Edwards recalls, for instance, their Perth flit at the end of the Sydney Test with Pakistan in January 1973 to deposit washing and collect luggage before returning two days later to embark on a Caribbean tour. With young families, all three were studying the bottom line of their endeavours.
Marsh, appointed third tour selector, was luckier than most: his employer, home-builder Realty Development Corporation, quite liked having an Australian cricketer on staff. Although he had clocked on barely eight days in eighty during the cricket season, RDC paid him his full salary. That said, he still earned $12,000 a year. In 1975, his professional golfer brother Graham—a regular guest in the Australian dressing-room in England—was the world’s sixteenth ranked player and earned $US120,354.
Cricket for Edwards, a hard-working sweat whose father had played for WA, was a succession of crossroads. He had qualified as an accountant, but spent much of his cricket duty wondering if he would ever practise except as consultant to Ian Chappell and a few teammates. Tours were subsidised by letting his house, while wife Lyndall took their son to stay with her parents in New Zealand.
‘I played from September 1971 to June 1973 without a break,’ Edwards says. ‘And by the end in the West Indies I was so physically exhausted I couldn’t get past the teens when I batted. I remember one day when someone brought some food into my hotel room and I just couldn’t stop eating it. My body was so starved of nutrition.’
Edwards returned to Perth financially depleted, too. ‘I was wiped out,’ he says. ‘I was unemployed and had $10 in the bank. I had a wife and a son and I just couldn’t go on ignoring our bank balance.’ Omission from the national side in the summer of 1973–74 allowed him some time to rebuild, but recall the following season and selection to tour was a sublime form of suffering.
Almost eighty weeks in the first five years of Dennis Lillee’s first-class career had been spent overseas on representative duty and as a Lancashire League cricketer. A Commonwealth Bank teller until 1973, he’d been lucky after an unsuccessful investment in contract cleaning to find a job at a travel agency, Travel Time International.
Treatment for spinal stress fractures diagnosed in the West Indies that cost him the 1973–74 cricket summer had pushed him into a bizarre dispute with the ACB when he was restored to the Australian team. The board had inscrutably ceased paying his bills the instant Lillee had rolled his arm over in Perth grade cricket just before Christmas 1973, and he had to visit Barnes to settle the matter. ‘At one stage a doctor even offered me the chance to pay his account off at $1 a week,’ he wrote. ‘How embarrassing! It wasn’t the amount of money it was the principle. I’d injured myself playing for Australia and I wasn’t going to pay for the treatment that followed.’
The 1975 tour contract itself continued the steady decline in cricketers’ earnings relative to average male weekly wages. As Braham Dabscheck of the University of New South Wales points out, the weekly income of the Australian team members on tour in India and South Africa in 1969–70 had been 66 per cent above average male weekly earnings of the time; the margin had narrowed to 40 per cent by 1972, and in 1975 was a slender 13 per cent.
The contracts, though, were signed with the usual alacrity. Only Redpath decided he could not afford the further neglect of his Geelong antique business. The 1975 schedule was as stimulating as any offered a devoted cricketer: a whistle-stop in Canada before a fortnight involved in cricket’s first World Cup and a four-Test defence of the Ashes just seized.
Travel broadened the Australian mind. Their eyes were opened in the World Cup to one-day cricket’s heady English surge. It was a discipline for which the tourists had little preparation: their primitive Gillette Cup state knock-out competition at home might limit them to one such sprint a season.
They were still headed only in the cup final by the West Indies. Despite the run-a-minute century by West Indian captain Clive Lloyd and the uncanny fielding sense of a twenty-three-year-old Vivian Richards, the result was in doubt until the day’s 120th over in a Lord’s twilight.
Cricket’s full international flavour was savoured for the first time. Never had all Test nations (not to mention Sri Lanka and East Africa) been gathered in a single location, and the mingling Australians learned that times were tough all over. With British inflation running at 25 per cent that month, local Test fees were unchanged at £180. Tournament gossip was of a Indian businessman in London proposing a travelling sequence of all-star exhibitions.
Cricket-minded Indian businessmen were always ‘well-connected’ and ‘had access to substantial capital’, but private cricket enterprise seemed fanciful while boards of control had the run of venues. When the Chappells, Lloyd and Indian captain Bishan Bedi were among those canvassed at a London hotel while the Cup was under way, their advice was to obtain official sanction first. The cricketers heard no more.
The Ashes were satisfactorily retained on the strength of Australia’s conclusive victory in the murk at Edgbaston, although the series again had a financial backdrop. Ian Chappell met Caldwell and tour manager Fred Bennett at Australia House on the rest day of the Oval Test and sought a review of the entire Test fee: not just the $200 match payment but the scrawny $50 in expenses and $35 for meals away from home. The first, he felt, should be at least $500, and he was annoyed at anomalies like the fact that hotel meals taken after restaurant hours because of practice sessions often left his men out of pocket.
The gathering on 31 August 1975 was not a militant meeting. As Edwards observes: ‘We were hardly in a bargaining position. We wanted to play for Australia. We’d based our lives round it. We said: “We want to keep playing. We think we’re worth it. Can’t you help us?”’ Nor were the officials unsympathetic. Caldwell, about to yield his chair to Parish, had been a thoughtful and concerned listener. The likeable Bennett had heard many of the same complaints as treasurer for the 1972 trip.
But the captain was insistent. Poor pay might sap success. His team had already been denied Redpath’s guiding hand at the top of the order. Now Edwards had chosen the Oval Test as his last and Mallett was toying with retirement. Chappell himself was considering at least standing down as captain. The winning Australian side was the ACB’s prime asset. Some reinvestment in that asset was now politic.
He sensed his chance: the Ashes were in safekeeping, the hawkish Bradman was 12,000 miles away, and the forthcoming West Indies’ tour of Australia guaranteed buoyant Test attendances and board profits for at least another year.
It was a persuasive case although the committee process would deny Chappell a decisive win. A week after Australia had the better of a protracted draw at The Oval, it had similar fortunes at the ACB’s pre-season meeting at Cricket House in George Street, Sydney: match payments were doubled to $400, with a $25 increase in expenses and a $40 rise in meal allowances.
When Ian Chappell did relinquish his captaincy, he became 1975’s second ex-captain. Mike Denness’s exit amid the wreckage at Edgbaston, however, had not been as orderly. With England heading for its sixth defeat in eight Ashes contests, Denness himself suggested that a leadership change might be positive, and proposed the popular Tony Greig. The extroverted all-rounder seemed qualified as a leader: opportunistic, magnetic, and uncannily adept at getting up Australian noses.
Greig played cricket more in keeping with his South African nativity than his Scottish paternity. He was ambitious, too. Given two years by his father to make a cricket mark while wintering in England in 1965, he had joined Sussex, made a century on debut and sought British citizenship. As a clean-hitting, visibly competitive middle-order batsman and seamer, he made a virtue of his two metres in height.
While early skirmishes left some Australians chary of Greig, his brand of cricket was one to which Ian Chappell in particular could relate: mean on the field, generous off it. Profiling the South African for Cricketer magazine, Chappell wrote: ‘As a person I like Tony. We’ve shared many beers after the day’s play was over, which in turn hasn’t stopped either of us from having a few choice things to say to each other in the middle in the heat of the battle.’
Despite his nationhood and combustibility, Greig also gained the confidence of authority. He grew close to the Daily Telegraph’s influential Jim Swanton, who wrote of him in 1974: ‘The degree to which Greig can subdue what amounts to an excessive and misguided enthusiasm is important for English cricket since, off the field, he is a strong and most likeable personality whom men will gladly follow. Given self-control he has all the ingredients of leadership, and one can see him as a natural captain of England.’
The English selectors were of a mind at Birmingham and named Greig captain for the balance of the series. And although he achieved more in style than substance over the ensuing three draws, he entered English imaginations as though he had recaptured the urn single-handed. Wisden saluted the ‘many splendid qualities’ of the ‘tall, volatile captain of Sussex’.
Greig knew enough of Test cricket from his three years, however, to understand that his name would never be stencilled in. ‘I’d got it from a guy who’d thought he was going to hang on to it for a long time,’ he says. ‘Who’d got it in turn from someone who thought he was going to hold on to it for a long time. And the same before him. Denness had got it when Ray Illingworth was sacked. Illy had taken it from Colin Cowdrey. I decided when I got the captaincy that I should never be in a position where I could be as let down as those guys seemed to be, when I knew a tenure could be ended by one bad report, one incident, one bit of foul language.’
With that in mind, he pursued endorsements and contracts restlessly, and in expansive mood spoke of becoming ‘the world’s first millionaire cricketer’. In England he even employed an agent of sorts in Reg Hayter—the man who thirty years before had introduced Denis Compton to Bagenal Harvey and Brylcreem—and had struck up a business friendship with Australian opener Bruce Francis while they were playing in South Africa in 1972.
When Francis organised in September 1975 for Greig to play for his venturesome Waverley Cricket Club, it was remarked that a deal of this kind was unusual for England’s captain. It looked all the more peculiar when, with the help of advertising executive Ian Macfarlane, Greig made his name synonymous with Kelloggs and Waltons, spruiked pads and pantyhose, wrote a newspaper column and a book and almost incidentally took 70 wickets for Waverley. But Tony Greig was no ordinary holder of English cricket’s top job.
It set the tone of the 1975–76 cricket season in Australia that the top scorer in the annual charity match organised by Sydney’s Spastic Centre at Drummoyne on 5 October was Bob Hawke, then in his pomp as president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The summer proved a high tide in Australian cricket’s on-field success and recognition and a low point in its malfunctioning industrial relations. So profound became the problems that Hawke, despite the strife about to break loose in the Australian Labor Party with the Whitlam dismissal, was never far from a Test match that summer.
Australia, under Greg Chappell’s leadership, firmly redressed its World Cup loss to the West Indies with a 5–1 Test series victory. Edwards’ retirement and Walters’ absence with a knee injury were more than compensated for by the valedictory feats of Redpath and Ian Chappell and the emergence of middle-order talent in Gary Cosier and Graham Yallop. Lillee and Thomson ruled the roost once more, aided and abetted by the maturing Gilmour, and there seemed few reasons that the younger Chappell, just twenty-seven, should not reign as long as his brother.
The summer bore better financial fruit for the Australian team. Their improved pay was funded comfortably from surging gates, and $150,000 staked by the tobacco company sponsor Benson & Hedges. New patrons like Queensland radio station 4IP also appeared. After seeking unsuccessfully to lure Dennis Lillee east, 4IP’s cricket-crazy chief Ken Mulcahy eased local hero Jeff Thomson’s homesickness for his native Sydney with a ten-year, $633,000 deal.
The money was strictly rationed, and the Dino Ferrari sports car beside which Thomson posed for promotional photos was leased, but the contract was talismanic for the fast bowler’s peers. Players, it proved, had a commodity to trade beyond their skill. As Greig was discovering, a name could be a brandname. Before Thomson, 4IP had been just another radio station, barely audible beyond Tweed Heads. After his signing, it had a national profile.
The deal also meant much to its broker, David Lord. An energetically mediocre club captain at Mosman until 1973, Lord hoped to become a better businessman. Sometime editor of David Lord’s World of Cricket Monthly and ghost writer, he became for press purposes after the 4IP deal Thomson’s ‘agent’.
Sparks from a short-circuiting cricket system, however, were detectable throughout 1975–76. Mulcahy had caught Lillee at a tender time in October 1975: Lillee had been retrenched by Travel Time and was only kept in Perth by a friendly car-dealer, Rod Slater, who found him work selling Renaults and Peugeots.
Recalcitrance at Test level had also filtered down to first-class cricket, whose administrators made the ACB elite seem enlightened fabians. When Cricketer magazine editor Eric Beecher surveyed the top twelve players in each of the five Sheffield Shield states for his December 1975 issue, he was deluged. Only two of sixty respondents believed they were being offered ‘sufficient financial rewards’. Only one more was against professional promoters being brought into the game.
Beecher commented soberly: ‘The result of this poll should not be mass revolution. It does not signify need for drastic upheaval. But it does require patient understanding, genuine acknowledgement and a sincere attempt at remedying disenchantment clearly pervading dressing-rooms at present.’ In fact, Beecher added for emphasis, for far longer: ‘For decades, cricketers have been voicing their disapproval of administrators. The communication gap between the two factions seems to have broadened with the years. Administrators with short memories could think back to one of their most illustrious—Sir Donald Bradman—at loggerheads with officialdom at times during his remarkable career.’
The ACB had created one loggerhead at the beginning of the season by requiring written reports from umpires on player conduct after every first-class game. Ian Chappell had promptly raised another by a famous decision—more memorable in correspondence than the event—to lower his trousers to adjust his protector during an early season fixture. Then, more seriously, he made the ‘communication gap’ palpable by leading his South Australian team to the brink of a strike over Sheffield Shield selection.
The disputes were symptomatic. Cricketer had discovered that two-thirds of its sample believed poor pay and conditions would force them from cricket prematurely. More than half were finding cricket actively detrimental to their careers.
As discussion became freer and franker, it became audible to those outside cricket’s core. Those of greatest importance, and closest in attitude and age to the players themselves, were a peculiar trio: the television comics Paul Hogan and John Cornell, plus Cornell’s former confrere on Perth’s Daily News, Austin Robertson.
Hogan had met Cornell in 1971, where they were in front of and behind the camera on the Nine Network’s fledgling A Current Affair. Hogan was a lowly paid comic on the show still living in a Sydney Housing Commission home, Cornell its Melbourne producer hired by another News old boy Mike Willessee.
When Cornell extracted Hogan from his niggardly contract and fell out with Willessee in 1973, the pair combined as JP Productions on ATV-7’s The Paul Hogan Show. Their TV sketch comedy echoed the era as faithfully as Ian Chappell’s cricketers. With their stock characters, Hoges and Strop, the pair lionised lairs and wags whose street-smart charm redeemed them. JP also branched out into managing their entertainment discoveries, notably the singer Bob Hudson and a Playboy bunny turned model, Delvene Delaney, who became Cornell’s girlfriend.
When Cornell left him at the News, Robertson was at his peak as a Westralian sport divinity. As full-forward at Subiaco, he had steadily outgrown being the son of the super-sprinter Austin senior. Schooled in the drop-punt by Neil Hawke, his 1278-goal pile still stands in the WAFL.
Robertson was the News’ athletic everyman. In the WA Sheffield Shield side, for instance, he knew everyone from captain and vice-captain John Inverarity and Ian Brayshaw, youth cricket teammates, to the kid swing bowler, Mick Malone, half-forward flanker in Subiaco’s 1973 premiership season.
When Robertson played his last game for Subiaco the following year and joined the News full-time, he’d been an obvious figure on whom Lillee could lean for small ‘management’ duties as the fast bowler became media property again on resuming Test cricket. Such business had long attracted Robertson, but Perth was a parochial promontory for the ambitious. In late 1975 he finally contacted Cornell and Delaney and told them he was coming to Sydney to ‘get serious’.
Dossing in their Neutral Bay home and considering sports-management’s horizons, Robertson startled Cornell by telling him Lillee scraped as little as $8000 from cricket every year. With his conviction that class acts should be paid class sums, Cornell recalled the exploitative $50 a week Hogan had been paid on A Current Affair five years earlier.
The genesis of World Series Cricket, as Cornell has related it, was an exchange as he and Hogan lounged in their Neutral Bay writing-room in their usual creative attitude: on their backs, feet up against the wall. Hogan repeated that someone should do something to reward the cricketers, and added as an afterthought: ‘Why don’t we do it ourselves? Contract the players and set up our own series?’
Some serious scuff marks were left on the wall as ideas were kicked round, but reality soon dawned. The closest they had come to cricket administration was organising a Variety Club celebrity challenge in January 1975 (Bob Hawke and Tony Greig among the star cast). They were basically sports fans, whom success had not spoiled to the degree that they could afford to buy a cricket team. Perhaps JP could manage a few of the guys: Robertson’s cachet with players, and the contacts Cornell and Hogan had in business and the media seemed a useful package. Robertson contacted Lillee in Perth urging he meet Cornell, another savvy local boy made good.
The fast bowler was unsure he needed a full-time agent. Though he agreed to meet him at Perth’s Parmelia Hilton, Lillee knew Cornell simply as Strop the golden-hearted imbecile. ‘As I walked into that room,’ Lillee wrote, ‘I did expect Strop to jump out of his chair, the jaw to drop and sneaky laugh to follow.’ Lillee was wooed, however, especially when Cornell extemporised of a cricket tournament of the world’s best players. Lillee had thrived on the World Cup, and reckoned some similar one-day jamboree would sell in Australia. With board approval.
It was a refrain Robertson would find familiar in other preliminary contacts with players. When the JP alliance broached its concept with the Chappells, Lillee and Marsh at the team’s Koala Oxford Hotel billet during the Fourth Australia-West Indies Test in Sydney in January 1976, they encountered a weary response. Says Ian Chappell: ‘I’d heard these things a few times before, and I just thought it’d go the same way as the rest of them. And if they disappeared I wasn’t going to be jumping up and down.’
The Chappells still preferred to think of reform by sanctioned routes. Jack Nicholson topped the celebrity register at Melbourne’s Hilton Hotel during the Sixth Test, but the most significant guest for the Chappells was Bob Hawke. The ACTU president joined a dinner round-table about the state of the cricketing nation with Marsh, Rick McCosker and former Australian batsman Bob Cowper.
McCosker was an officer with the Rural Bank of NSW in Newcastle, and had succeeded Edwards as the team’s unofficial treasurer. Cowper, who ten years before had compiled an indelible 307 across the road at the MCG against Mike Smith’s Englishmen, had put a stockbroking career at Guest and Bell ahead of cricket in 1970 and was now a henchman of takeover merchant John Elliott.
Test players were keen to depute an ‘official liaison officer’ to represent them at the ACB. In time, he might speak for all first-class players if they could evolve some sort of ‘trade union’. Privy to his sharp mind as an adjacent slip-fielder during the 1960s, Ian Chappell had Cowper in mind. Cowper himself had felt strongly enough in 1974 about the calibre of Australian cricket’s management to seek election as the VCA delegate of his Hawthorn-East Melbourne club. He’d felt even more strongly when he’d missed out. But Cowper’s business acumen might even cut ice with another stockbroker in Sir Donald Bradman.
‘You’ve been raped for years,’ Hawke agreed, but he counselled caution. Hint of a ‘trade union’ to the ACB would provoke thoughts of the Eureka Stockade. English cricketers had made their ten-year-old Cricketer’s Association acceptable to the Test and County Cricket Board by choosing a ‘liaison officer’ above suspicion in president John Arlott. Cowper would have to radiate the same rectitude.
Beecher gave the idea oblique approval in Cricketer. ‘Cricket in Australia needs a mediating force between the two groups and . . . negotiations have been taking place for such a post to be filled by an eminently suitable person. His appointment could mark a new era in relations between the two volatile groups and a new deal for Australian cricketers.’
A different appointment at that same Test, however, proved more significant. Lillee had become the first client of the embryonic JP Sport. Press calls were fielded, interviews arranged, a Renault commercial filmed at the South Melbourne Cricket Club on the rest day, to fit round Lillee’s cricket. Lillee and Thomson in that Test were creating a first. Australia’s first ‘managed’ opening pair featured Lillee in Cornell’s corner, Thomson in David Lord’s.
One ‘new deal’ was in motion, but so was a newer one. And the first sign that the latter would gather up the former came when Cornell rang Lillee in Perth to ask his client whether he’d ever heard of a businessman called Kerry Packer.