In the disorienting blur of familiar faces round Tony Greig as he alighted at Victoria Station on 30 March 1977, the voice of Thames Television’s Eamonn Andrews arrested him: ‘Tony Greig. This Is Your Life.’
It sure was, and over the next three hours it flashed before his eyes. His agent Reg Hayter had slipped a sham appointment ‘discussing an ITV sporting program’ into Greig’s diary, and the ruse had worked. Painfully well. Greig faced everything he stood to lose. His English teammates mingled with family members flown from Queenstown, his coaches, counsellors and kindergarten teacher. There was even Teki Manzei, the elderly African retainer who had bowled to a barefoot Greig during his South African childhood. Greig learned that the kind conspiracy had been engineered at the Centenary Test. He could not, of course, tell a soul about the planning in which he was now immersed.
Greig had dreaded such encounters. How could he face Alec Bedser and Ken Barrington, managers of his successful Indian campaign? And Jim Swanton, his stentorian Daily Telegraph advocate? With a steady gaze, Greig decided:
That was where the deceptive side of it came. That was pretty difficult to handle. People who I was close to like Barrington and Bedser. If I’d have said anything to those guys, they would have been obliged to go to Lord’s. Those chaps would depend on Lord’s in some ways for the rest of their lives, as managers, selectors or coaches. There was Swanton, too, who’d been very good to me. How do you sit these guys down, as a South African with a Scottish father, and say: This is the real world. This is something you’ve got to adapt to. There is competition and it won’t go away? But I was on a new path in my life. And the strategy was to make sure that Greg Chappell’s team made it to England intact. If I let the cat out of the bag, that wouldn’t be certain.
Greig kept his poise. In an interruption in filming he even buttonholed Derek Underwood: he would call the spinner next morning about ‘something big’ that would interest him. Underwood, Kent colleague Alan Knott and Greig’s Sussex teammate John Snow learned that they were to meet at London’s Churchill Hotel on the evening of Easter Monday, but still the secret remained in its select circle. Even Teki Manzei, who stayed with the Greigs in Brighton a fortnight after his unexpected arrival, sensed only perpetual whirl. It was with Greig’s brother Ian that Tackies’ did most sightseeing.
Greig, of course, was just passing through. Two days later he booked into Port-of-Spain’s Trinidad Hilton, where he met Robertson and Consolidated Press’s veteran secretary John Kitto.
As the Fourth Test of Pakistan’s West Indian tour commenced at Queen’s Park, the Australians were equipped for safari. Their contracts were baited by a forty-five-minute cassette tape on which Ian Chappell attested JP Sport’s bona fides. Greig camouflaged his involvement as native guide by carrying a Sussex contract for the emergent all-rounder Imran Khan.
Imran was also presented with a JP Sport contract, as were his cousin Majid, captain Mushtaq Mohammad and deputy Asif Iqbal. Rotating Tests and domestic cricket with English county careers, their cricket on the run prepared them for anything. Asif, Robertson’s first guest after the third day’s play, had dashed home from Kent to begin three Tests against New Zealand on 9 October 1976 with 166 in Lahore, then sparked November’s Pentangular Trophy with 196 for National Bank against Pakistan Airways. Three Tests and two Test centuries had followed his touchdown in Perth on 15 December, and he would finish ten weeks in the Caribbean with 135 at Sabina Park in a fortnight. Three days later he would captain Kent against Surrey at Folkestone. Retirement beckoned, perhaps as a National Bank executive … until he saw Robertson.
Mushtaq, fast making the Test a personal landmark with 171 runs and eight wickets, had been hoping to play Sheffield Shield in 1977–78 as a relief from leading Northamptonshire. Majid and Imran, reassured by Greig that their Test careers would not be jeopardised, signed their $75,000 three-year contracts with equal flourish.
Warned by Mushtaq to beware ‘an Australian businessman called Robertson’, Clive Lloyd was soon accepting a dinner invitation from the enigmatic visitor. The West Indian captain was into his fruit salad by the time the $90,000 three-year offer came up, but nearly choked. Chappell’s recorded voice came as an important endorsement, but Lloyd sought time to discuss the offer with his wife Waveney.
Sir Frank Worrell might have been featured on the Barbadian dollar, but no West Indian had grown rich through cricket. Lloyd’s Testmen remained virtually the only West Indians who could count themselves professionals, and their abiding dependence on county cricket careers bothered their captain. Staleness had characterised his team during its 1–5 series defeat in Australia in 1975–76. The fulcrum of his attack, Andy Roberts, had.been fatigued from carrying Hampshire’s attack during the 1975 English season, and arrived for the Pakistan series sore from a spell with NSW. The West Indies’ 3–0 defeat of England in between had owed much to the players’ confinement to national duties.
Lloyd himself was thirty-three and wedded to life as a West Indian Lancastrian for as long as tottery knees allowed. ‘I had seen the plight of many a great West Indian cricketer of the past following their exit from the game and it was not particularly comforting,’ he recalled. ‘Several had been forced to continue playing in the leagues in England, while Caribbean governments had created coaching posts for others. I did not see myself following either course, and here now was an opportunity to earn and invest the kind of money which would allow me to be confident of my future after my playing days were over.’
By the time he returned to Robertson and Greig to sign his contract, the Antiguan alliance of Roberts and Viv Richards had been signed. Novelty had worn from the county contracts they had signed in 1973 with Hampshire and Somerset respectively, and they would rarely be better placed to sell themselves as professional sportsmen. Recognition of their 1976 record feats—Roberts’ sprint to 100 Test wickets inside thirty months and Richards’ 1710 Test runs —had so far been confined to their appearance on Antiguan stamps.
Last stop was Kingston, Jamaica, on 6 June where Roberts’ twenty-three-year-old fast bowling partner Michael Holding was convalescing from a groin injury. Eight months before, ironically, Holding had disappointed Greig by rejecting a £10,000 Sussex contract. Again he was coy:
I was at University and that came first. I remember telling a journalist in Jamaica that, whenever my studies clashed with a Test series, they would have to look for another fast bowler. I was not interested in county cricket, that grind. I played because I loved it. Andy had been used at Hampshire, bowled into the ground, because he was such a great wicket-taker. Touring with so many guys who played county cricket I knew what it was like.
Greig assured him that this would be different. While Holding might have to carry a county, he would never have to shoulder the World. The Jamaican’s one insistence, when he heard that he might be sharing a dressing-room with South African cricketers, was a clause voiding the contract if it did not receive a prior blessing from his Prime Minister Michael Manley.
Manley was as fervent an opponent of sporting links with South Africa as he was a lover of cricket. He went as far as accepting county contacts between West Indians and South Africans as an occupational mishap, but no further.
‘I agreed with Manley’s stance,’ Holding says. ‘And I told Tony I could not be involved with any South Africans who had not at least played county cricket. Nor would I like to be involved.’ Kitto hastily drafted the clause, and Greig undertook to contact Manley. But this strange political posture—that some South Africans were more equal than others—would come to plague the Packer organisation.
As Robertson and Kitto headed back to Sydney, Greig left Kingston for London where he planned to meet two ‘unequal’ South Africans in Pollock and leg spinner Denys Hobson. They were assembling at Greig’s behest at the Churchill on the Easter weekend with countrymen Barry Richards, Eddie Barlow and Mike Procter. Greig proceeded. The wheels of politics would always grind exceeding small. Packer’s were now at speed.
The momentum in Australia had gathered one recruit Ian Chappell felt indispensable. Packer called the venerable Richie Benaud on 6 April 1977 at the Coogee apartment that housed D. E. Benaud and Associates, retaining the consultancy that former Australian captain ran with his wife Daphne. The Benauds warned Packer about how the establishment would receive a rival:
Their reaction in the first instance will be to contact one or two players and sound them out to find out what is going on; and their second reaction will be one of disbelief … They may come back to you then and suggest a meeting but, before that, we would strongly advise against any statement calculated to provide ammunition for them in criticism of the players. It will be the players who will come under fire on the basis of ‘letting down Australia’.
Chances of a welcome were slim:
Although the matter has remained confidential to date, it is doubtful there will be no leak between now and the announcement. It is equally doubtful that the ACB will be thoroughly delighted at the thought of Australia’s players taking part in matches other than under their control. We believe it is important from the public relations point of view that you contact the ACB before making an official announcement, so they cannot say they and the game have been snubbed.
The Benauds reminded Packer that he had a lot of enemies.
As this is a Channel Nine exclusive production there will be resistance from other media, despite the quality of the players. That can partly be overcome by performances on the field, but you shouldn’t think there won’t be some sniping from all areas of the media. It’s not a national happening as in the Australian Open Golf where everyone wants to boost the event. Newspapers will almost certainly send their No. 1 writer to the Australia-India Test if there is a clash. No. 2 man will cover the commercial event. The way around that might be to avoid a clash of Test match dates, so that the top writers cover the whole summer, rather than a whole tour as is now the case.
Above all, the Benauds concluded, antagonists needed to be disarmed before they began. Packer had spoken of organising a coaching scheme for New South Wales country boys with the local association to be run by Barry Knight, and had budgeted it as much as $200,000. Tie the announcement of the two together, and the venture might be sweetened.
Richie Benaud would shortly be leaving for England, where he’d been a BBC television commentator since the end of his playing days in 1963, but left Packer a draft letter to the ACB along conciliatory lines:
In keeping with our policy of boosting sport in Australia, I am writing to advise that my organisation will be staging a number of cricket matches during the 1977–78 cricket season. It is proposed that these matches, to be played in each capital city, will be between teams of Australian players and players from other cricketing countries, the latter making up what could be called a World XI.
To enable as many sports followers as possible to view these games, it is proposed to televise them throughout Australia on our network. As you know we have established an outstanding television technique for golf in the Australian Open, and it is hoped that now in cricket we shall be able to provide an equally outstanding coverage for the hundreds of thousands who will be watching throughout the country. This is all part of our forward planning for sport and follows our recent announcement of a $200,000 coaching scheme for country boys in NSW. We are looking forward to an exciting summer. If your board has any further thoughts on how we could cooperate in assisting cricket and providing entertainment for the spectator and stay-at-home television fan, we should be pleased to hear from you.
Success of an ‘independent’ circuit would stand or fall on the quality of pitches and grounds, and no curator in Australia strictly fitted the bill of agriculturalist cum alchemist necessary to conjure wickets from the ‘non-cricket’ grounds it would be played on.
As he prepared for his English trip, Greg Chappell recommended instead someone he thought might rise to the occasion: groundsman at his Woollongabba home ground, John Maley. A thirty-year-old apostle of WACA curator Roy Abbott, Maley had first come to notice in Brisbane by resurrecting Toombul club’s notorious mud-pile at Oxenham Park. Maley’s two seasons taming the Gabba’s mangrove had further impressed Chappell.
Robertson had actually called Maley in January, obliquely seeking his thoughts on prefabricating pitches. The challenge of doing it that Robertson put to Maley at the Gabba engaged him immediately: he signed a $50,000 three-year contract, handwritten on JP Sport notepaper. He would in all likelihood be surrendering a Test ground, but he would be taking on a test tube.
The magic ingredient, of course, was television. Planning a family holiday in the UK for June, TCN-9 sports director Brian Morelli was bemused by an exchange with a station executive. ‘You’re going to England aren’t you?’ he said. ‘While you’re there, take a look at how the BBC do the cricket.’
‘Hmmm?’ said Morelli. ‘Are we going to be doing some cricket next summer?’
‘Just go and have a look.’
Packer’s project remained top secret at least until Chappell’s team were in England. Benaud’s letter could then be sent, a simultaneous Anglo-Australian news release made, and a puff piece published by Bulletin editor Trevor Kennedy. With the Ashes tour under way, punitive administrative actions—like the sacking of captains or recall of teams—would seem clumsy.
Greig returned to a country at a peculiar crossroads. As the Queen celebrated twenty-five years on the throne, loyalists were planning thanksgiving services and bonfires to illuminate the land end-to-end. Sporting events willingly took the royal seal, none more so than cricket with its so-called Jubilee Test Series.
But it was a strikebound isle, in which a million working days were being lost a month and the Labour Government of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan had seen prices rise 70 per cent in three years. Cricket’s antiquity had rarely seemed more reassuring. Colin Cowdrey summed up the Centenary Test in the Times: ‘It has been heady stuff and it will be much the same in 100 years from now.’ Correspondence from an MCC member in the Sunday Times three weeks later looked forward to ‘long summer days of grace and tranquillity … sitting, watching, eating sandwiches, drinking and sleeping’.
Barlow, Procter, Pollock, Hobson and Barry Richards were contrastingly agitated at the Churchill in Portman’s Square, just near Marble Arch, when Greig met them on Easter Monday, 11 April 1977. Richards had already enlisted, and the rest itched to. Barlow would not wait for the carefully prepared introductory address. ‘Where do I sign?’ the all-rounder asked.
The Englishmen arriving were also willingly led. Snow was at the end of a career estranged from England’s selectors. A victim of selection fashion despite his 250 Test wickets, Underwood welcomed contracted security. The intensely religious Knott felt it all ‘a wonderful answer to prayer’ after a succession of winters away from his family. Only Greig’s entreaties to the Test and County Cricket Board on his behalf had enabled him to take his wife Jan on the Indian tour, and the Knotts had sought divine guidance since returning home. The respect all four had for England’s skipper deepened, for he had most to lose. As Underwood reminded him: ‘On your own head be it.’
Over the next three days, Greig oversaw their signatures with CPH’s London chief, King Watson. The following week began with his English team being toasted by the Anglo-American Sporting Club in London, two pre-season friendly matches against Kent at Hove and a dash to Quaglino’s on Wednesday, 20 April, to introduce Knott to the dinner presenting the keeper with the Walter Lawrence Trophy for the fastest century of the 1976 season.
Only there did Greig’s facade slip. After enthusing to Swanton at length of the Indian tour, Greig invited the sage to stay with him in Brighton. ‘Something big for the players’ was in the wind, and Greig would like to explain aspects of it.
But Greig was swallowed by the English season proper two days later and the invitation was never formalised. ‘It would be nice to go and do all these things in a more palatable fashion,’ Greig says today. ‘But things don’t happen that way. Opportunities arise and you take them.’
Opportunities taken by thirteen of its seventeen members, the Australian team was finally in the air. Cricketers had kept coming right to the last moment.
Having skipped cricket to swot for Adelaide College physical education exams just five months before, David Hookes had left the Centenary Test as a student prince. His five centuries in three Sheffield Shield games and boyish good looks were fit for front pages and centrefolds.
Among callers in the next fortnight were the television variety hosts Ernie Sigley and Don Lane offering their management skills, and Hookes turned to his South Australian mentor Ian Chappell for advice. Chappell had a ready answer: have a yarn with John Cornell first.
With Hookes planning a trip to Newcastle for a demonstration game, he arranged to meet Cornell at his Neutral Bay home on the Thursday before Easter, 7 April. As they paced bayside walking tracks, Hookes was filled in. The best players were already involved,’ Hookes recalls. ‘And as far as losing my place in the Test team was concerned, John intimated there was a chance I could do both if the board acted accordingly.’
There was added inducement: he would be advanced two-thirds, rather than one-half, of his first-year fee when he signed so he could bring forward plans to marry his fiancee Roxanne Hewitt, a psychology graduate. Hookes joined on Easter Tuesday and, granting an interview to Women’s Weekly, remarked: There’s a lot of luck in this game, and you take it when you can.’
Robertson returned from Kingston with a fortnight to lasso the Australian team. The selectors had scattered a few surprises in the Ashes party named as an epilogue to the Centenary Test, of whom ten had not previously toured England.
Some were pleasant. With unflagging self-belief, Jeff Thomson had surged through a fitness test. The constitution and spirit of his boyhood Bankstown friend Len Pascoe had also brought him to notice. Robertson wanted both.
The exclusions were noteworthy, too. The left-handed opener Alan Turner, in the country’s best XI for fifteen Tests before the Centenary Test, found he was now excluded from its best seventeen. And Gary Gilmour, having left Melbourne apparently assured of his tour berth, was also stuck wintering in Australia.
He’d limped through the season with a bone injury incorrectly diagnosed as an achilles strain, but been relaxed by the poker faces of selectors in the dressing-room after the Centenary Test. Until, that is, he was driving across Sydney Harbour Bridge on the way back to Newcastle that evening. ‘I turned on the radio and they were reading out the Australian team,’ he recalls. ‘And I wasn’t in it. I’d been in the team for the whole summer, played all the Tests, had been speaking to the selectors two hours before but they hadn’t said a word.’
Robertson had both short-listed, and ultimately passed over only four of the seventeen tourists: the doubted Gary Cosier, the junior West Australian batsmen Kim Hughes and Craig Serjeant, and the veteran Queensland medium pacer Geoff Dymock preferred to Gilmour.
Cornell flew to Melbourne on Easter Monday, reuniting with Rod Marsh at the MCG where the keeper joined the colours while watching a Hawthorn-Richmond football match. Robertson then visited the Greensborough home of Marsh’s shadow for the English tour, Victorian captain Richie Robinson, leaving him twenty-four hours in which to decide if he would perform the same function for JP Sport.
‘When he told me the players who had been signed, I realised that, if there was a ban and I stayed where I was, I’d probably be one of the first offered the Australian captaincy,’ Robinson says. ‘But I weighed it up. So many of my contemporaries were involved, obviously believed it was the right thing to do and important for cricket, that I decided I’d pass that opportunity up.’
Robinson signed the same day as Robertson visited the Spotswood residence of his twenty-two-year-old state teammate Ray Bright. The left-arm spinner, yet to play a Test, had been on the periphery of the Australian side since 1974. ‘I rang Ian Chappell,’ Bright recalls. ‘And basically what he said was good enough for me.’
On Tuesday 19 April 1977 the pair met Max Walker at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport for the hop to Sydney, where they were to assemble with the rest of the Australian players and where Robertson was obtaining the signatures of Thomson and Pascoe.
Robertson then sought Gilmour. The aggrieved all-rounder signed with alacrity when chased down at the Newcastle Leagues Club. His only strike was Turner, invidiously employed as a senior accountant at Benson and Hedges, and having thoughts of leaving cricket altogether anyway.
Australian manager Len Maddocks was cheerfully ignorant as he addressed a last supper in Sydney: thirteen of his retinue would be revealed once in England to have signed contracts with another boss. ‘I’m going to England to have a good time,’ he told them. ‘And I hope you blokes are, too.’
Craig Serjeant was momentarily perplexed. ‘Have you signed?’ Richie Robinson had muttered as the pair changed for practice at Lord’s. Signed what?
‘I beg your pardon?’ Serjeant replied. It didn’t matter, the Victorian said. Only vaguely aware who was in their camp when they arrived in London, the Australians seethed with secrets. ‘We were a vulnerable group of part-time cricketers to whom someone had offered money,’ Kerry O’Keeffe reflects. ‘For many of us that was a new experience.’
David Hookes knew at least that Cosier had not been approached, and joined a little half-heartedly in birthday celebrations for his Adelaide friend on 25 April. Two days later the pair were playing their first innings on English soil at the traditional one-day frolic against the Duchess of Norfolk’s XI by Arundel castle.
A relaxed Greg Chappell had shaken hands with Tony Greig before another toss, and watched his young batsman hint at the talent of which he’d spoken glowingly on arrival. Serjeant made a firm fist of opening with 65, Hughes compiled a crisp 28, and 6000 spectators left the sylvan scene with a few new names to ponder.
But there was ample time in damp pavilions thereafter as a semipermanent squall trailed the visitors. One chilly day’s play was possible in the team’s opening first-class fixture against Surrey at The Oval, five fragmented hours against Kent at Canterbury.
Had there been less chance of introspection, and less opportunity for journalists to mingle among players, the Packer story might have taken a different turn. Its organisation might then have been seen as a commercial convenience, rather than as an act of espionage. As it was, Len Maddocks enjoyed a dinner party at Jim Swanton’s Canterbury home with Chappell, Marsh and Walker little knowing the storm that would break about him two days later.
Chappell and Greig tossed at Hove for Australia’s game against Sussex on Saturday, 7 May 1977, more as a ritual than a preparation. Hovering rain would banish players within an hour.
At least the tourists knew they would be spared the shabby confines of the Dudley Hotel that evening: Greig planned to repay Australian hospitality by throwing an elaborate party for the whole touring entourage, players and press, in a marquee at his new Brighton home. He’d even imported Foster’s Lager for the occasion.
For the journalists Peter McFarline and Alan Shiell, who were pooling their intelligence after detecting whispers of some autonomous cricket carnival during the Australian summer, rain was convenient. They knew that English journalists had scented the same story and were satisfied with their information. Pro forma denial from Greg Chappell was sought and furnished. ‘You can say this,’ he told them. ‘It sounds like an interesting proposition. I’d like to know more about it before committing myself.’
The pair headed for the Dudley to file the details that they had for the Age and the Australian respectively. When McFarline told Snow he was about to publish, Greig’s party became a party line. He called Packer. He called Hayter. He called his World team members, who were scattered round the counties for John Player League games on the Sunday. Greig himself was leading Sussex against Yorkshire, although he tracked down Hayter beforehand to dictate a statement. ‘There is a massive cricket project involving most of the world’s top players due to commence in Australia this winter,’ it read. ‘I am part of it along with a number of English players. Full details and implications of the scheme will be officially announced in Australia later this week.’
A piquant duel was played out at Hove as journalists pieced together what they could from Greig’s statement and their own prior intelligences. The Sunday fare of Sussex versus Yorkshire became Greig contra Geoff Boycott. After Boycott had played an andantino 36 in 24 overs with 29 singles, Greig’s allegro 50 from 36 balls won the match with an over spare. And as they passed in the carpark later, Greig advised the Yorkshireman to beware an interesting story in the next day’s papers.
The Australian stories were just hitting the streets, sketchy but startling. McFarline’s ‘greatest cricket show on earth’, naming two-thirds of signatories, carried the forecast of an unnamed English player that Packer’s plan would be ‘the biggest explosion in cricket since W. G. Grace’. McFarline’s only mistake was his choice of season: in Melbourne, Collingwood Football Club’s Saturday victory was the big story on Monday 9 May, and the Age secreted his twenty-three terse paragraphs on an inside back page of the sports section while it panted: ‘Once again Collingwood is a great side, and coach Tom Hafey has told his players there are bigger and better things to come.’
Reading Shiell’s front-page story in the Australian in Adelaide, Ian Chappell called a friend, car-dealer Graham Ferrett. ‘Let’s get out of town,’ he said. ‘Something big’s about to blow. I’ll explain later.’ In a country pub over a counter lunch, Ferrett was admitted to the circle whose story was about to girdle the cricket globe.
Marsh, Walker and Malone alone avoided the helter-skelter. Greg Chappell had cleared them to honour invitations to the Amsterdam Cricket Club. But when Marsh rang his Perth home for Mother’s Day, his wife’s warning that news was oozing from the Australian media sent the wicket-keeper out early the following morning to gather the English papers.
In a thorough and well-informed story of the ‘dogs of cricket’ by the Daily Mail’s Ian Wooldridge, the trio finally saw the full relief. ‘Rod and I had played Shield with each other and practised together all this time and we’d never mentioned it,’ says Malone. ‘And Max hadn’t said a word. It was a case of each looking at the other one and saying “So, you are in”.’