Gary Cosier headed instinctively for the bar. If any of the team were about on the Sunday, 8 May, the odds were they’d be propping up the Dudley’s run-down tavern.
But only Len Maddocks, tour treasurer Norm McMahon and the familiar face of ABC broadcaster Alan McGilvray were in evidence. Len was clearly fretful, Norm unusually self-absorbed, and McGilvray looked like he’d lost his best friend. As Cosier watched, the agitated manager ran to answer a phone call. ‘Where are the boys?’ Cosier asked, wondering if he’d missed something.
That he’d missed much he discovered when he found the team clustered round two tables in the Dudley’s restaurant. Eyes followed him as he crossed the room to join his mate Hookes. ‘What’s going on here?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No idea.’
Hookes explained: over the past couple of months, thirteen of them had signed secretly with someone called Kerry Packer for a series in Australia against a World team. Hookes saw Cosier’s hurt. Three weeks earlier they’d flown side-by-side from Adelaide to Sydney and Hookes had not said a word. ‘I didn’t know whether you were in or not,’ Hookes told him. ‘We weren’t allowed to tell anybody. None of us knew who’d been invited and who hadn’t.’
So what was happening now? ‘We don’t know,’ Hookes replied. ‘We don’t know whether we’re going to be allowed to continue the tour or whether we can play when we get home or what.’
As word spread, in fact, people seemed to know less. Details of the ‘televised Tests’ were scarce. Newspapers trawled files for information on Packer, Kerry, as opposed to Packer, Sir Frank.
A Monday press conference Packer and Cornell called at Consolidated Press proved more declaration of intent than detailed statement. At least Packer seemed quotable. ‘We’ll do all we can to co-operate with the cricket board,’ he told the press. ‘And, if they co-operate with us, there is no reason why Test cricket as it is now will be affected. But, if they don’t co-operate, they’ll walk straight into a meat mangier.’
Packer apologised for not informing Parish in advance. A courier carrying the Benaud letter had been marooned by striking Sydney air-traffic controllers, and would not arrive in Melbourne until evening. The Age delivered to his home in Lorene Court, Toorak, was Parish’s sole intelligence as he and Australian Cricket Board secretary Barnes briefed Maddocks at the Dudley in Brighton. Defectors must know they were out of bounds: the ACB was Australian cricket’s promoter and would act against enemy aliens. Otherwise, silence was to be observed. Maddocks obediently called an Australian huddle in the Hove dressing-room to press the point.
Trapped between players, administrators, press and a bare-knuckled businessman, the manager was particularly pained by Ian Chappell’s involvement. Maddocks had helped entice the former Australian captain to his North Melbourne club for the 1976–77 summer. Though Chappell had hinted at a ‘big cricket’ comeback in 1977–78, he’d never mentioned captaincy of an outlaw XI.
No writer caught the moment better than John Arlott in the Guardian. His shorthand for Packer’s proposal—the ‘circus’—quickly became common coinage. ‘Circus cannot match Test,’ he wrote on Monday, 9 May. ‘It is virtually certain that if a circus scheme were launched in competition with Test cricket, it would fail. The English cricketing establishment could almost certainly destroy any such threat to the international game.’
Arlott had empirical support for his view that Australians would rally to boycott Packer’s games: Rest of the World series in lieu of South African Tests in England and Australia had been poor pullers.
They have been raised on the age-old hostility of Australia versus England, the more recent spectacular series with the West Indies, and some exhilarating matches with Pakistan. If the members of the international teams were banned from both domestic and representative cricket in their own countries, they would rapidly become meaningless as performers.
Arlott, moreover, could not be dismissed as a blimp. As president of England’s Cricketers’ Association, he was ‘the player’s choice’.
The Australian Eric Beecher echoed Arlott in Cricketer Annual: ‘Do they honestly believe such a trumped-up exhibition will interest cricket watchers … fattened on a diet of real Test matches?’ He deplored that ‘a band of money-hungry mercenaries’ and ‘shrewd commercial manipulators’ were ‘holding the game to ransom’.
Greig’s ‘mercenaries’ met varying receptions. Kent chairman Walter Brice told Knott, Asif and Underwood at Canterbury that he could not interfere in their winter engagements. When Test and County Cricket Board chairman Doug Insole and secretary Donald Carr sought out Knott and Underwood as Kent played Middlesex at Lord’s on Wednesday 11 May, they seemed conciliatory. They wanted to know more about Packer. ‘Does he need a manager?’ Insole asked.
Procter, however, found Gloucestershire’s Tony Brown terse: he could play for Mr Packer if he wanted, but probably wouldn’t for the county if he did so. And press hovered round Greig at Hove, even after the Australians left for Southhampton, like the clouds that doused Sussex’s next match against Lancashire.
His Wednesday press conference upstairs in the adjacent Sussex Cricketer hotel was strained. Greig tried to remain buoyant amid questions of growing hostility. This summer is in the hands of Lord’s,’ he said. ‘In the winter it is in the hands of a possible compromise between Lord’s and Packer. I will myself do anything possible to get them talking.’ Reporters were still waiting when England’s captain returned from answering Carr’s statutory Lord’s summons next day. ‘A friendly chat,’ he reported lightly. ‘The topic of the England captaincy was touched upon but not in any great depth.’
No one, Greig could tell, was convinced: ‘For the first time in my life I experienced the odd sensation of knowing that many of my listeners did not believe a word I was saying … When I insisted that cricket would benefit in the long-term, they stared and muttered as if I was a creature from another planet.’
As Carr and Insole reported to English cricket’s superincumbent UK Cricket Council on the Black Friday afternoon, Henry Blofeld of the Guardian and Ted Dexter of the Sunday Mirror found Greig sheltering from the rain and chain-smoking in the Hove captain’s room.
‘What do you think they’ll do?’ Greig asked.
‘I think you’ll lose the captaincy,’ replied Dexter. ‘But I expect they’ll let you go on playing.’
‘Well,’ said Greig, ‘I knew that might happen when I went into this.’
UKCC chairman Freddie Brown donned the black cap when its meeting dissolved at 5.30pm, saying that Greig had ‘inevitably impaired the trust’ vested in him by acting as Packer’s agent. Carr called Greig with a heavy heart: he had promoted the Testless youngster for the 1971–72 World tour of Australia, and managed Greig’s first English tour to India and Pakistan the following year.
A cosy Ashes summer had taken a week to shatter, and Greig’s nominal successor, vice-captain Mike Brearley, was shaken by a journalist alerting him to the sacking. ‘I don’t want the job,’ he thought. ‘I just want to play. Should they have sacked Tony?’
Although the thirty-five-year-old Cambridge scholar had led Middlesex to a shared County Championship crown and played two Tests in 1976, he owed his sudden suitability predominantly to his predecessor … with a little help from Geoff Boycott.
When the prodigal Yorkshireman scorned an offer of the vice-captaincy for England’s Indian tour, Greig had proposed Brearley. ‘I liked Brearley and I liked the way he operated with me,’ says Greig. ‘I’d give him a problem and he’d go away and think about it, and always come back with something practical. I wouldn’t have taken him to the West Indies, because he wasn’t really a great player of fast bowling. But he had good footwork and played the spinners well in county cricket, so you could count on him for a few runs as well.’
Premature grey hairs and a degree in moral philosophy invested Brearley with a cerebral air, and he collected himself over the next fortnight as the scarcity of alternatives underscored the logic of his succession. Carr finally made the appointment formal on 25 May 1977, though Brearley did not feel inclined to speak of his ‘reign’.
Packer’s Bulletin had unprecedented circulation as it hit Australian newsstands that week. No administrator was fully informed without Trevor Kennedy’s ‘The Great Cricket Story: The Inside Facts’.
It was Lord’s first measure of the men rapidly spoiling their season, and of their vision. Kerry Packer and the ‘shrewd little hardhead’ John Cornell emerged as unblinking revolutionaries. ‘Probably the most imaginative piece of sports promotion ever devised,’ Kennedy began. ‘A staggering coup … expected to provide the greatest boost Australian cricket has ever received …’
The revelation that temptations had been dangled and accepted at the Centenary Test was like discovery of a marital infidelity, and Kennedy’s implication that authorities were bereft of imagination and did nothing to ‘boost’ the game they ran was galling.
Again, though, it was a small measure. Aside from the players and the will, Packer’s proposal had as yet little substance: there were thirty-five cricketers but no itinerary, a groundsman but no grounds, a vague management structure but no managers, and six months to pull it together. JP Sport remained a $2 shelf company, share capital now divided between CPH’s Television Corporation subsidiary and the Cornell-Robertson-Hogan alliance, designed to ‘act as promoter for a series of cricket matches to be held in Australia and elsewhere’. World Series Cricket Pty Ltd remained a business name registered with the New South Wales Corporate Affairs Commission.
Groundlessness was addressed, fleetingly, when Packer followed up an idea from Michael Winneke, the barrister son of Victorian governor Sir Henry, who had helped Robertson draft contracts during the Centenary Test. Winneke had suggested Packer use the capacious VFL Park football ground in Waverley, twenty-five kilometres out of Melbourne. He knew that the league was struggling to justify the seven-year-old, $42 million arena in its isolated corner of the city. The idea of cocking a snook at the Melbourne Cricket Club would also appeal to it.
VFL boss Allen Aylett was indeed enthusiastic as he welcomed the helicopter disgorging Packer and Cornell at 5.45pm on Tuesday 24 May. It would shortly be light-up time for the ground’s four floodlight towers which, after a stadium tour, illuminated a night football match between Footscray and South Melbourne as the party dined.
It rained, though the VIPs were able from their executive balcony to admire the power of 1000 lux. ‘The lights are so good,’ Aylett quipped, ‘you could even play cricket here at night.’
Packer himself switched on. If the light tower shadows could be eliminated by extra floodlighting, it might work. ‘How much do you want for the ground?’ he asked on the spot.
Aylett had no idea. ‘$250,000?’
‘Sounds fair to me,’ Packer replied.
‘We’d also want a share of the catering and parking,’ Aylett added hastily.
‘No, $250,000 it is,’ Packer replied. ‘That’s what you said.’
The spontaneity left Aylett breathless, and he hastened to stitch the deal up by phone next morning. Packer spent five minutes pondering a three-year ballpark offer of $825,000, but the result was the same. ‘We didn’t really know what VFL Park was worth,’ Aylett wrote, ‘but our take was close to the million mark and … from zero to a million in 12 hours seemed a good deal to me!’ Aylett even picked up a job: official cricketers’ dentist.
Other territorial claims, though, required a full-time manager, preferably someone skilled in promotion, nimble with finance and steeped in cricket. The best candidate Ian Chappell could suggest was thirty-one-year-old Victorian Cricket Association secretary, David Richards. A Monash University economics graduate, Richards had pioneered the VCA’s promotional push with the daring appointment of consultants International Public Relations and more recently made the Centenary Test run like clockwork with ideals he’d picked up on a trip to the United States and United Kingdom in May–June 1976.
Chappell also floated Bill Lawry, now a senior manager at Malleys Whirlpool in Melbourne. In contrast with his hangdog air as a skipper, Lawry had an active promotional mind. He’d been instrumental while in England in 1968 in persuading insurer V & G to become Australia’s first one-day cricket sponsor.
When Richards turned Packer away, though, GTV-9’s David Evans recommended CPH’s radio network boss Vern Stone. The smart, career-conscious Stone had propelled Melbourne’s 3AK to the top of the ratings after coming from Perth’s 6PM in 1973, and was known to have ideas above his stations. At Packer’s Sydney summons, Stone dashed from Perth with a click of the heels.
The job offer of general manager of World Series Cricket, however, tore Stone: he found cricket mystifying. Packer reassured him: he would have the services of a cricket-literate administrative controller in Brian Treasure, a former Perth grade cricketer who had become Michael Edgley’s partner in the city’s Entertainment Centre.
‘Look son,’ Packer said, ‘you’re a young bloke, you’re ambitious, you’ve done a good job. And it suits me that you don’t like cricket. Basically I want someone to look after my money and to get this show on the road, because it’s one hell of a job.’ After an arm-twisting dinner at the Sydney Hilton with Evans and TCN-9’s Sam Chisholm—who stressed the folly of rejecting their boss—Stone agreed.
But the new WSC organisation was still waging phoney war. Packer’s preliminaries were enlarging the threat, not embedding it. Withdrawal remained optional if those television rights came loose. So what about a third team? And a fourth? Could Cornell and Robertson rustle enough Englishmen or West Indians to impersonate England and West Indies XIs? The latter, so used to changing allegiances, were very feasible. And the West Indies Cricket Board of Control had been the authority least hostile in response to WSC.
Robertson contacted Lloyd—then in a Manchester hospital awaiting knee surgery—to ask him for a list of his own preferred sixteen. A bigger WSC meant more Australian and World players, so Ian Chappell and Tony Greig were asked for more names.
It was still, nonetheless, the no-obligation route. Buying more talent committed CPH to no more than paying out a few cheap contracts if the ACB capitulated. In the meantime, the Test nations faced matches without their best players and—however united the front the International Cricket Conference projected—had grounds to fill. Packer was a television man first, a cricket impresario second, if indeed at all.
Five days after watching night football in a ground designed for 80,000, Packer, Comell and Robertson arrived to watch a Sunday of county cricket in a Hove ground that could not hold 10,000. Greig was captaining Sussex against Mike Procter’s Gloucestershire and it was a chance to peruse the merchandise. ‘I’m very excited about cricket and I’ve never seen Procter play before,’ Packer told Blofeld. ‘I hope to see him bat today.’
Although David Frost’s ITV interview program was his one London appointment, Packer hoped to meet the Lord’s elite. ‘Whether you like it or not,’ he said, ‘I have influence given to me by the top players in the game who thought they were getting a raw deal.’
Packer got his first wish—Procter took 4–26, then stroked his team to victory with an unbeaten 29—but not his latter. With detail so scarce, the ICC was merely confused. ‘It was difficult,’ as secretary Jack Bailey wrote, ‘to avoid the temptation of thinking Packer would go away. How could he sustain … worthwhile cricket matches in Australia? It was as if he didn’t understand that ‘authorised cricket’ held the world copyright on the game and its organisation.’
Intelligence on Packer was almost as scant. When it came to Australian benchmarks, there were Rupert Murdoch and Rolf Harris (whose show was screening on BBC-1). The Sunday Times’s reviewer for the Australian edition of the Oxford Dictionary was Sir Les Patterson.
Packer’s inquisitors on The Frost Programme—BBC TV commentator Jim Laker and the Sunday Times columnist and former Sussex captain Robin Marlar—reflected the mixed and muddied feelings. The former was a passionate moderate, friendly with Benaud but distrustful of Greig. The latter was more irascible and known, in writer Don Mosey’s words, as a man of ‘strong and often peculiar views on a number of subjects’. Packer was one, in Marlar’s eyes a self-publicising ‘rich provincial’ with a traitorous South African lackey.
It made great television. Marlar could not contain himself. ‘Our life, of which cricket is a part, is entirely about behaviour,’ he spluttered. Packer’s contrastingly logical responses were leavened with humour that won the applause of a partisan studio audience. Asked whether he would be upset if his ‘managing director’ defected to a rival (as Tony Greig had done as chief of English cricket), Packer saved himself from an answer with a quip: ‘I am my own managing director.’ Marlar, as Sunday Times television columnist Dennis Potter wrote, was left ‘trying to play a straight bat to a raspberry’.
As Lord’s remained inscrutable, Packer flew Lloyd from Manchester to London to scan his West Indian sixteen, sending a liveried limousine to ferry him to the Dorchester Hotel. He also phoned Barry Richards during a match at Guildford for his opinion of Gordon Greenidge, his Hampshire opening partner at Hampshire. As Richards was watching the West Indian make a double-century, it was not hard to be positive.
Greenidge bolted to Park Lane, and his countrymen also signed with zeal. While WSC money provided a decent upper-middle income in Australia, in the West Indies it conferred tycoonhood. At Caribbean rates of exchange, a $A20,000 a year contract was up to forty times the average per capita income. As the West Indian writer Tony Cozier puts it: ‘When you put the fee in front of them, their first reaction would have been: “That’s impossible.” They were being offered the chance to earn in a few seasons what it would have taken them their whole career to earn playing Tests.’
Robertson and Cornell travelled invisibly in England as they hunted the county careerists: batsman Alvin Kallicharran, all-rounders Bernard Julien and Collis King, and the young fast bowlers Wayne Daniel and Joel Garner. Cornell, at Derby to poach Julien, sat unrecognised even as Strop amid a crowd heckling Knott and Underwood. ‘He was quite an important man in the Packer set-up but no one at the ground had any idea who he was,’ Knott recalled. ‘Seen from the player’s box he looked on that day as an unobtrusive spectator.’
To comb the Caribbean, Packer contacted the sporting impresario incarnate, Mark McCormack, who recommended him one of his trustiest IMG aides: Alistair Johnson, the Scottish accountant who ran Arnold Palmer Enterprises. In a week, Johnson rounded up batsmen Lawrence Rowe and Roy Fredericks, spinners David Holford and Albert Padmore, and the team’s indispensable wicket-keeper and senior pro Deryck Murray. The only elusive name was one Packer had not recognised: the uncapped Leeward Islander Jim Allen. Islands were upturned—he was meant to be a bulldozer driver—until he was traced to a Welsh league.
Greig recommended Pakistani Zaheer Abbas as a World squaddy, and he signed at the Dorchester without hesitation. The contract made him ‘whistle’. But, though Greig, Knott and Underwood had been picked ‘on merit’ to play for Brearley in three Prudential oneday games against Australia, potential English recruits were hemmed in daily by talk that Packer men would be frozen from county cricket. Knott was manhandled as he went into bat at Chesterfield by a spectator swearing: ‘How come you’re worth all that money?’
For Dennis Amiss, it was a matter of pride. He had been upset at omission from the original list, thinking: ‘Why haven’t they asked me. Aren’t I good enough?’ With eleven Test hundreds in fifty Tests, he assuredly was. But as Warwickshire’s dressing-room became the country’s fiercest anti-Packer bunker, he would wonder what the miff of the moment had got him into.
The bar of Manchester’s Grand Hotel, Australia’s billet for the first Prudential match on 2 June, emptied at word that Packer’s skirmish with Robin Marlar was on television. Jammed in dressing-rooms by rain, it had been hard to avoid thinking about an employer none had met.
On the field, even the team’s seniors were struggling. Left behind initially to nurse his mending jaw, Rick McCosker’s arrival had been delayed until 15 May by the same strike that had grounded the Benaud letter. The bat seemed foreign as he opened the innings at Bath three days later, as did the sight of two metres of Bajan brawn tossing the new ball from hand to hand.
McCosker’s introduction to Joel Garner lasted five balls, but he would become accustomed to his face. Playing that day as Somerset’s guest on release from a league contract with Littleborough two months after his Test debut, Garner was about to sign a Packer contract.
A fortnight of skinny scores later, McCosker’s early fall at Old Trafford in the Prudential match left Australia 2–2. England passed its puny 169 with ten overs to spare. At Edgbaston, the side folded for just 70. Greg Chappell called an anxious team dinner at the Waldorf before the final game at the Oval on the Bank Holiday Monday, 6 June, although only his century and heavy rain helped Australia to a consolation win.
As Australia headed for Dublin for a game against Ireland hosted by Guinness, however, Chappell vanished. He was still with friends on the Isle of Man when his players, poured onto their Aer Lingus flight back to London and then bussed all night to a Brentwood hotel, slumped sleeplessly against Essex.
With the First Test days away, Chappell’s absence was ill-timed. But it would not be the last time Chappell sought refuge, and his Test selections betrayed his anxiety. The search for experience turned Richie Robinson into opener. The captain himself could not avoid being a bashful number three, for Walters had yet to pass 40 on tour. Thomson similarly had just seven first-class wickets.
In London for the ICC’s emergency meeting at Lord’s on 14 June, Parish and Steele at the budget Westmoreland Hotel in St John’s Wood Road kept a distance from their team at the Waldorf in Aldwych. It was hard for them not to feel let down. Parish remembered Greg Chappell’s pleasure at the Benson and Hedges sponsorship deal. And Lillee had just published his The Art of Fast Bowling, including a cricket philosophy to gratify any official: ‘I know I grumble now and then, but I appreciate that cricket owes me nothing … I realise that I have enjoyed a red-carpet-ride to cloud-nine.’
‘It had left a taste in my mouth,’ Parish recalls. ‘And it was a rather bitter taste. I felt there’d been a certain amount of under-handedness by the players involved,’ Adds Steele: ‘It was a fait accompli as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want to hear explanations. The players hadn’t thought it through.’
After the ICC resolved to issue Packer an invitation on 23 June, administrators then joined crowds magnetised by the Lord’s Test. A satisfactory rubber seemed in the offing. Though McCosker remained luckless and Robinson’s overenthusiastic swinging emphasised the batting’s brittleness, Thomson found fire and Pascoe and Serjeant showed debut promise.
Greg Chappell could finally compare notes with brother Ian, who had arrived as a journalist. Gary Gilmour was covering the game for the Newcastle Sun, while Ross Edwards was leading a package tour. Brian Morelli had made it, breaking his family holiday to check on BBC sport-coverage conventions. And a face in the crowd on the fourth day shared his interest: director John Crilly.
Crilly’s had been a longer, stranger journey than most. He had impressed Cornell as a director on Hogan projects and moved on to produce documentaries on Lillee and Marsh at Perth’s STW-9, but ignored the Packer palaver until Cornell called him a few weeks earlier. ‘You know I said I might be working with you again?’ Cornell had said. ‘I’ve got a job for you I don’t think you’ll be able to resist.’
Cornell had judged him well. After nineteen years directing boxing, football and cricket, Crilly was fascinated by Cornell’s futuristic vision of televised cricket and flew straight to Sydney. The pair kept nightwatch on TCN-9’s BBC telecasts of the first three days of the First Test at Cornell’s Neutral Bay home, deriding the reverent camera work and deadpan commentary.
Cornell foresaw ‘personality’ coverage, from advertisements evoking players as individuals in their natural habitats to audio recordings giving their responses to certain cricket situations (being dropped, scoring a hundred, avoiding a duck, etc). Would Crilly go to England and do it? Ian Chappell and Tony Greig would give him an entree. The rest was up to him.
England was coming back firmly in the match when the jet-jaded Crilly stumbled into the Lord’s press box just before 4pm on Monday, 20 June to ask Ian Chappell for an introduction to Greig. He knew it might be a little difficult. The South African was next in.
Before Crilly knew it, however, Chappell was matter-of-factly leading him through Lord’s catacombs to England’s dressing-room door. Bob Willis politely fetched Greig, who appeared in his pads wearing one batting glove. ‘This is unreal,’ Crilly thought. ‘The dressing-room is the holy of holies, you never speak to a batsman about to go in. Here I am talking to the great Tony Grieg and he’s about to go in to bat.’
They discussed Crilly’s mission and arranged breakfast the next day, but an appeal cut them short. Brearley was out, after adding 132 with Bob Woolmer. ‘Sorry John,’ said Greig. ‘Gotta go now. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’ The now-obligatory hooting followed Greig as he marched out, though Crilly’s arrival may have been a good omen: Greig’s 91 assured England’s fair share of the draw.
Address list in hand, Crilly and an English film crew began their star search. Asif, Mushtaq, Greenidge, Zaheer and Amiss responded for the tape recorder; Andy Roberts was filmed dashing deer-like through a Hampshire forest, Eddie Barlow captured among his pigs in Chesterfield.
The director reunited with Greig nine days later at Hove, where the South African’s Sussex attack was being mauled by Somerset’s Viv Richards. The Australian’s intention had been to film Imran Khan— cooling his heels because of a clearance dispute with his former county, Worcestershire—strolling along Brighton beach. But, when Imran was delayed, Crilly’s crew settled for watching a Richards double-century spangled with six sixes and twenty-one fours.
Their reverie was disturbed finally when Greig strolled coolly to the sightscreen by which they were filming to point out the arriving Imran. Jeers followed as the crowd twigged, and a Sussex official who’d offered free entry charged Crilly £30 as he left.
Packer himself was unmistakeable as he, CPH lieutenants Lynton Taylor and David McNicholl and an uncomfortable-looking Benaud, pulled up at the Grace Gates at Lord’s two days after the First Test for his ICC audience. He’d not been taken by his invitation’s reference to the ICC as the ‘sole promoter of international cricket’, but was determined not to enter as ogre.
Packer was attentive as ICC chairman Tagge Webster methodically listed conditions for sanctioning the series: WSC must be truncated to run as a six-week spectacle under ACB direction so as not to disrupt traditional cricket. Benaud added soothing words. But, with the parties at touching distance after an hour and a half, Packer renewed his ambit claim: exclusive television rights.
Benaud took Packer for a stroll round Lord’s for the next forty minutes as the ICC deliberated. The WICBC was keen, and Steele half-inclined to leave the door ajar. ‘He’d come across reasonably well,’ Steele recalls. ‘And I think Parish and I probably erred in agreeing to go along with some of the things the ICC said. We felt there’d be some people at home who wouldn’t be very happy if we accepted Packer’s offer.’
Webster emphasised, though, that the ICC could not be dictated to. And united they stood. Secretary Jack Bailey fetched Packer from the Long Room, and the Australian was told he could bid for the rights like everybody else when the ABC contract expired. ‘Is that satisfactory to you?’ asked Webster.
‘No sir,’ the Australian said.
‘Then there is nothing further to discuss,’ the ICC man said with finality.
Packer communed with himself as he left, then spat his response at waiting scribes. ‘Had I got those TV rights I was prepared to withdraw from the scene and leave the running of the cricket to the board. I will take no steps now to help anyone. It’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.’
Packer’s parting shot echoed. Critics seized it as proof of special villainy. ‘So much for the protestations that he had come into cricket to improve the lot of the downtrodden first-class cricketer!’ sniped Jim Swanton. ‘His players one and all, not least his truculent spokesman Tony Greig, were seen to be mere pawns in a local commercial dogfight.’ He called on the cricket world to reply as one: ‘And the devil take K. Packer!’
Benaud winced, dashing Taylor off a memo:
Please when you get to Australia start making love not war. The press has been desperately bad from the public relations point of view over that statement and the devil bit. As it is our job to pick up the pieces I’d like to think a more gentle approach could be evolved. With that statement already made, cricket authorities have gained a great deal of sympathy.
But the public relations setback was greatest among Packer’s WSC Australians. Had he really been prepared to walk away? If every man was for himself, were they destined to be the hindmost? ‘There’d been the comfort of thinking that the control boards were going to be approached and that was now gone,’ says Greg Chappell. ‘And I knew there was a fair amount of disquiet among especially the younger players about what they’d actually signed up to do.’ A strong general had always been necessary for a team with ten first-timers in England, but the captain was feeling less and less like one.