When John Crilly finally caught the Australians up on 10 July 1977, they were three days into an Old Trafford Test gone wrong. By the rest day, when he arranged to collect Australian thoughts for the ‘Cornell tapes’, England were 139 ahead with a wicket in hand.
Partaking of a bath of beer and spirits that the director filled in a hotel room, players played cards as they took turns taping. ‘By the time we got through it we were absolutely shit-faced,’ Crilly recalls. A couple of days later, in a bar in Kingston, Jamaica, on the next leg of his journey, he noticed a blackboard carrying the Test score from England. The Australians, Chappell aside, had been brushed aside by Underwood on the fourth day and beaten by nine wickets. Crilly blanched: ‘Was I responsible for that?’
Crilly’s employer certainly wasn’t helping. Packer’s recruiting had recommenced on Test eve when Robertson called Craig Serjeant— quickest of the young Australians coming to terms with English conditions—to ask if he was interested in a contract. When his coach Ken Meuleman in Perth and his parents urged him not to accept, Serjeant asked Robertson to come back if he was still making runs in a year’s time.
It was at Old Trafford, too, that Gary Cosier first remembers silences that his presence provoked from WSC signatories discussing their latest news, and his exclusion from whispered instructions in mixed company like the tour coach. Then on the Test’s first morning, Greg Chappell met an ashen Tony Greig who’d just received a call seeking comment on Packer’s death in a car crash in Sydney. Though he checked with his brother to be sure, Chappell told him it was probably a hoax. ‘Dead?’ grunted Packer, when Greig finally contacted Consolidated Press in Sydney. ‘Well I’m not, am I?’
But, while the 1977 Australians are regarded as the team Packer poisoned, they would have struggled in a sun-kissed summer with a favouring wind. Generational problems in the team had been some time coming. The team photo is suggestive. The nine players in the back row had eighteen Tests between them. Among the team’s nominal seniors in the front row, only the captain and vice-captain Chappell and Marsh were genuinely risk-averse selections: Walters had never succeeded in England, McCosker’s jaw might not have healed, Thomson was a medical miracle, and none of Walker, O’Keeffe or Davis had been first-choice players a year earlier. Premature Australian retirements in the preceding two years had divided the team before Packer’s intercession. As Ian Davis remembers: ‘There was literally no middle age in that side. You had me and Hookesy, and Serj and Kim Hughes in our early twenties, and then all these other guys round thirty. Unless you were a very strong personality, you were just in awe of them.’
Kerry O’Keeffe felt the nexus give way:
The band of experienced players played in accordance with their own unique overview of the game and couldn’t really relate to young struggling players. Kim Hughes in particular was yearning for an experienced player to take him aside and talk him through every shot, and that wasn’t the nature of Chappell, Walters and Marsh. They couldn’t see the gripe. If you’re getting caught at long on for 94 regularly then you should be able to suss out yourself that there are easier ways to reach 100. So there was a shortcoming among the senior players, but also a naivety among the youngsters.
Greg Chappell was an apprentice captain, still fumbling with his tools, and unused to failure. Arriving for the National Times, Adrian McGregor wrote of Chappell’s ‘altered state’:
As courteous as ever, but with an air of having jammed his finger in the dyke … Yet sitting with younger players it was clear they were undergoing a crisis of confidence, confused at being led by Greg into an apparent dead-end.
Greg had begun a sheepdog role, nipping at their heels. He maintained this role even at parties, shepherding players round arguments, calling for music if the action became too boisterous. I could see how the schoolmasterly metaphor came about.
The captain pined for the do-it-yourself ethos of his brother’s time: cricketers who didn’t need to be told. Richie Robinson’s unsuccessful selection as opener at Lord’s, for instance, hinged less on his suitability than on his captaincy of Victoria, previous English tour and the fact that ‘if he was asked to open the bowling he would jump at the chance’.
As his virtuoso skill proved insufficient to inspire, Chappell withdrew. The senior players closed ranks round him, instinctively protective but inadvertently widening their distance from the ranks. Everyone felt aggrieved, nobody felt responsible, individual isolation was universal. Cosier recalls:
It got to the stage, where you only saw the senior players on the field. I only wanted to talk to someone about the way things were going on tour—not even about my own situation, that was between me and the selectors—but there was no bastard around to talk about it to. Greg just disappeared. Rod, who’s a magnificent communicator, wasn’t really round much. So it ended up that poor old Doug Walters tended to cop the lot.
Because everyone seemed to represent a faction, no criticism was trusted as objective. Maddocks, as the obvious establishmentarian, could do no right and his flagging organisation sapped morale. ‘Len Maddocks just lost interest in us,’ Davis recalls. ‘His organisation got worse and worse. His attitude was: “You let me down, you’ve been disloyal, you’ve walked out on the board”.’
Amid the mayhem, Craig Serjeant arrived at the 20 July tour match at Edgbaston unaware that he was opening. In his five minutes notice, he learned that his kit had been left at the hotel. Spectators watched as McCosker proceeded to the centre alone as Serjeant frantically borrowed equipment before running out still tying his pads. The breathless duck that followed was almost predestined. Australia next day took the field with ten men, Maddocks having freed reserves Dymock and Malone to attend a Rohan Kanhai benefit breakfast. Bob Willis’ brother David, a club wicket-keeper, had to make a cameo appearance as substitute.
Rumours spread, after the unexpected arrival of Jeff Thomson’s manager David Lord and lawyer Frank Gardiner, of at least one of the young signatories jumping ship. Robertson called Chappell in Birmingham to obtain what was an unauthorised statement of solidarity. Lillee began telephoning regularly with words of encouragement and unity.
The estrangement of the team’s leaders showed when Pascoe led discussion at a 22 July meeting at Leicester, urging elders to a more motivated approach in tour games. Marsh replied that a few of the young players should try to motivate themselves a bit more. As the hapless Maddocks ventured the uncontroversial view that everyone was a little to blame for the team’s dilemma, even Greg Chappell, Marsh immediately threatened to flatten the captain’s first critic.
Charges that the Australian team was picked along Packer lines were levelled at tour selectors when Serjeant’s omission for Robinson for the Third Test at Trent Bridge four days later eliminated its last ‘non-rebel’. Chappell burst into Marsh’s room at Nottingham’s Albany Hotel with a hail of expletives. ‘You know what those bastards have written about us now?’ the captain spat. They reckon we’ve gone and picked a team of Packer players. It just never even occurred to me.’
This time Marsh was a pacifier: ‘Well I was going to say something when we picked Richie. Someone was always going to say that.’
Chappell’s rage, ironically, reassured Cosier. He was an accidental eavesdropper, lying on Marsh’s bed but unseen round the corner, as he collaborated writing team ditties. No, he felt, Packer wasn’t the root of the problem. If only it had been that simple.
The name Packer could not, however, be erased from newspaper front pages. On Wednesday, 27 July, the day before the Trent Bridge Test, the Australians passed papers round the Albany plastered with their mug shots. ‘Banned!’ and ‘They Face Axe!’ screamed the banners.
Reports were of an International Cricket Conference ultimatum issued the previous evening at Lord’s: WSC players would be barred from all first-class and Test cricket if they did not shred their contracts before 1 October 1977. Though the Test and County Cricket Board’s Doug Insole and Donald Carr had received Queen’s Counsel’s advice that enforcement would be legally difficult, the counties were passionate. Glamorgan’s Ossie Wheatley went into the TCCB minute book expressing the view: ‘Our duty is to drive this wedge of uncertainty into the players’ mind.’ Insole echoed: ‘War situation. We must make sure this thing does not get off the ground.’
The ICC was not as united as it appeared. Jeff Stollmeyer and Allan Rae of the West Indies Cricket Board of Control had received a Churchillian admonition from chairman Webster for their dissent: ‘Wars are not won by appeasement.’ When the view was reiterated over dinner by the Australian Cricket Board’s Tim Caldwell and the New Zealand Cricket Council’s Walter Hadlee, the pair had accepted the need for at least the appearance of unanimity. Establishment lobbyists at Nottingham targeted Thomson, Hookes and Davis.
Lord and Gardiner had arrived with gloomy news for their client: liquidators had been appointed to the two Allsports sporting goods stores in Brisbane in which, seven months earlier, Thomson had invested his 4IP cash with brother Greg and friend Ashley Colbert. Creditors were chasing $30,000. But, by signing with Packer, Thomson had jeopardised his ten-year radio contract. He couldn’t do both, and Gardiner harped on WSC’s uncertainties.
Thomson accepted the bald choice, and visited Chappell after the team dinner to say he was probably going to pull out. Half an hour later the captain’s phone was ringing with requests for comment, and he asked the Albany switchboard to stop calls to his room at midnight. With the Third Test starting next day, he didn’t care if Packer called.
Lord acclaimed the withdrawal. ‘This will be the beginning of an exodus from the Packer circus,’ he said. ‘The players themselves have just followed each other like sheep without thinking about it. But suddenly they have had an attack of brains.’
Thomson was encircled by reporters on 28 July as he confirmed: ‘I’m tearing up my contract. I was with a bunch of lads at the time and it seemed OK.’ His appearance at the crease just before tea was greeted by an ovation, but the capacity crowd of 22,000 could afford to be charitable: Australia, having batted encouragingly on a blameless pitch, had lost 7–54 in the afternoon session.
Adelaide businessmen were sought to contribute to a war-chest for Hookes’ retrieval, while Davis took careful stock of a meeting with Tim Caldwell, whom he knew from the Northern Districts grade club he’d joined as a Nowra teenager at Bankstown. ‘We’re only interested in you young blokes, you and Hookes,’ Caldwell said. ‘If things work out for you, you could be Australian captain in a few years’ time.’
‘Shit,’ the young opener thought. ‘Maybe he’s right.’ He’d never discussed the decision over with anyone, not even his parents, and now his first-class career might be ending at twenty-four. Davis, Walters, O’Keeffe and Pascoe contacted their former Sheffield Shield teammate Mick Hill, now a Newcastle lawyer, who was then in England on an Old Collegians’ tour. Could he come to the Albany and have a look at their contracts?
Hill arrived, and took Doug Walters’ contract to an Australian silk on sabbatical at Cambridge for an opinion on the players’ legal bondage. There might just be a way out. But tactics were becoming more important than torts. When as a friendly gesture Hill confidentially passed Gardiner a copy of the contract it appeared the following day on the front page of the Daily Mail. Hill squirmed as a mole was suspected. ‘I think at that stage the establishment had only seen extracts of the contract, not a whole one,’ Hill recalls. ‘I was shitting myself.’
As its reception for Thomson showed, the Trent Bridge crowd was making instant heroes. None outshone Geoff Boycott. His three years of Test self-exile were forgiven the moment he reappeared in his dark blue cap, and forgotten completely when he marked his return with a century.
McCosker is haunted by the reprieve he granted Boycott at slip when the Yorkshireman was 20, going on 107. ‘I still have nightmares about it,’ he says. So fallible was Australia’s catching that Chappell thought it almost unfair: ‘I said to Rod Marsh during Saturday’s play that it seemed we were being paid back for the previous five years when everything that had gone in the air had been plucked safely out of it.’
Australia’s decline was charted alongside the establishment ascent. Business rallied round a London-based cleaning business entrepreneur and former umpire, David Evans, who spoke of a corporate pool to pay Test bonuses to loyal English players.
Lord failed to woo Len Pascoe. Though Test cricket was a dream realised for the fast bowler, the suggestion that he would naturally want to follow his Bankstown pal Thomson felt vaguely insulting. But Lord was widening his net. At lunch on the third day, he reappeared in the press box to announce he’d rescued West Indian Alvin Kallicharran from Packer’s clutches with a 4IP offer to come to Queensland. Kallicharran explained his decision to preserve a county career at Warwickshire as ‘playing safe’.
Which was something the Australians seemed incapable of doing in their second innings, the long-suffering McCosker excepted as he mirrored Boycott’s 107. And journalists could hardly wait for England’s second win three overs after tea on 2 August. Kerry Packer was back in town.
Tony Greig beat most of them to the Dorchester, where Packer was headquartered with John Cornell and Lynton Taylor in a suite already crawling with lawyers studying the ICC ban.
Packer had anticipated the challenge. At a crucial meeting in Sydney with Cornell, Robertson, Vern Stone and Brian Treasure on 21 July he had resolved—against Benaud’s advice—to shortcircuit any ban by scheduling their ‘Super Tests’ on the same days as the Tests in different cities. The players would not be free for Test selection whatever the ICC’s course.
It was a defiant strategy, and a perilous one. Packer had already stuck his neck out with crowd forecasts of 15,000 a day. Coinciding with a true blue Test, WSC could look pretty drab on the grounds that Stone was now negotiating to rent.
But the ICC’s self-appointment as cricket’s ‘sole promoter’ could not go unchallenged, and barring signatories from first-class cricket appeared an unenforceable restraint of trade. Lord had also to be stopped. CPH, it was decided, would back Greig, Snow and Procter in a High Court challenge to the ICC.
Procter took Greig’s call in a Bristol restaurant, and pulled into Park Lane just after midnight. Snow arrived from Brighton in time for breakfast with Packer the following morning. With a phalanx of lawyers, they extracted an interim injunction against the ban and against Lord’s infiltrations.
Packer was still simmering. He hit the phone to Kallicharran, threatening him with a breach of contract suit. Defectors? He’d leave them ‘barefoot and bankrupt’. Even Cornell fell out momentarily with the CPH boss, feeling ‘shitty as hell’ at being ordered by an ‘absolutely raving’ Packer to be in the lobby of the Dorchester in fifteen minutes. Cornell decided to take forty. As he told Chris Forsyth, however, the protest was mute because Packer took longer. ‘He didn’t arrive for some two hours,’ Cornell lamented. ‘He’d got caught up in something else.’
Women’s Weekly’s editor, Ita Buttrose, recalled perhaps the only person to placate Packer was the Savoy Grill maitre’d. Fielding Packer’s complaint one evening that his Krug was too warm, the waiter remarked: ‘You look familiar, sir. Would your name be Packer? Ah, I remember your father always liked the champagne chilled.’
Australian fuses were also short on a tortuous bus journey to Sunderland after the team’s Trent Bridge loss. Walters was to lead them against Minor Counties—with Chappell, Marsh and Thomson mourning in private—but young players bailed him up in the bar that evening. Who was in charge? Greg and Rod? Doug? The board? Packer? And how come Ian Chappell was apparently welcome to hitch a lift on the coach when he chose?
Walters took it on the chin, where he bore stitches two days later from a rising delivery that hospitalised him. O’Keeffe became Australia’s fourth captain on the trip with the side reduced to a dejected dozen that included Walker as a hobbling substitute despite a cortisone injection in the knee. Minor Counties showed no more mercy than England and won the game after two declarations.
Arriving in Leeds on 10 August for the Fourth Test, Brearley had some sympathy for the Australians. As victories had brought his confidence into line with his competence, he had been an anxious conciliator. He would not hear of tit-for-tat reprisals. Before his team’s pre-match dinner at the Dragonara Hotel, for instance, he told David Evans he wanted any Test bonus organised paid to Greig, Knott and Underwood.
But England’s captain feared a last Australian hurrah, and wrote: ‘I am sure Chappell and his side set out, like any self-respecting team, saying, in effect, “if this is our last fling, let’s show them”.’ And Brearley’s team were determined to prosecute. ‘None of us felt sorry for Greg Chappell’s side,’ wrote Bob Willis. They were outclassed in every department, and it was good to be able to grind them down in the same way that they had played in previous years.’
Boycott liked no mission more in front of his home crowd than eternal vigilance. He was set on becoming the first man to achieve his 100th first-class century in a Test, and the on-driven boundary with which he reached it an hour after tea on the first day virtually retrieved the Ashes at a stroke. As patriots forded the boundary to surround their northern hero, Australians visibly sagged.
Having spent two and a half hours conspiring with Greig, Boycott spent another two and a half with Knott, and he lingered until tea on the second day compiling 191. Low cloud arrived between innings and, as the ball misbehaved, the first five Australians lasted no longer than it had taken Boycott to settle in.
The same familiar poses were struck: Davis inert, Walters chest-on and bat adrift, Hookes anchored in his crooked defensive push. Brearley caught Chappell’s deflated drive at slip. Just 36 runs were added the following morning before Australia followed on, and
Chappell’s stiffer second-innings resistance was undermined by a rogue replacement ball. ‘I remember Greg standing with his hands on his hips,’ Brearley wrote, ‘incredulous that even this should go against him.’ Australia lost Hookes in worsening light, and Walters moments before an offer to go off, and had only Robinson left of its specialist batsmen when rain curtailed the day.
Packer was a disappointed patriot at the Dragonara, comparing notes with Ian Chappell and Greig as the Australians sank without trace, but keeping a discreet distance from his players. He accompanied Ian Chappell on the 14 August rest day to a press Test’ on Harrogate’s pretty ground and revealed rudiments of technique for seven balls in an unconquered two.
Party lines were relaxed as, standing beside the Australian’s Alan Shiell, Packer caught the TCCB’s Peter Lush from David Lord’s bowling. Greg Chappell and Hookes were faces in the crowd. Their first sight of Packer suggested only that he had a good pair of hands.
Ian Chappell exerted bustling authority despite the match’s informality. When voluble locals began heckling Packer from the boundary, the player turned pressman silenced them with a few choice words. He continued in the same vein in the evening when he joined Packer for dinner at the Dragonara with Greig, Guardian gadfly Henry Blofeld and his two female companions. Blofeld recalled Ian Chappell taking his boss to task for tardiness approaching Ashley Mallett: Packer had yet to honour his offer of facing a trial over from the off spinner.
Packer took the chiding in good part, even when Knott and Underwood (also dining in the restaurant) were called on to corroborate. ‘We’ll see,’ Packer said mildly. ‘We’ll see.’
In their separate worlds next day, Ashes victors and vanquished had only Packer as a common influence.
As the Englishmen ducked their own champagne corks on the Headingley balcony, Greig came to Brearley upset. Chief selector Alec Bedser had just asked him whether he would be available to tour Pakistan and New Zealand that winter. Of course he would not, and it sounded to Greig like a threat to exclude him from the final Test team at the Oval. Brearley reassured him: he’d press the selectors to stick with the victorious outfit.
The pair then kept an appointment with Ian Chappell in Packer’s Dragonara suite, to which Brearley had invited David Evans. Steak sandwiches, beer (for the players) and soft drinks (for Packer) were consumed as Evans was awaited. ‘Post-Test languor had set in,’ Brearley wrote. ‘Ties were loosened, and jackets discarded.’ Evans was a pin-striped incongruity as he arrived at around 9pm.
The TCCB was known to be beating the bushes for a Test cricket sponsor in 1978, and Evans and Brearley sounded Packer out: if he agreed to join Evans’ partnership, they would try to persuade Lord’s to drop the ban. Packer seemed willing, floating the figure of £50,000 and offering to withdraw his court action to allow breathing space to settle his differences with the authorities. Evans agreed to take the package to Lord’s. Brearley recalled:
None of us was sanguine. I felt that the TCCB would not be persuaded by an offer of money; the fundamental argument between the two worlds could be summed up in the Australian Board’s horror at Packer’s saying, ‘Come on gentlemen, there’s a little bit of the whore in all of us when it comes to money’. Moreover, the English authorities would feel that a year’s time would be a year within which he (Packer) could strengthen his position.
Brearley was right. Evans was ignored.
The colours in the bar of Australia’s billet at the Post House Hotel showed no sign of blending either. On one side of a table sat Marsh, on the other Gary Cosier and Kim Hughes, with Kerry O’Keeffe uneasily torn between factions. Hughes, who’d been desperate to play in the Test, suspected that Robinson had been preferred because he was close to the team hierarchy. Marsh denied it.
Though O’Keeffe had little time for Hughes, he had shared his bafflement. He’d also sympathised when the twenty-three-year-old moaned at receptions that nobody would offer him advice, although O’Keeffe had been careful to suggest no more than that the youngster beat the system by getting hundreds. Hughes had been out four times between 80 and 100 on the trip.
Hughes pressed his luck. Marsh must at least admit the error of Robinson’s selection at Lord’s, and added: ‘Skull thinks so too.’
‘Hang on, Kim,’ O’Keeffe interjected, ‘I didn’t say that.’
But Marsh glared as he asked angrily: ‘Do you think we were wrong to pick Richie as an opener at Lord’s?’
That was another question, O’Keeffe thought, and he might as well come clean. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘as a matter of fact, I do.’
That tore it. Marsh rose angrily, tears in his eyes. Hughes was one thing—the kid was obviously drunk—but O’Keeffe was another. Marsh stormed from the bar. Kerry O’Keeffe did not play again on tour.
At the Waldorf two days later, a dozen Australians also faced their futures. Were they really rebels? If so, whose was their cause? Few had met the man most English papers called simply a TV magnate’. Now on 17 August 1977, it seemed, there was a chance to meet Mr Kerry Packer. Taxis shuttled from the Waldorf to the Dorchester, where their boss waited to receive them.
Hookes was especially anxious. His phone had run hot with calls from Adelaide as locals rallied to ‘Keep Hookesy At Home’. Blandishments, big dollars and the South Australian captaincy were there if he quit WSC. Cornell busied himself pouring beers before Packer marched in, all bonhomie and business.
His lecture was pointed, and personal. The only thing that’s going to make this thing work is our bond,’ he said. ‘And our loyalty and our commitment to one another. The only way I’ll make money is if I give it everything. The only way you’ll make money is if you do the same.’
After three months in which addresses had been mostly swipes at slackness, it sounded like the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Is there any reason why we shouldn’t play cricket for World Series?’ a prowling Packer asked. ‘Look, if Thomson and Kallicharran want to go that’s fine, we’re not going to chase them. We don’t want guys who don’t wanna play, we’ll let ’em go.’
He began circling the room, eyeing each individual. ‘Is anyone here having second thoughts? Is there anyone who thinks what they’re saying is right, that you’re a “disapproved person”?’ Each player was fronted. ‘Are you in?’ Each assented.
‘He’d lined us up and made it clear,’ Davis remembers. ‘He’d coughed the dough up and he intended us to be loyal. I think it put me back on the path to World Series. After that I just thought: “I’m committed. I’ll stick with it”.’
Malone was excited: ‘Packer’s physical presence was awesome. And because he was so direct and forthright, he came across as a powerful individual whose side you wanted to be on. What he said was really relevant to us: that we were all in it, that we had to make it work to make money out of it. At the end I felt really confident.’
Packer paused before turning to Hookes, who seemed doubtful. ‘Kerry asked him again with a firmer voice,’ Walker recalls. ‘And Hookesy kinda coughed and said he was.’ But Hookes was not swayed: ‘At the end of it, he was still just a businessman to me. Not a billionaire or anything like that. And I was probably going through a stage every twenty-one-year-old goes through of being a bit of a smart arse.’
He returned to the Waldorf to find his friend Cosier disconsolately in the bar. Nobody, of course, had told Cosier, Serjeant, Hughes and Dymock of the meeting. Coming downstairs they’d met Maddocks wondering: Where are the boys?’
‘It wasn’t that the meeting was happening,’ Cosier recalls. What disappointed me was that nobody said to us: ‘We’ve got this meeting down the road to go to. Sorry you can’t come, but we’ll meet you in the bar afterwards”. It wasn’t the fact that we were in the bar. The real hard part was that they weren’t in the bar with us.’ But this was a team that had never truly been united.
The Oval, England’s usual final Test venue, is accustomed to farewells. Sir Donald Bradman denied in 1948 that its salute had anything to do with Test cricket’s most mythologised duck. Applause as Greg Chappell embarked on his uncertain future was equally genuine, but no one could quite decide if Tony Greig, Alan Knott and Derek Underwood were taking genuine curtain calls. The crowd hissed Greig regardless.
As teammates at the Clarendon Court Hotel were aware, Greig was still very much in Mr Packer’s pay. Just before the pre-Test dinner on 24 August he invited Bob Woolmer and Bob Willis to his room for a nightcap afterwards. The subject was obvious.
Greig had asked Knott to join him as an advocate but, joining them at 11.30pm, Woolmer was already sympathetic. From membership of a fervent anti-Packer faction on Kent’s team bus in mid-season, Woolmer had come around. He recalled past injustices at the Test selection table, like omission at Headingley two years earlier, apparently to accommodate a token Yorkshireman.
‘You know what we’re doing,’ Greig stated simply.
‘Yes,’ said Woolmer. ‘I’m right behind you.’
In principle anyway. Despite centuries in three consecutive Ashes Tests, Woolmer was unsure he fitted the ‘top bracket’. TCCB Test payments also seemed about to surge from their £210: Evans was broking a £1000-a-Test deal for players with Cornhill Insurance not unlike Australia’s Benson and Hedges underwriting.
Greig urged Woolmer to think of other cricketers. Woolmer’s defection would help the fair pay fight. ‘I thought you were all for it,’ Greig said disappointedly. Woolmer said he was. It was whether it was all for him.
Woolmer had barely left to consider his position when Willis arrived. The ritual was repeated for the Warwickshire fast bowler, still relishing his best Test summer, and ended the same way. Derek Randall had already been privately courted. All reported to Brearley the following morning, Woolmer surest he would follow.
Although the Australians fared better at The Oval, their tour came full circle in a damp draw. Some of the Australians made the best of what might be their last Test. Hookes sparkled during his 85. Debutant Mick Malone was a medium-pace metronome for 47 overs at the Vauxhall end while claiming 5–63. But they were passionless pleasures. ‘Greg just kept throwing it to me,’ says Malone.
Others were merely glad to see the end. Serjeant, again a reluctant opener, approached the wicket uncertain whether to take strike to Willis. ‘Might as well get it over with,’ he thought. He did not last the over.
English players adjusted themselves to divergent winters: the TCCB crowd were destined to tour Pakistan and New Zealand under Mike Brearley, Underwood, Knott and Amiss bound for Australia under Greig. As they parted at The Oval, Underwood told John Lever to give his regards to Hyderabad’s insanitary Sainjees Hotel, then shared a cab with Ian Chappell. ‘Guess I’ll be seeing you in Australia,’ he said, before thinking of Chappell’s willingness and success in sweeping him. ‘You and that bloody broom.’ With Knott, Woolmer and Greig, the spinner had headed for a county match: the first hat-trick of his career at Hove on 31 August included Imran and Snow and was complemented by Woolmer’s century.
A meeting of the English Cricketers’ Association at Edgbaston on Monday, 5 September, showed the members’ equivocal—according to Greig, contradictory—outlook. Almost four-to-one in favour of banning Packer players from the county game, a clear majority called on the ICC and TCCB to negotiate a truce.
But the TCCB had set its stall so utterly it had even wrong-footed David Evans. Evans called Woolmer after the Fifth Test, imploring him not to sign until he met Cornhill’s chairman at Luton Football Club on Gillette Cup Final day.
But that Saturday, 3 September, was also selection day for the Pakistan tour party, and the TCCB’s Donald Carr interrupted a party at Woolmer’s home enquiring of the Kent batsman’s availability. Hoping that Evans would call before the team was finalised, a perplexed Woolmer said that, on balance, he probably wasn’t. He turned on the BBC’s Gillette Cup Grandstand in the afternoon to find that the TCCB had proscribed him. ‘That’s typical of the way they handle things,’ said an exasperated Evans when he called a little later. ‘It serves them right. You go and play.’ Party guest Greig signed Woolmer virtually on the spot.
When Hampshire denied Gloucestershire the County Championship the following Friday at Bristol, cheering locals consoled their inspiring captain Procter. Visiting players gathered to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ round Greenidge, Roberts and Barry Richards. Three days later, the players met again at the Dorchester with WSC’s other county players to receive winter work schedules from Lynton Taylor.