Max Walker’s wife Tina answered the door at their Doncaster home in mid-September 1977 to find Victorian leg spinner Jim Higgs cloaked in darkness. The medium pacer cum architect had been expecting Higgs, who wanted to examine some technical drawings for his civil engineering class, and turned on the porch light. ‘Oh, right, go for it,’ he said. ‘Look at whatever you want.’
Higgs was clearly uncomfortable. ‘Look mate,’ he said. ‘Can you turn out the light? I’ve been told I’m not supposed to be here. The VCA reckons we shouldn’t talk to you blokes.’
None of World Series Cricket’s Australians had feared strangulation by ticker-tape at home. Some had delayed return from England: Greg Chappell and Rod Marsh had accompanied Ian Davis to Amsterdam to represent an invitational team called the ‘Elephants’ on the mats against the Netherlands, before turning tourists with their wives in Sardinia for a week.
Hostility toward them as ‘disapproved persons’ still smarted. Having sacked Chappell as a state selector while he was in England, the Queensland Cricket Association offered $15,000 to void the contract on which he’d been lured to the state from Adelaide in 1973. Though Chappell asked to be considered for state selection, he came no closer than a Gabba afternoon tea with QCA chairman Norm McMahon as Queensland played Victoria on 4 November. McMahon, who was Greg’s tour treasurer in England as well, steered uneasily around the topic. Chappell refrained from mentioning it.
The role of iconoclast fitted Greg Chappell badly. ‘All of the guys that had signed would have put themselves in the traditional camp,’ he says. ‘We had a great respect for the game. Always have done, always will. We weren’t challenging the game, we were challenging the way it was run.’
Old friendships were strained. Even employers became abrasive. At the Rural Bank, McCosker found the atmosphere chill. ‘It seemed that everyone involved in WSC should be treated with a fair amount of disdain,’ he says. ‘It was certainly the view of some of the management that I was now a rebel and should be treated like one.’
Official Australian Cricket Board response had been subtler. In fact, its 6 September meeting briefly raised hopes: it would seem that if players were free for Test cricket and able to honour commitments to Benson & Hedges as sole team sponsor, nothing, strictly speaking, prevented their selection.
They weren’t and they couldn’t, though, so they wouldn’t be. Even if not involved in overlapping Super Tests, the players’ B & H deal in January 1977 meant that the moment two or more team members observed clause 3 (10) of their WSC contract—stipulating they ‘participate by personal appearance in team group photographs and TV programmes and/or advertisements’—they were exiling themselves from Test cricket.
‘When it came to the crunch,’ Parish recalls, ‘the players had banned themselves. They couldn’t be part of WSC and, perform their duty to Benson and Hedges. An individual could do basically as he wished but as soon as there were two or more they implied they were part of a team.’ As Austin Robertson and Brian Treasure completed WSC’s last round of signings, the alternatives were clear. One could be an establishment pillar or a circus animal.
That deterred neither West Australians Rob Langer and Bruce Laird, of whom Ian Chappell had written highly, nor Greg Chappell’s Queensland protege Martin Kent. Nor was their brother Trevor discouraged, just as he was about to play for Perth club Scarborough. Ian was also gratified to learn that Packer had offered terms to Ashley Mallett—although time had never permitted that trial over after all— and even Australian masseur Dave McErlane.
McErlane was dear to the Chappells for his doughty temperament and impish humour. His physical strength in dressing-room wrestling was a byword. McErlane’s twenty years at the New South Wales Cricket Association bothered him when Ian Chappell asked but Packer was difficult to deny. ‘You’re not coming with us Doc?’ the businessman said. ‘Would some money change your mind?’
It did. ‘I wasn’t stupid,’ McErlane recalls. ‘I’m not too good with words, but I can count.’
Quick bowlers, with fewer recent Test opportunities, were less eager. Even after meeting Treasure at his Bassendean home ground Hillcrest Oval and considering his school teacher’s stipend, the young West Australian medium pacer Wayne Clark decided that Test cricket was too near and dear. He’d dreamed of it since being taught as an eight-year-old by Australian fast bowler Laurie Mayne.
The money was good, and we weren’t well off,’ Clark recalls. ‘But I called the ACB, and they said I had a 95 per cent chance of playing Tests that summer. Whereas I’d be banned and I might end up playing in Ballarat if I signed. There was also a credibility thing with friends. WSC was sort of a rebel thing to do and I knew I’d probably have to quit teaching to do it.’
The Victorian Alan Hurst, with two Testless tours behind him, also turned Robertson away. The offer would have to have been unbelievable really,’ says Hurst. ‘I was just desperate to play for Australia. I said to myself: “I’ve got my whole life to make a mark in whatever field I want, but this is my one chance to play for Australia. I have to make the most of it”.’
The net had to be cast further. The chance to play for Ian Chappell, his old state captain and mentor, convinced the rangy paceman Wayne Prior in Adelaide. And a friendly call from Robertson to his Perth mate Graham McKenzie, then coaching Claremont-Cottlesloe, coaxed him from retirement. ‘I was thirty-six and it was a bit of a bonus,’ McKenzie recalls. ‘I would probably be earning more from a season of WSC than I did in all the years I’d played for Australia.’ The wages of sin were that, two days after joining WSC, Prior lost the job that the South Australian Cricket Association had arranged for him at Adelaide car dealer United Motors. And McKenzie had to leave his post because of the widening WSC embargo in club competitions.
Umpires also proved hard to entice. When distinguished Australians Lou Rowan and Max O’Connell, and the Englishmen Dickie Bird and David Constant all turned WSC down, the ranks of retired referees had to be perused. Westralian Gary Duperouzel, Queenslander Peter Enright and Victorian Jack Collins eventually joined the West Indian Douglas Sang Hue.
The stain of WSC was the quickest route to a free Saturday in Melbourne. Ian Chappell’s unhappily brief North Melbourne stay ended. Ian Redpath’s two decades at South Melbourne were terminated. Max Walker ended a decade at Melbourne when an open vote to omit him from the side was opposed only by his state colleague Jeff Moss. Walker’s three-page thank-you note and request for clearance to a lesser competition received a one-line reply: ‘Your transfer application has been granted.’
Walker then achieved publicity by having to guest with five clubs in six different competitions in order to stay ahead of the prohibitive contagion. At Old Scotch Collegians, having changed from the boot of his car, the dizziness of his decline hit home. ‘I was still tying up my boots as we were going out and shaking hands with Tom and Dick and Harry,’ he recalls. ‘In six months I’d gone from crowds 65–70,000 in the Centenary Test to two blokes, one lady and a dog.’ Even Jack Collins was compelled to quit Footscray’s committee.
In the West, Dennis Lillee’s insistence on practising and coaching at Melville earned it a $5 fine. Melville was then alone opposing a ban proposed by Midland-Guildford, ironically the club that had welcomed Barry Richards a year before. Ross Edwards, assured by Fremantle that it would resist Midland’s motion, felt betrayed. ‘What happened?’ he says. ‘I mean, Fremantle had obviously been got at before the meeting and they’d wilted. I can tell you I was very pissed off.’
The pressure on David Hookes in Adelaide, although his sympathetic West Torrens club had named him captain, was unremitting. Entreaties from Australian selector Phil Ridings and a financial package more than twice the size of his WSC contract seemed to offer all the security he could want. He began to buckle, and in early October flew to see Packer with a financial adviser and resignation speech memorised. ‘He just laughed at me,’ says Hookes. ‘Well, perhaps not laughed, but he made it clear that there was absolutely no way I could pull out. And if I did I’d end up paying him 90 per cent of my salary for rest of my life. My name had been used in the advance promo material, so I’d be sued for damages.’ Three weeks later when Gary Cosier was best man at Hookes’ low-key wedding, the pair finally knew they were headed separate ways that summer.
WSC players fared better in Brisbane and Sydney. Unable to enforce a ban under its constitution, the QCA had to ‘request’ that clubs do the decent thing, but Martin Kent and Greg Chappell reeled off some gallingly routine centuries for their defiant Sandgate-Redcliffe and South Brisbane teams. Rick McCosker, Doug Walters, Len Pascoe and Ian Davis survived four Sydney grade rounds before the boom fell. Round one of competition proved especially watchable, with 108 by Western Suburbs’ R. B. Simpson against Penrith.
Bob Simpson found his return to grade circles particularly gladdening. On 9 September he’d lunched at the Angus Steak Cave with the ACB’s three-man ‘emergency committee’, having offered them his aid and comfort while Australia had been abroad.
Over lunch, the retired forty-one-year-old had been officially offered the captaincy of Australia a decade after relinquishing it. Sir Donald Bradman’s was the voice Simpson heard clearest. The knight recalled his own position in 1945. He’d been content to pull stumps, but agreed to lead Australia as it recovered ‘from the ravages of war’. With Australian cricket at war, an old general seemed expedient.
It was a remarkable reacceptance at the ACB’s bosom. He had not been close to the board since his retirement, and some officials were chary of Simpson’s commercial bent. A year before, of course, he’d tarried with Packer himself. Now Simpson was back in the inner sanctum, and his appointments to lead New South Wales and Australia were announced simultaneously. Polarities could not have been defined more sharply: sacred sportsman versus profane promoter. At Simpson’s 11 October Cricket House press conference, journalists broke into applause.
A surprise well-wisher calling from Brisbane amid the fifty interviews of Simpson’s first two days in the job was Greg Chappell. And Ian Chappell forecast success in Cricketer. ‘I’ve got tremendous admiration for the man,’ he wrote, ‘and I can’t see why he can’t do well this summer against an Indian attack which doesn’t possess anyone above medium-pace … as a batsman Simpson rates as one of the best I’ve seen.’
All the same, the elder Chappell remembered Simpson advising him against the hook at an early stage of his career, a move against his instincts that he brazenly reversed after a season. And their mutual admiration was limited even at this stage. Simpson wrote:
In assessing the impact Ian Chappell made on Australian cricket, I find the easiest way to describe the transition which occurred under his command as being one where he took the team from the yachting-jacket set and brought it into the jean generation … Chappell in the early days of his captaincy was a bright, new and somewhat bumptious personality who was able to relate to the youth of Australia. He epitomised their attitudes and was prepared to thumb his nose at the establishment, which he did time and again by his casual attire and irreverence to tradition.
Ray Steele’s seasonal address at the VCA on 24 October 1977 at last opened the great divide publicly. Referring to his nemesis only as either ‘Packer’ or ‘the private promoter’, Steele told his audience: There’s a place for that kind of cricket… some place like Siberia.’
Packer was in an ashtray-filling mood at Consolidated Press four days later when he met with WSC’s inner circle: the Benauds, Robertson, Treasure, press officer Chris Forsyth and the television men Hill and Berkery. The boss was emphatic about detail. The cap peaks for the player’s uniforms were too short. Not enough video-discs? Get more, and make sure you have what you want.
Richie Benaud reported from his governing committee on trail-blazing for playing conditions. From South Africa, where the experiment had been tried four years before in the country’s local one-day trophy, it was borrowing the idea of circles restraining the ritual scattering of deep fielders in limited-overs matches. It was also demanding 75 rather than 65 eight-ball overs between new balls and promoting lenience toward fast bowlers on the front-foot no-ball law (a rule that Benaud despised).
Benaud worried, though, that the Laws of Cricket themselves might have a legal character. The MCC did hold their copyright. It would be important to play a form of stand-alone rules ‘based on’ the Laws to avoid further legal troubles. The High Court action in London still had two weeks to run, the NSWCA was pulling the SCG beyond Packer’s reach in the NSW Equity Court, and the ACB still had him pinned down in the Federal Court over whether he could touch the sacred Test’. WSC television advertisements that had been running for three weeks displayed the scars: the players shown were in limbo, no final schedule or venues could be promoted, and all had been viewed and amended by the Federal Court. If there was legal avenue open against WSC, Packer knew it would be probed. ‘Get the legal side straight,’ he told Forsyth. ‘If you fuck it up we could lose the lot—the whole $12 million.’
The newly arrived Greig saw the $12 million at risk as his helicopter overflew VFL Park that day. He told pressmen it could be one of cricket’s greatest stadia. Privately, sight of its gaping hole where a pitch should be had demoralised him. ‘How the hell are we going to play on this?’ he thought.
Wicket installation in Melbourne and Adelaide was indeed badly behind schedule. The pitches were flourishing in the greenhouses, but the hovercraft caused laughter wherever general manager Vern Stone went. ‘Sounds fantastic,’ said a friend in the Perth building industry when he heard the notion. ‘Fantastic bullshit. It’ll never work.’ Army and Navy experts advised likewise, if more militarily.
Stone fumed when he flew to Adelaide to find the hovercraft team years from completion. ‘I don’t care about overtime,’ he demanded. ‘Get your men working twenty-four hours a day on it. We’ll pay the bill. These things have got to be ready on time.’
Precautionary investigation of installation options methods dismayed him further. Cranes, perhaps? Too heavy. Helicopters? Too small. Then Stone received a report from soil scientist Roy Bond: drought conditions in Perth were killing the Gloucester Park pitch.
Lawyers could help them find a way round the restrictions on the phrase Super Test and Australia. The Federal Court seemed to find ‘Supertest’ satisfactory, and the guise ‘WSC Australians’ and such apparently passed muster. Stone had then found WSC a home, blockbooking ninety-five rooms at George Frew’s sprawling, mock-Tudor Old Melbourne Inn for the first cricketing arrivals in three weeks.
A Country Cup itinerary was also finalised: team managers Graham Ferrett and John Curtain had taken Austin Robertson on a 12,000-kilometre car journey round a dozen cities registering interest in WSC. Concentrating on districts where sympathetic regional press could be expected, they organised co-promotional deals with local sponsors for a fourteen-match tour.
But the only relief Stone heard to the eccentricities of Birzulis’ hovercraft had come from an enigmatic Waverley resident, introducing himself as a retired French army engineer who had seen service in Burma. ‘Low-loaders,’ he muttered. With tyres deflated and run overnight on a steel track over hessian sacks, damage to the ground should be minimal.
Stone was sufficiently intrigued to check with Brambles General Transport, and, when engineer Terry O’Brien confirmed the advice as sound, set Birzulis a strict agenda. Packer was coming to Melbourne on 2 November for the 3AK Christmas lunch at the Melbourne Club, and would like a pitch as a present.
It should have been a private process, but Chris Forsyth had invited the press for what became a very public debacle. Arriving by helicopter with Packer and Harry Chester that day, Stone’s heart plummeted. ‘I could see clouds of dust coming out from the greenhouse and people running round all over the place,’ he recalls. ‘I was shell-shocked. There wasn’t meant to be anyone there.’
Packer growled: ‘I thought this was meant to be private.’
‘So did I,’ the executive squeaked. Birzulis, standing by his overheated hovercraft, surrendered to Brambles.
Packer, in fact, never saw his pitches laid. He flew to Perth to lecture on the future of cricket with Lillee and Edwards at a Melville fund-raiser at Park Towers. Then he admired the terrain of his other estate—Kensington golf course—which he circled on a buggy with Jack Nicklaus.
As Brambles jemmied Maley’s trays into Football Park on 8 November, Packer was in transit for a fishing trip on New Zealand’s Lake Taupo with Greig, Nicklaus and golfer Jerry Pate. And by 4.40pm the next day, WSC finally filled the hole in his life at VFL Park.
Shaky laughter filled a Hertz minibus bound for Waverley just after 7.30am on Tuesday, 15 November 1977. The WSC Australians had left the Old Melbourne fifteen minutes earlier and headed towards VFL Park for their first practice session on the Packer payroll. Except it was at St Kilda Football Club’s Moorabbin ground.
The bus reversed, but there was no turning back for the players. Practice, for once, looked good. Being ‘disapproved persons’ had taxed their ingenuity and patience. The skipper had set the example of turning out for village green teams as varied as Pulteney Grammar Old Boys in Adelaide, while Ian Davis had pondered physical challenges ahead by weight-training and a month with Len Pascoe on a Bankstown concrete pitch with boxes of bearing-hard composite balls. Lillee and the West Australians had played a convivial charity match at Kalgoorlie and even managed a clandestine net with Tasmania’s greenhorn Sheffield Shield team in Perth.
But it had been hard, especially in Adelaide where Bishan Bedi’s Indians had begun their official tour. Even attending nets on Bedi’s invitation, Prior was treated like a quisling. Only Phil Ridings troubled to cross the floor when Hookes attended the Indians’ mayoral reception.
The word ‘professionalism’ was pervasive. Many players had ditched their outside careers. McCosker and Gilmour had left their banks, Malone had quit his school and Walker his architecture partnership. ‘I had a planter box to do when I got back from. England,’ Walker remembers. ‘It was up to scheme twenty-seven for Parliament Place, and I figured I didn’t want to design a planter box I’d designed before. Suddenly pro cricket looked really good.’
Martin Kent and Gilmour had turned up with fingers already broken—the former missing a slip catch in a Brisbane club match with Sandgate, the latter playing in a Newcastle rugby league semi-final with Carlton-Merriweather—but were told they could see doctors in Melbourne. Ian Chappell wanted his team together.
In his room 413 at the Old Melbourne, with Cornell, Benaud, Geoff Forsaith and Graham Ferrett looking on, he’d given his orders for the day. And the decade. This thing is good,’ he’d said. ‘We’re here to stay. Not just for one year, or three years, but ten years and more. And you’ve got to get that in your minds from here on in.’ Solidarity was stressed. ‘We have to sell our product and the way to do that is to make sure it’s the best. We can do that by helping one another to improve his game.’
On Chappell’s request, they stepped from the bus in creams. Each was issued four WSC shirts from Michael Treloar Uniforms, one pullover and sleeveless, and one tour cap each. Pascoe was first to the ball box, McCosker first into pads, in front of a few hardy pressmen and Moorabbin early-risers.
Greig arrived to pose for action shots with Lillee snapped by Adelaide promotional photographer Milton Wordley, and in room 413 that evening John Newcombe appropriately underscored their new commercial discipline. Tracing his experience of the tennis star as salesman, he described how ten years before he’d become part of the ‘Handsome Eight’ of Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis tour as ‘Newc’ the player-personality. ‘When I started to have a court personality like the one I had in private, more people turned up to watch me play,’ he explained. Ian Chappell might do something similar. The way he scratches his crutch before a ball’s bowled must be a turn-on for women. Image is important, no matter what the traditionalists say and how much they hate it.’
The Australians heard more evangelism on 16 November from Ron Barassi, coach of 1977’s Victorian Football League Premiers North Melbourne. The fundamentals of professionalism? Attitude, commitment and responsibility to the man paying the bills. That’s the man you’re playing for, that’s the man who is going to control your future. You’ve got to give him everything … Anything else is wrong and unfair.’
It had a resonance to Richie Robinson who had been drafted for the 75-over-a-side practice match commencing that day to lead the Australians’ second-stringers. It was a long-term assignment. Things were moving so quickly I can’t even remember who told me I had the job, but it was a bit of a let-down,’ he says. ‘In all the years I was Rod’s deputy, I never ever resigned myself to not getting in there if his form faltered, or as a batsman.’
Robinson consoled himself by throwing Lillee a new ball at 10.38am. The fast bowler accelerated as free admission turned a few hundred heads into 5000. Bright bagged five wickets in the afternoon, Marsh and McKenzie half-centuries of differing finesse. Seven thousand the next day saw Ian Chappell’s XI squeeze home by five runs in spite of Davis’s fluent 124. Ordinary cricket balls came soft to his bat after a month of Pascoe’s pummelling.
Barassi had caused mild indigestion with his insistence that ‘perfect practice’ required ‘perfect practices’. Even in diet. No more pies, milkshakes and hamburgers. Ian Chappell was studied carefully: he loathed running, and eschewed push-ups on the basis of the Nicklaus dictum that they interfered with a golf swing. ‘Well I’m going for something to eat,’ he said in his familiar deadpan. ‘Anyone want to join me for a pie, a hamburger and a milkshake?’ Revolution would clearly come at his pace.
The seafood fare was typically sumptuous in the Old Melbourne’s Haymarket room on Monday, 21 November for WSC’s welcoming banquet for the newly-arrived internationals, their families and press. Packer, having left the Australian Open in David Graham’s custody the previous day, was now a cricketophile on High Table with Cornell, the team captains, Benaud, and Sir Garfield Sobers.
Packer pointed a few barbs at the NSWCA, which on the Friday had finally denied him the SCG, but was otherwise softly spoken. ‘No I don’t wish any ill to the touring Indians,’ he stressed. ‘Unlike the ACB I would like to see both series prosper.’ He posed for photographers with Sobers, whose unimpeachable name was to bless a trophy at stake in Supertests between West Indies and Australia—as their official Tests were played for the Sir Frank Worrell Trophy—in an effort to communicate WSC’s message: past and future blending to create cricket present. That was the idea anyway.
Aiming to please, Packer lavished a buffet on his practising players the next day, too. The Pakistanis couldn’t believe it,’ Walker recalls. ‘I can just see Mushie tucking in: he must’ve just come from the curried goat and the fried rice. And it got like that everyday, the sort of stuff you might get in a superbox. After a week the little feller was like a tadpole.’
Packer mixed cheerfully at the session. ‘Carrying a bit of extra weight Procky?’ the businessman bantered.
‘Yon get the pads on,’ Procter replied. ‘And I’ll show you how fit I am.’
Procter, indeed, felt hollow on the cold Melbourne Thursday as he took the new ball on his WSC debut at VFL Park for Tony Greig’s World XI against the Australians. Twelve thousand had watched the Aussies play their two-day scratch match, but no more than 200 seemed interested in paying for similar privilege.
‘Just a practice match’ was the official response, and the concept was only in miniature. Hill’s cameramen rehearsed for closed-circuit monitors. Pitch microphones were in use for the first time, as technicians experimented with ways to fade out the saltier of the players’ expressions. But the 2449 who joined Packer at various times looked all the fewer for their vast surrounds. Truth was a little loose on that day, actually,’ Forsyth wrote. What had been billed as the start of the WSC competition had suddenly, surreptitiously and inexplicably, changed into what were termed by Packer and others as trial games.’ The new press box resounded with phrases of indifference. The Times’ John Woodcock summed it up: ‘If history was, indeed, being made, it passed almost unnoticed.’
The first semi-official century from Ian Chappell, made mostly during a rearguard with Bright, came in virtual silence. The news was bleaker from Football Park in Adelaide, where Graham Ferrett had taken the West Indians and a World team led by Asif Iqbal. Fewer than a thousand were watching Dennis Amiss make a dogged 81.
Packer did not enhance attraction there the next day as he applauded the second semi-official century. More than half of Clive Lloyd’s 140 came in boundaries, but barely 650 acclaimed it.
Packer did not sleep that night, although not for reasons some might have suspected. Justice Slade was due to pass High Court judgement on the International Cricket Conference ban and, with his lawyers overwhelmingly confident of victory, Packer consented willingly to a BBC telephone interview when the decision was known.
His honour handed out a greater hammering even than Clive Lloyd. The ICC’s only gratification came in Justice Slade’s observation that cricket administrators were a thoroughly decent breed who ‘believed that they acted in the best interests of cricket’. The judge could also understand sense of betrayal at Greig’s recruiting role, but retaliation had ‘strained the bounds of loyalty’. In fact, they should have foreseen events: The very size of profits made from cricket matches involving star players must for some years have carried the risk that a private promoter would appear on the scene and seek to make money by promoting cricket matches involving world-class cricketers.’
It was an outright victory whose full implications took time to tease out. In fact at the outset it seemed a little empty for players uninvolved in county cricket. Even if they weren’t ‘disapproved persons’, there was still a gulf to cross before their ‘approval’.
But the setback for the ICC was palpable. New chairman David Clark would have to touch members for $320,000 costs. We were well and truly stuffed,’ ruminated the Test and County Cricket Board’s Doug Insole. Packer hung up on the BBC to wake Greig at the Old Melbourne. ‘I just thought you’d like to know,’ he said. ‘We’ve stuffed them.’
‘I’ll get back to you,’ said a drowsy Greig. So would many others.
Packer gave a convincing impression of tired triumph the next day at VFL Park, although he was not foolish enough to suggest the ICC would reopen negotiations: ‘It would be easier to get an audience with the Pope and I’m not Catholic.’ He even sat placidly through two takes of an interview for GTV-9 after the film unspooled at the first attempt.
He was stirred only by sight of John Woodcock. ‘One of the enemy,’ he grunted.
‘It’s true,’ said the Times writer. ‘I’ve been against what you have been trying to do. But I would nonetheless like to congratulate you on a considerable victory.’
Packer was unmoved. ‘I can see from your face how sincere you are. I’ve read some of your stuff. You’ve never been prepared to give me a chance.’
‘I don’t know,’ Woodcock replied. ‘I thought I said some good might come of it.’
‘Good might come of evil?’ sniffed the Australian. ‘I don’t think that’s much of a compliment.’
Ian Chappell had been buoyed by his century. In his 1976–77 grade season for North Melbourne, he’d not passed 94. ‘I’d never been so long without a hundred,’ he remembers. ‘I’d been starting to think: “Jeez, maybe I’m getting a bit old for hundreds”.’ Then a better Saturday crowd of 3472 brought colour to Ian Redpath’s cheeks during a celebratory 152. He chirpily performed shoulder rolls after twice lifting Albert Padmore into the stands.
Chappell felt that the outside pressures were bringing his team together. The Australian contingent that Richie Robinson and John Curtain led fifty miles down the highway to Geelong on 28 November dressed sprucely for a mayoral reception and performed coaching duties obediently on the outfield of Kardinia Park. They also convened a meeting at their Travelodge Hotel digs to discuss travel arrangements. It didn’t seem proper to be sharing a bus with the West Indians they were playing the next day.
There were still going to be setbacks, and the game sadly ended Redpath’s promising season. Turning his ankle as he jumped in celebrating Lloyd’s wicket, the local Geelong boy broke his achilles tendon.
But good vibes predominated. Packer helicoptered in to declare that Redpath would be paid in full for the season, and spectator Ian Chappell had a substitute in mind straight away. Graeme Watson, the versatile all-rounder who had quit cricket in 1975 to pursue architecture, had been playing with Greg at Souths. He deserved to be a WSC benefactor. Martin Kent’s comeback 40 in a glove tailored to protect the three breaks in his finger had been promising. And Australia had won by 49 runs. It might turn out a real cricket contest.
Justice Slade’s judgement had, of course, flashed round the world. Emergency meetings of the West Indies Cricket Board of Control were particularly careworn. Jeff Stollmeyer, who had voted against his instincts, recalled: ‘Although … we tried to explain our position and that of the ICC and of the dangers which lay ahead for the future of international cricket, Kerry Packer became something of a hero and his “more bread for players” syndrome carried the day.’
News also reached Brearley’s England side practising in Rawalpindi. ‘All the talk is about Packer,’ confided manager Ken Barrington in a letter home. ‘It was a shock judgement. It’s going to be a real problem unless they all get together.’
Within the ACB, the very fact that WSC was at the crease had raised the ante. When state captains attended the year’s first meeting of the players sub-committee, the mission with which Ray Steele charged them was recorded in the minutes: ‘The current year (is) of vital importance, and the established players should be aware that they are fighting for the survival of cricket.’