For two days, Australia’s clashing cricket attractions in December 1977 at VFL Park and the Gabba proceeded in symmetry. Both Test and Supertest Australians seized unlikely first innings leads. The former were 125 runs to the good with seven wickets standing as Sunday 4 December dawned, the latter 180 with six.
The public relations battle had, however, been a no-contest: aggregate attendance in Brisbane would hit almost 32,000, while a meagre 13,000 Melburnians came the twenty-five kilometres from city to Waverley to watch World Series Cricket. Kibitzers, come to bury WSC not to praise it, became offerers of condolence. Wrote Tony Lewis of London’s Daily Telegraph: ‘I can see how much the players love it and feel sorry for them that no-one wants to watch. Only time can help it, but time, too, might end it.’ Eventually the phoney wars would seem to affect the real ones. Bob Simpson succeeded on still-agile feet against spin to the north. Ian Chappell was harpooned by a shooter on treacherous turf to the south.
The irony was that WSC could hardly have concocted better fare or finale, with the West Indians winning a tense, low-scoring match thanks mostly to their Antiguan axis of Richards and Roberts. During a first-innings 79, Richards appeared almost to will Lillee and Pascoe to his strengths. Ever-faster, ever-shorter, the bowlers seemed dupes. It required a lightning strike to cut Richards down, a bottom-edge from Hookes’ chinaman that Marsh caught between clenched thighs. And when Hookes interceded again to stem Richards at 56 on the last day, the South Australian’s catch at deep square leg seventy metres from the bat briefly restored his team’s hopes.
But Roberts, by this time, had done too much to lose. Evicting Walters and Hookes to begin Australia’s Sunday slump, he took charge five hours later when his team trembled 46 runs from victory with three wickets standing by wordlessly promoting himself above an edgy Holding. An hour of scampered singles with Deryck Murray, and Roberts hoisted Bright beyond long on to win the game. ‘One of the facts of life was that over the years I was dobbed for a few sixes,’ Bright recalls. ‘And that was as big as any of them. Andy had this short sharp jolt of a backlift, though they always went a long way back.’
Writing of his team’s spirited 16-run victory at the Gabba a couple of days later, Bob Simpson invoked the Tied Test he’d played seventeen years before. His youths had taken three hours to budge from their dressing-room. But VFL Park’s absence of ceremony, and stake beyond the $16,667 prize money, left the Daily Mail’s Ian Wooldridge ruefully indifferent. The Supertest players needed no excuses to be made on their behalf,’ he recognised. Their match featured some colossal cricket. It would be uncharitable to suggest that the big top caved in on Mr Packer’s circus. All that happened was that barely a single dinkum Australian paid it more than abstract attention.’
There were many explanations. VFL Park was too far away, there were a host of rival attractions (Australia had been beating Italy in the Davis Cup, too), the $5 admission was too steep, and big-ticket pre-Christmas cricket in Melbourne had never been attempted. But the possibility that grandstand finishes needed the right grandstand haunted WSC.
Tremors occurred. Manager John Curtain resigned, bemoaning lack of cricket know-how in WSC’s administration. Then Packer actually sacked Chris Forsyth for unpacking his heart to a journalist, before being persuaded to reconsider.
Packer had also to farewell two of VFL Park’s guests. The black-listed Springboks Graeme Pollock and Denys Hobson had been brought within yards of international competition, but knew they were to be ‘excused’ WSC duty. Pollock, who had compiled twin hundreds for Eastern Province against Rhodesia a week before, left publicly lamenting ‘scheduling problems’. Hobson spoke of a sore shoulder that would last the whole summer, though no one noticed him greet the New Year with bags of 5–65 and 6–49 for Western Province.
Gary Gilmour, Mick Malone and Kerry O’Keeffe, with Richie Robinson’s Australians playing the World in the Country Cup at Rockhampton’s Cricket Association Ground during the First Supertest, talked over their individual realities as reservists. ‘We realised that if we’d stayed with the board we would have been golden-haired boys,’ Gilmour says. ‘Instead we were playing at Rockhampton, so it was hard to know if we’d made the right choice.’
O’Keeffe recollected his exchange with Marsh after the loss of the Ashes:
I thought that fateful night was coming back to haunt me … I was never fully forgiven. In trying to put a case I hadn’t agreed with I’d been seen to side with it. I didn’t want the limelight. I’d always loved Sheffield Shield. I loved its values, and I really missed it. To face bowling up-country, knowing Wisden was never going to record it, frustrated me enormously.
They rejoined colleagues at Adelaide’s Hotel Australia, where Chappell was trying to train his gaze on weekend International Cup matches. Net sessions were driven. VFL Park videos were replayed. A team rota was organised to involve peripheral personnel on the Saturday and Sunday, 10 and 11 December.
Previously, of course, there had been a rousing green-and-gold cap and patriotic following. Now bonding was essentially contractual and spectators scarce. Vern Stone was asked to install teams on separate hotel levels. Managers Geoff Forsaith and Graham Ferrett agreed that players sharing buses should at least travel in separate seat blocks. While WSC was theoretically an expression of the player as individual agent, there was very recent example in England in 1977 of disunity’s dangers.
Packer remained a visible figurehead. There was hardly a morning when you didn’t hear the chopper in the car park,’ Walker recalls. ‘It’d give us the tomtits frankly, because it threw dust over all the cars, but Kerry was always there.’ To allow reciprocation in Adelaide, Cornell grouped the Australians after practice to singalong for a birthday video he was making for The Boss’s’ fortieth in a week’s time.
The Australians were still tentative, though, and rusty in one-day drills like pacing an innings and bowling for dots which World and West Indian players knew by heart. Derek Underwood coiled round the Australian top order on the Saturday, undisturbed by Marsh’s promotion to number three as a left-handed pinch-hitter, then Roberts and Daniel allowed them only ten scoring shots from their last 40 balls on the Sunday.
Beaten twice in two days before barely 4000 people, Robinson, Gilmour, Edwards, Davis and Hookes barely had time to shower before joining Lillee, Laird, Kent, Pascoe, Mallett and Trevor Chappell on an Ansett Fokker Friendship to Albury for a Country Cup match the following day. This is going to be horrendous,’ thought Ferrett. The guys have been playing all day and they haven’t eaten, and we’ve only got this propeller thing to get them to Albury.’
‘Why don’t we make it into a bit of a party?’ he asked Cornell, and was authorised to invest in a chicken and champagne spread. By the time they hit Albury, the Australians had dubbed their outback duty The Champagne Tour’. Thin times lay ahead, but the name stuck.
Tony Greig and Ian Chappell shook on it. No bouncers. It seemed a fair precaution on Wednesday 14 December 1977 as they tossed at VFL Park for a new ball game within the new ball game. They were beginning in light but the World and Australians would finish their 40-overs-a-side in floodlight. It was a hurriedly arranged affair, untelevised because it was not part of any WSC competition, and the captains agreed to go a little easy. Greig was pleased to bat on calling correctly. Fielding floodlit had to be simpler than batting.
Night cricket had an antiquity in Australia. But the members at Western Suburbs in Sydney who in 1932 had practised on specially prepared pitches at Concord Oval had been confounded by evening damp and thrown away their white ducoed balls.
They’d been on at least one right track. White balls, WSC discovered, stayed basically white against the black sightboards regardless of scuffing and rotation. Orange balls went brown, red-and-white balls tended to vanish.
Alchemy in the air had even attracted a crowd rather than a clique to VFL Park: 6449 was the final count. Buoyed when he and John Cornell arrived by helicopter at the ‘dinner break’, Packer allowed spectators to gambol on the ground. Cornell had liked this ‘Village green’ practice in New Zealand nine months before, and it seemed a worthwhile break with custom as players for the first time had a full evening meal in an underground restaurant.
As 14,000 watts illuminated VFL Park in the twilight, Packer and Cornell grew even jollier. They could ‘see it’. The white ball zipped from the hand and scooted across the outfield with startling clarity. As Ian Chappell added 104 for Australia’s first-wicket with Rick McCosker, Packer and Cornell examined the WSC calendar to reschedule some other VFL Park fixtures as evening fare and prime-time viewing.
Ian Chappell even smiled for the first time that summer. When his frustrated rival captain personally broke the bouncer bar and was pulled for four by McCosker, Chappell told him: ‘If you want to bowl bouncers Greigy, we’ll turn the lights off for you.’ Underwood was the only worry and took four wickets as evening moisture fell, but Greg Chappell lent victory a festive air in the last hour with an unbeaten 59. His off-driven six from Mushtaq brought victory on the tick of the appointed 10.30pm finishing time.
Packer and Cornell were already circulating. Marsh was cautious: the ball was hard to see against the batsmen’s white clothing. The umpires had not granted an lbw: white balls striking white pads were difficult to judge. But The Boss’ was able to give his first poised press conference of the new season. ‘For the first time in a lifetime of watching cricket, I could see the ball from the moment it left the bat,’ he said. ‘It must be a great innovation for cricket and I can’t see why it can’t be used all the time.’
Even the Age, militantly traditional, ran a front-page picture story (The Atmosphere was Electric’) with a back-page match report (‘Night cricket switches on the crowd’). ‘Even though WSC did not get out of the blocks as its starter would have liked,’ it wrote, ‘under the power of 1000 lux the revolution took on some meaning.’ It noted importantly that traditional cricket fans were less in evidence than ‘the family element surrounding VFL Park’.
Eric Beecher, whose Cricketer was about to pack a punchy January 1978 issue headed The Great Packer Yawn’, also ruminated. His report of the game secreted the words ‘bright’ and ‘breezy’, and in his book The Cricket Revolution he would see the evening as a turning point: ‘Just as the sun seemed to be setting on WSC’s first disaster-filled season, someone turned on the lights.’
Richie Benaud was off-duty as commentator that night, but on-duty as a historian. He fielded Greg Chappell’s final six, pocketing the first white ball for presentation to the SCG Museum.
There was something about Andy Roberts. Word got round that he carried a preserved bull’s penis. Word got round that the walkman tape that engrossed him on air routes was a chant of ‘Kill the Whites’.
Even if one decided Roberts was merely shy, an opponent needed to know the Antiguan’s peculiar cricketing habits. The second-most important thing about his bouncer was its speed. The most important was to expect it immediately after a very slow ‘sucker’ bouncer. And he didn’t seem to mind the victims of that sinister ‘left-right combination’.
English memories of Roberts and partner Holding from the West Indies’ 1976 visit had been the main reason for Dennis Amiss and Tony Greig lugging what from a distance seemed like large chamber pots: visored white helmets.
Amiss carried a lump left in the back of his head in May 1976 by Holding in fading light at Lord’s. In July 1976, Greig had been introduced to cricket fear while parrying Roberts, Holding and Daniel on a diabolical Old Trafford pitch. ‘It was the first time in my career that I had felt really frightened,’ he wrote. ‘It was also the first time I almost gave up.’
Greig had had Bill Swanwick, a Nottingham maker of protective equipment for epileptics, take a wax mould of his head for a skull-cap to fit beneath his cap. Mike Brearley had pursued the idea as far as wearing a Swanwick design from April 1977.
Watching Brearley, Amiss finally took the step of designing a full-blown, motorcycle-style helmet with businessman Peter Beniman and a Birmingham company called Vellvic. To Amiss and Greig, Australia seemed a very good place to test-drive.
You tried to be polite while Roberts was round anyway. Even county teammate Barry Richards would respond to Roberts’ morning greeting with: ‘And good morning to you, Mister Roberts.’ And when Roxanne Hookes, having a casual balcony breakfast on the morning of Friday 16 December at Sydney’s Chateau Commodore, saw Roberts pass on his way to the Showground for the first day of the Second Supertest, she made a point of complimenting him on his fashionable blue pants. Her husband might be facing him that day.
Although McCosker fell to Roberts’ fifth ball, caught by Lloyd from Gordon Greenidge’s fumble, the Antiguan did not command the stage at once. Ian Chappell’s firm shots had restored Australian heart against Holding and Daniel, when spectators saw first evidence of the new West Indian depth. Chappell stood tall to stay over a square cut from Holding, but a figure standing taller in the gully picked it up almost playfully. Joel Garner.
Presented with Supertest selection on his twenty-fifth birthday, Garner could obviously field, and when he joined the attack himself proved he could bowl as well. Greg Chappell’s drive was skewered to third slip and the day’s two Australian newcomers, Martin Kent and Bruce Laird, swept away; the former’s edge lodging unluckily in Murray’s glove from Greenidge’s tentative hand and Lloyd’s knee.
From 5–89, however, the Australians rallied. Roxanne Hookes began watching her husband and, with 7200 spectators, to swing along with his strokes. The marauding Garner dropped short and was poached for 17 runs in an over. Holding, slower on his second breath, went for five intoxicating fours in his first over when recalled. Even Roberts seemed negotiable when Lloyd roused him and, so sweetly was Hookes harmonising with Marsh just after tea, that the Antiguan seemed reluctant to continue. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he told Lloyd.
‘Just three overs Andy, fast,’ the captain asked. His bowler shrugged.
‘Did you hear that?’ said Hookes to this partner. ‘If we can see Andy off, we’ll be right. Just concentrate on seeing Andy off.’
As the South Australian recalls with the clarity of a road accident victim, the slow bouncer arrived. ‘Andy bowled me a ‘lolly gobble bliss bomb’ first up and I got that away all right,’ he says. ‘But the next one made a mess of me.’
A couple of feet shorter, several yards faster, it caught the hooking Hookes in medias res despite his two hours, 81 runs and 14 fours. His head resounded, his body completing a full circle that ended in a semi-balletic swoon. ‘And,’ intoned Benaud gravely, ‘he’s in trouble.’
Murray was first to reach him, Hookes recoiling from his touch as he spat blood. Fielders were magnetised and Marsh charged from the non-striker’s end. Only Roberts, chasing the ball from his follow-through, remained locked in his private thoughts.
As manager Rudi Webster bustled from the West Indian rooms, Packer himself was hastening to the Australian dugout. He was waiting among them when the bloodied, bare-headed Hookes was lowered gently on Doc McErlane’s treatment table. Roxanne Hookes held her breath.
The newcomer Laird, a Supertestman just three years out of Perth club cricket, was transfixed. ‘I’d never seen a broken jaw before,’ he says. ‘And I can still remember the splinters of bone through the blood on the floor of the dressing-room when Hookesy was brought in. They were like little bits of glass.’
Packer was the twenty-two-year-old’s ambulance driver, his Jaguar ignoring traffic lights, for the one-mile journey to St Vincent’s private hospital. A double fracture of the jaw and cheekbone was diagnosed, a five-week fracture in Hookes’ season prescribed.
The Showground crowd spoke in bereaved whispers as Ray Bright came out to bat. ‘Mmmm,’ he muttered as he arrived at the crease, ‘bit of blood in the old blockhole today.’ Roberts adduced his edge and bowled a retreating Lillee before his second wind was spent, and only Marsh and Walker in a half-century stand pushed the total past 250. Lillee and Pascoe had 24 deliveries at Greenidge and Roy Fredericks that evening, and went for 31 dizzying runs.
As Hookes underwent surgery on the Saturday, so did the Australians. The scalpel was Viv Richards’ 88, after the home side had almost revived with three early wickets. Pascoe pitched just short to the Antiguan and watched the ball disappear for a six, driven straight off the back foot. Fourteen other fours laced his two-hour innings. Lloyd and Murray endured, and bowler-fielder Garner proved he could bat as well.
Greenidge’s first-day fumbles reflected a vital fact of Showground life. It was fast. Balls from groundsman John Maley’s bounce gauge rebounded as though from marble. ‘John had a piece of wood with a jam tin, that dropped the ball from a height of ten feet or so,’ Kent recalls. ‘He’d pull a string and bounce at different lengths up to see the bounce was uniform. At the Showground it was: three feet high all the way.’
Laird and a tin-hatted McCosker had twenty minutes merry hell that evening, but reduced the West Indian lead to 46 before they were parted. The Australians were 19 in credit with only two casualties when Garner began his first spell on the third day.
Still to acclimatise to his altitude, the Australians ran out of breath. Greg Chappell at once edged to Lloyd, who this time palmed the ball to Greenidge. In Garner’s next over—the last before lunch— Lloyd caught Kent solo at ankle level. In his first over after the break, McCosker’s deflection was too late to elude leg slip and Bright’s footwork too slow to escape a yorker. Marsh was neatly held by Greenidge to become the fifth loss in nine runs. This time there was no retaliatory Hookes.
Lillee, Walker and Pascoe wasted the 69 they grafted with an hour and a quarter of thoughtlessness attacking Greenidge and Fredericks. Although Pascoe managed to strike Fredericks on the shoulder, the left-hander was as tender as tungsten and added 86 with his partner. Brainless bowling, brawny batting, and the West Indians had won the Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy with half an hour of the third day remaining.
For WSC it was another humiliation. Attendances had actually kept pace with those in the concurrent Perth Test, but the premature finish meant that four Super days had now collected gates of zero. The West Indians had collected more than $33,000 in less than six days work, the Australians nothing.
The rub for Ian Chappell was that this seemed to reflect the sides’ merit. Fuse burned to a stub, he spent his spare days at the Chateau Commodore lugubriously. Odd phenomena occurred at such times. John Crilly remembers his poolside group looking up at an opening sixth floor window: Chappell had found his room-service meal cold and, with a stroke of his arm, swept a steak, plate, tray, phone, coffee pot and utensils out the window. Piqued management left them floating in the pool for three days.
The weekend David Hookes was struck proved a notable one in the history of the cricketing head. Packer promptly sought the name of Amiss’s helmet-maker and had a batch ordered that evening from Birmingham. In Sunday’s Country Cup match at Canberra’s Manuka Oval, where Robinson’s Australians were playing against the World, Bob Woolmer established Kerry O’Keeffe as the first batsman caught by a helmeted fielder camped in Vellvic canopy at short leg.
The most significant event, however, was occurring on a road between Sydney and Surfers Paradise. Tony Henson, who had recently acquired a company called Coonan & Denlay specialising in equestrian caps, heard news of Hookes’ mishap on the radio as he drove north for a family holiday. As a club cricketer (and fast bowler) he’d thought deeply about Rick McCosker’s broken jaw nine months before. Word that Packer was placing big orders overseas stopped him at a call box to put colleague Arthur Wallace at C & D’s factory, in Parramatta Street, Ashfield, in touch with WSC.
Wallace was pessimistic in reporting a meeting with Marsh and Austin Robertson when Henson returned to work. ‘It can’t be done, Tony,’ Wallace said. They want us to make something that can withstand half a house brick at a hundred miles an hour.’ And Wallace was strictly right: that would need an astronaut’s helmet.
But Henson persisted. Because most head blows were glancing, a helmet need only deflect impact rather than absorb it. And protection without compromising cricket aesthetics had to be feasible. Something, perhaps, like the polo helmet with cardboard ‘Visor’ that early in the new year he put half-jokingly on his wife’s head.
School holiday crowds in Perth for the next instalment in Simpson’s comeback saga—another tense Australian victory—offered WSC one sop: Rob Langer’s long-awaited ticket out. The West Australian Education Department had declined to offer him even unpaid leave after he signed (which it had done for Sheffield Shield games), and Langer had been excused WSC duties during term times in the belief he would not be at front rank of selections.
But with Hookes and Redpath rubbed out, and Walters in apparent eclipse, Langer was promotion material when he touched down in Canberra on 16 December. ‘I literally got off the plane, went to the ground and ten minutes later was out there playing,’ he remembers.
After anti-apartheid protesters spilling onto Manuka Oval to deplore South Africans playing enlivened Langer’s deep-fielding, his 26 and 50 in two meek Australian batting performances were above the mean. He was then well placed when Ian Chappell came to Mildura personally to scout for talent as the Australians met the World again on 21 December.
The captain was in no mood to see the first three chances of the World innings at City Oval fluffed. As Robinson recalled: ‘Practically every player in the team bore the brunt of his abuse over that two-day game and his criticism was not at all unjustified. Chappell … above all is aggravated by players making fundamental or basic errors.’
Players strove to impress, though Wayne Prior bowled almost too furiously in the 35°C heat. Dismissing Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal and Greig, he had helped reduce the World to 7–182 when his leg cramped. The Australians wilted with him, and Alan Knott and Imran Khan added 129 in two and a half hours to inflate their total to 352. A few of the Australians even managed to annoy their management that night by yarning into the small hours at the Mildura Inlander Motor Inn while toasting Walters’ thirty-second birthday. It was not a cheery bunch rejoining battle the following day.
Temperatures touching 40°C that compelled drinks breaks every half hour sharpened the Test-like intensity. When Imran loosed a violent and voluble opening spell, Chappell thrashed back. He advanced on John Snow, twice flipping him beyond mid wicket for six, and batted past lunch with Davis adding an opening 165. Three quick wickets then left Rob Langer in the frame.
Four years’ frustration at the Test periphery eddied up as he applied himself. At last, he felt, he would not merely be an object of distant binoculars: ‘One thing I’d been attracted to in WSC was that the people picking the teams weren’t up there sitting miles away. They were actually on the ground with you.’
Only after an abstemious two-and-a-half-hour 50 did he gamble. In consecutive overs, Greig and Underwood disappeared over square leg for sixes. The West Australian cursed himself when bowled by Snow for 90. ‘I played a bit across it,’ Langer remembers. ‘And even John Snow chastised me for playing a shot like that and missing the hundred.’ But the West Australian’s 10-run shortfall meant less to Chappell than further failures for Walters and Kent.
The World lost lividly. Imran struck Ashley Mallett a sickening blow to the back of the head with just two runs separating the teams. Manager Ferrett blessed his invitation of a cricket-loving local doctor and ambulance personnel. At Mildura Base Hospital, Mallett learned he’d been within an inch of a paralysing spinal injury. It had not been a sunny couple of days.
The Old Melbourne Inn was an eye in the cyclone, already a refuge from care and controversy. Its downstairs ‘noise room’ offered cheap drinks and jukeboxes, ‘Mum’s’ milk bar down Flemington Road a renowned chocolate milkshake.
Visitors were struck by its hermetic atmosphere. ‘I only went there twice,’ Henry Blofeld wrote, ‘and each time it seemed like they were all corralled in this rambling old coaching inn, as if they feared they might be contaminated if they so much as stepped beyond its boundaries.’
But, unlike touring hotels of yore, the Inn was more than a staging-post. By Christmas 1977, it was home from home for eleven families, and facilities like WSCs creche were appreciated by cricketers accustomed to long absences from family and friends when on duty. Families could also accompany touring players on discounted fares, and received concessions on room rates. ‘Accommodation was up a cog from what we were used to,’ says Walker. ‘Kerry did everything well. The impact of his financial status was everywhere and players really enjoyed it.’
‘We were being spoiled rotten really,’ Mick Malone recalls. ‘Outside of WSC, there’s always been the idea of establishment versus players: the traditional image of the captain marching into the committee room and saying “You’re all a bunch of dickheads”. Now we were like celebrities.’ Managers Forsaith, Webster and Mike Denness pooled resources on a rainy 25 December for the first WSC Christmas. Eddie Barlow squeezed into a Father Christmas outfit to distribute gifts, while Greig and Collis King were unlikely limbo-dancing contestants.
Greig was in mixed spirits. His South African countrymen were features of a comfortable International Cup win on Christmas Eve. Barry Richards sacrificed a century by holing out on the cover boundary for 95. Beginning with an outswinger that removed Greenidge’s off stump, Mike Procter had then been irrepressible with the ball.
But Greig’s intimacy with WSC made him uniquely sensitive to its stresses. A mere 3147 had dotted VFL Park on a day when 3549 loyalists watched Bob Simpson and the Test cubs Peter Toohey, John Dyson and Paul Hibbert play an MCG Sheffield Shield game. WSC’s pre-Christmas schedule of twenty-seven days’ in town and country had drawn just 84,000 people and looked worse when rain ruined VFL Park International Cup games the next two days. The GTV-9 crew almost overturned their outside broadcast van in the headlong flight for the next fixture at Football Park.
The South African actually spent the day before that 28 December International Cup game in Adelaide representing WSC at a fourteen-hour meeting proposed by David Lord. But the time for talk had passed. The Australian Cricket Board’s resolve was stiffened as soon as WSC left Melbourne, when the city’s climate turned traitorously balmy for the Australia-India Test match. In spite of the visitors’ victory, some 82,217 people would attend.
ICC secretary Jack Bailey, an ACB guest, felt in the ‘front line’. The atmosphere almost held a whiff of cordite,’ he wrote. ‘All the talk was of beating Packer. There was no question over the determination of Bob Parish and his colleagues … At that time, there was a Churchillian mood about them.’