Despite his usual pre-match routine of half a dozen beers and an early night, Ian Chappell woke with a start in Adelaide after only a couple of hours. The Third Supertest at Football Park was eight hours off, but sleep felt impossible. All he could see in his mind was being hit in the head by a cricket ball. ‘What the hell are you thinking about that for?’ he seethed at himself. ‘You’ve gotta go out tomorrow and face Roberts and the rest of them.’
In the previous fortnight he’d seen South Australian compadres Hookes and Mallett laid low, but it wasn’t like him to lose sleep over such acts of God. He’d even made a point of lunching next to Imran in Mildura. ‘As a professional sportsman you’ve got have the ability to cancel that sort of thing out,’ he philosophises. ‘You’ve got to be able to argue with your wife in the morning, when she might have said “I won’t be here when you get home”, but still get in your car, go to the ground and face Roberts and Holding and Garner and concentrate on what’s going on.’
Studying his hotel-room ceiling, he recalled Paul Sheahan’s advice: Don’t resist negative thoughts; follow them with something positive. He’d gone a while without a century. Today would be his day.
Chappell’s first duty on 31 December 1977 was pleasant. He told Rob Langer he’d been picked for what he could consider his Test debut. His second duty was successful. He won the toss from Clive Lloyd for the first time and batted on what he knew to be a slow pitch and a slick outfield.
Still the captain’s mind wandered when he joined Bruce Laird in the fourth over, but it was his day. Michael Holding’s frail shoulder finally gave way, and Lloyd’s decision to omit Wayne Daniel for off spinner Albert Padmore reduced the West Indians to a pace pairing of just Roberts and Garner. Laird’s solidity freed Chappell to focus on his inner game, and the captain reproved error as his opponents found a rewarding length elusive.
The opener was 19 at lunch, but Chappell was past his half-century and later saw Langer reward his faith. Padmore and Collis King were feasted on. As Garner’s thrust petered, Chappell cut three boundaries in an over, and a trademark pull for four from that bowler raised the first Supertest century in four hours. Greg Chappell, demoted to break the bunching of right-handers, rediscovered touch to ratify Australian ascendancy at 3–261. Back at the Hotel Australia, the New Year’s Eve entertainment organised by John Crilly was a casino night around an improvised roulette wheel and a print of Deep Throat for the West Indians.
Although a day in the sun, opponents drooping, had been routine at the Chappell era’s peak, these were not the old days. Of custom there had also been a vast crowd to soak it in. But Richie Benaud’s commentators had spent a listless day searching for spectators to kindle atmosphere. Brian Morelli recalls finding most of the 3000 congregated in the grandstand, because the general aluminium seating was too hot to sit on.
Packer, in a baseball cap to protect his sensitive skin, was among fewer than 3500 who came to watch the home-town brothers extend their partnership to 120 on New Year’s Day. ‘Once he looked back over his shoulder,’ wrote John Benaud, Richie’s brother in Sydney’s Sun. ‘Did he catch a glimpse of the devil that he once urged to take the hindmost?’
The Australians disappointed him. The elder Chappell was athletically caught by substitute fielder Jim Allen mishooking Garner after six and a half hours, and only Kent settled after Roberts ended Greg Chappell’s three-hour 90. An hour before tea the West Indies were threatening to pass the Australians’ 388 by stumps.
Lillee’s season of struggle was becoming an unspoken byword. His five wickets thus far had cost 60 runs each. Because Lillee gathered so much locomotion from his approach, he was tormented by rough run-ups that felt like ‘ploughing through sand’. Opponents sensed his discomfort, and Roy Fredericks and Gordon Greenidge used their nine overs before the break to exploit it: 73 runs included thirteen boundaries.
When Ian Chappell gambled on his brother’s medium pace, however, his fortune would have bankrupted Crilly’s roulette wheel. Aided by doubtful caught-behind decisions against Fredericks and Rowe, the flutter proved worth 5–20. Lillee, at last, celebrated a Richards edge. At a hurried corridor conference when his rivals were rounded up for 145 on Monday, Ian Chappell acknowledged the improbability of it all by declining to enforce the follow-on. Now it was time to graft.
The stubbornness that Bruce Laird’s captain had seen in England in 1975 was suited to West Indian challenge. The opener glowed when bruised. ‘Bruce I’d seen a bit of,’ says Chappell. ‘And if there was ever a guy you wanted to send out to blunt fast bowling, it was Stumpy.’ Laird spent a neat four and half hours at his century and, while the West Indians worked steadily through his partners, no declaration came until their target exceeded 500.
The visitors, Chappell knew, retained the ability to astonish. Langer was dumbstruck when Bernard Julien tumbled into his full-blooded hook just behind square leg. Even watching the replay, he could not comprehend it: ‘I tried to do everything right. I can remember rolling my wrists to keep the ball down and I really middled it. We had a drink later and I think he was still wondering how he’d caught it.’
Richards and Fredericks drove headlong for an hour and a half, and Australian fielding frayed as their stand reached 129. Laird at mid wicket was feeling a misfielding culprit when he dived Julien-style for Fredericks’ pull and rose, baffled, with the ball. Richards stood alone as Lillee and Bright winkled out his partners over the next three hours. The soft hum of resurgence was maintained by the visit of David Hookes, who lived within sight of the park in West Lakes. Jaw wired, he patted back underarms in the nets among a knot of well-wishers.
Winners at last, the Chappells, Lillee and Marsh could overlook the fact that a 190-run Test defeat of the West Indies two years before, virtually across the road at Adelaide Oval, had attracted a crowd nine times the meagre 15,210 of this 220-run triumph. Their team had earned $16,667 this time, of course, against $3000.
World Series Cricket itself, though, could not neglect comparison. Football Park, in which John Maley had invested thousands of hours, was deleted as a venue. It was a desperate advance guard WSC sent to Perth to promote three International Cup matches.
Vern Stone’s confidence that the pattern would break in the West was that of a native. WSC could almost call Perth a company town. Cornell and Robertson, Stone and Treasure, Maley, Forsaith and Crilly called it home, as did Lillee and Marsh, Langer and Laird, Malone, McKenzie and Ross Edwards.
Perth had gone without a Test the previous summer despite its recent abundance of cricket talent. And crucially, WSC had twice its usual television grip: STW-9 shared a program-buying cartel with TVW-7 and both would be telecasting the games.
If, that was, they were ready to be telecast. WSC’s itinerary had stretched taut resources. Complete resurfacing of the salt-riddled Gloucester Park square had been necessary, as had outside purchase of water because of Perth’s summer drought. Fred Bolton had been flown from Kensington golf course to design a new reticulation system for the ground, and Packer himself had joined in mowing the outfield to make the pacing park a camp fit for cricket. Even the sceptical Blofeld saluted the effort: The transformation was astonishing, for when I first saw the park the day after I arrived in Perth it had been converted into an attractive cricket ground with the boats on Perth Water at one side giving it a pleasant atmosphere.’
Gloucester Park’s other life, though, left producer David Hill little margin for error: it was hosting the $100,000 Benson and Hedges Cup trot the night before the game, and WSC did not gain official custody of the venue until midnight on Saturday 7 December.
‘It was only a day match the next day so we didn’t have much time,’ remembers Brian Morelli. The scaffolders went in the minute they finished.’ Richie Benaud was to preview from his eyrie at 10.20am local time and, as dawn broke, gantries were still strewn in pieces across the track. It was not until 10.10am that Hill was sure WSC would make it to air.
The pre-match politics were familiar. ‘It was the same stuff as usually happened,’ Stone recalls. ‘Mysteriously, people emerged to put parking tickets on cars. Police banned liquor going in to our ground while they were letting it into the WACA. But we had a queue. We’d been opening the gates and waiting an hour for people to turn up. This time they were lined up.’ More than 13,000 Perth patriots arrived; easily a WSC record.
The Australians played, unfortunately, like a team happier with privacy. Against a West Indian pace attack supplemented by Wayne Daniel and Bernard Julien, the home side stumbled to 121 from 28 overs. Lillee then crooked an ankle in his fifth over on the uneven surface. His hobbling retirement on the shoulder of his father Keith completed a poor day’s salesmanship.
Early rain discouraged spectators the next day as well, trimming 20 overs from the Australians’ match against the World, but a faithful 9000 approved 87 from stopgap opener Greg Chappell and a three-wicket victory. The West Indians’ defeat of the World on Monday brought Perth’s three-day turnout to almost 29,000: a healthy 6000 more, in fact, than the ACB’s five Test days there.
Perth had two unavoidable bum notes. With characteristic lack of fuss, Robinson had decided he did not want to be first among seconds: he resigned the captaincy of the Australians’ Country Cup side. ‘I think if I had a real beef with WSC it was that I was made captain of that second XI,’ he says. ‘It was logical, I suppose, because I had the experience with Victoria, but I thought it was a bit wrong that they hadn’t told me when I’d signed. I would always have joined but, with all the extra duties a captain handles, I would have held out for a bit more money if I’d known I was it.’
The team elected Ross Edwards in his stead, again a man who never said no, and his first match at Maitland gave Robinson a chance to prove he could still be counted on. Their decisive unbeaten partnership of 65 came beneath a vault of inky cloud after a freak electrical storm that upended a sightscreen.
The other bum note—to Forsaith, Ferrett, Denness and Webster—had Packer’s signature: a few locals seemed to have mislaid their contract clause requiring promotional devotion.
One of the first commitments WSC players had honoured was posing for a grand team photo mingling with ‘Ronald McDonald’, the clown mascot of the fast-food chain distributing the poster. Wayne Daniel and Len Pascoe had giggled through a television commercial, but there had since been several truants when marketing was mentioned. Chris Forsyth found Lillee, Marsh and Malone particularly difficult when press duty called: ‘Each was willing … if the financial incentives were great, but for the occasions when no money was available they were decidedly disinterested.’
Humbler souls, especially ‘Champagne Tourists’, were more willing. Edwards remembers visiting four McDonald’s outlets in a morning: When we realised it wasn’t as though we were going to pull any big crowds, we went round saying g’day to the staff.’ In country centres, co-promoters were recompensed for air fares and accommodation by the availability of players for personal appearances. We’d go to Fred’s Shoe Store and there’d be a sign outside saying “Come and meet the WSC cricketers!”,’ recalls Edwards. We’d sign autographs and press the flesh, and it was great really because the cockies’d all be saying it was the first time they’d ever seen dinkum, competitive cricket.’
It was quaint for Graham McKenzie, no longer a household name seven years after his last Test: The kids had never seen me play, maybe never heard of me. Occasionally I’d hear a dad say: “You’d better get his autograph. I was a fan of his when I was a boy”.’
Foreigners were happier celebrities, especially South Africans otherwise confined by county cricket. We were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at being “on-tour”,’ Barry Richards says. While money was important, it was exposure to international cricket that we valued.’ Mike Procter wrote: ‘Cricketers must be the hardest sportsmen to please—they moan about having to get places on time, about the food and having to do a few promotions for their employer. As far as I was concerned, I was lucky to be there.’
Greig was a role model almost too expert. At Sydney’s Chateau Commodore prior to the Fourth Supertest between Australia and the World, he intercepted Barry Richards en route to a photo session with the Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraphy offering $160 for a store-opening appearance instead.
Forsyth was furious: Greig should have known better. WSC needed all the publicity it could get, and not one Fairfax reporter had been sent to Adelaide or Perth. Richards, too, settled for the unpaid front-page. ‘In those days, it was the sort of money you’d think about,’ he says. ‘But it wasn’t going to make or break anyone.’ Greig stalked off with a sneer: ‘If you want your picture in the paper so much instead of earning $160 I can’t help you.’
The West Indians meantime savoured their success. At last they felt true professionals, secure in their station. ‘We were kept as a unit for a long time,’ says Michael Holding. ‘Because the senior players had the men they wanted, you knew your place was not under threat and that you could do the job that you had to do.’ Chests also swelled with outside recognition:
Kerry Packer gave us pride. At that time we were just starting to climb the ladder and had a great team in the making, and the fact that Packer and whoever advised him would gamble on us was important. And Kerry Packer himself, I remember him coming into our room and kicking up a storm when we did not play our best. He knew what we could do and let us know what he thought, and that appealed to us. We thought: ‘We cannot afford to let this man down.’
Holding’s was a superbly balanced pace generation: its sprinters and endurance runners could be rotated perpetually. Nor was theirs a random violence. Laird remembers his pet cut falling into disuse. They were so disciplined,’ he says. ‘You got no width at all: I can’t remember cutting them more than half a dozen times in two and half years.’
Rick McCosker was teased forward. ‘I’d always been a back-foot player, so they kept it up to me,’ he recalls. These guys weren’t mugs you know, they had a plan and they stuck to it,’ Ian Davis, bombarded when recognised as a front-foot driver, realised he was receiving what Australians had given: ‘It was “Cricket 2000” in 1977. We were a pretty aggressive side and, because the directive was that there was no limit on short-pitched bowling, everyone just went for it. You got as much short quick stuff as you liked. Or didn’t,’ His own state of mind is reflected by an occasion when he inquired after Holding’s health. ‘Survivin’ Wiz,’ came the baritone reply. Davis heard it as: ‘Stay alive.’
Centuries had a new arithmetic. ‘You had to set yourself to bat all day,’ says Greg Chappell, ‘and accept that you weren’t going to get any more than 70–80 overs. If you faced half of those, you had also to realise that half of them you wouldn’t be able to score off. So you might get a hundred balls a day to score off. And with four fast bowlers, the most any of them will bowl is 20 overs, maybe 15, so they were never going to have a hard day at the office.’
Old rhythms were redundant. ‘If you were at the other end for a few overs,’ McCosker points out, ‘you could go fifteen minutes without a hit. Then you had someone coming at you at ninety-five miles an hour again. There was no continuity. You were switching on and off all the time.’
Rudi Webster and Sydney physiotherapist Dennis Waight were vital additions to the team. Webster, whose use of hypnotherapy on the West Indians inspired his book Winning Ways, encouraged self-discipline and self-assertion. Waight’s rigid fitness standards were vital in keeping the team’s pace attack ticking. We’d never had a single person dedicated to us before,’ says Holding. ‘And in those days we’d never heard of track suits. You played in whites. But Dennis told us that we weren’t fit enough. He got us running and stretching and training, and learned what each of us needed.’
The Australians were struck by the character change. ‘Lloydy ruled with an iron fist,’ Laird recalls. ‘He was very strict on their behaviour. There was no partying or drinking after the game and very few verbals on the field.’
Garner was a rare fraterniser, to the irritation of colleagues who preferred subsisting on ‘room-service and Chinese takeaways. ‘Some of my teammates disliked me socialising with opposing players,’ he wrote, ‘but I had my own ideas … Often I had to tell a couple of them that no one could tell me who to drink with.’
Webster and Waight came to believe that Garner’s predominant need was persuasion. When the fast bowler suddenly succumbed to a strain just before taking the field on a fiercely hot day at Gloucester Park, Webster duly directed him to Royal Perth Hospital.
‘Awww, no,’ Garner replied. ‘I’ll just wait for the doc when he gets here.’
‘No, Joel,’ the manager insisted. ‘I want you to get treatment now. It could be serious.’
Vern Stone later quizzed the manager: surely, they could have waited for the doctor? No, Webster replied, Garner was twinge-prone when hard work was in the offing. This strain could be cured by a few hours in a hot casualty-ward queue.
Among doubters the West Indians were silencing was Packer himself. When Webster had warned him two months earlier that the team would be a mettlesome opponent, Packer had laughed: That’s a joke. You don’t know how to win.’ His tune changed after West Indian victory in the First Supertest. This is dangerous,’ he admitted to the manager. ‘You’ve learned how to win, and it’ll be difficult to beat you now.’
The team the Australians were about to confront was a stark contrast There was no need for the whole of the World to exceed the sum of its parts: the parts alone would do nicely.
That every part had its own approach could cause problems. Greig had unsuccessfully wooed England’s physiotherapist, Bernie Thomas, and the idea of a collective approach to team fitness lasted one team meeting. When Eddie Barlow mentioned the mountain runs with sacks of sand that he’d decreed at Western Province, the Pakistanis were particularly restive. Asif Iqbal, renowned for his fleet feet between wickets, spoke for the room. The day you can get out in the centre and run three as fast as me,’ he said, ‘I’ll start carrying sacks of sand up mountains.’ End of subject.
As Greig recalls: ‘Barry Richards’ idea of practice was to get the best bowlers in his net, and to ask someone like Snowy to imitate Dennis Lillee, because that was who he was going to face. But Snowy didn’t like to be told to bowl a certain way at practice. He liked getting away into a net and bowling at a single stump.’
Greig’s thoughts of instilling a team ethic with blazers were thwarted by Ian Chappell, who considered them as natural as braces. ‘It bugged me that we should travel anonymously, in some cases scruffily, while establishment tour teams invariably dressed in uniform smartness,’ Greig would write. ‘But Chappell did not care at all—he would wear what he damn well pleased.’
One could, though, learn a lot. Imran Khan, the rawest World recruit, became a jackdaw for tricks traded by Procter and Snow. Cricket education in Pakistan was inhibited by jealousies and rivalries but, among the myriad models, he lengthened an ungainly mincing run, broadened his repertoire and was encouraged to stretch for extra pace.
Greig’s brush with commerce in the last year had also affected him profoundly. As Greig’s rapport with Packer strengthened, manager Mike Denness became resigned to seeing him only during playing hours, while the South Africans sensed their countryman’s ebbing engagement with cricket. ‘A World side was never going to be the same as a national side and Tony was working to a different agenda at the time,’ Richards recalls. ‘Cricket was a passing phase, with the objective of becoming involved in the whole Packer organisation … He’d come to practice but, because there were no mobile phones in those days, he was always dashing off again.’
Procter wrote of Greig as an absentee captain more visible in the media than around his team:
Cricket almost seemed secondary to Greig in Australia, he had so much going commercially. They loved him in the media but I wish he’d been able to do more on the field as World captain… I’m sure he regrets getting distracted by the commercial side of the game so soon, because he was a great trier on the field who surpassed his natural abilities by dint of effort, character and temperament.
Procter’s judgement, though, says as much about him as Greig. Cricket had little to offer the latter and—after twenty-four consecutive summers round the world and experience of high office—he had little left to give the game. Cricket, by contrast, had denied Procter everything when, as Imran discovered, he still had much to volunteer.
The more retiring Englishmen, by contrast, receded from view, especially when WSC decided to pool the World and West Indian squads for the remaining three Supertests. Lost in the talent avalanche with Woolmer and Snow, Amiss felt a little disused. That wasn’t the idea when I signed,’ he complained. ‘How am I meant to compete with that?’ Pretty soon the Australians were asking the same question.
Greig liked his bigger pool for the Fourth Supertest at the Sydney Showground: he hankered to revenge England’s 1974–75 Ashes tour. His attack was now a solar system of Roberts, Procter, Garner and Underwood, his batting order of Fredericks, Greenidge, Lloyd, himself and both Richards almost ugly in its surfeit of skill. The Australians, denied even Lillee by his ankle injury, had to vest their new ball in Wayne Prior and Gary Gilmour.
When the original World and West Indian teams were involved in International Cup games interspersed with the Supertests, however, the merger was a peculiarly dim promotional ploy. There was an arrogance like that of a body-builder flexing his pectorals in relegating Procter, joint first-class record-holder for six consecutive centuries, to number eight
The sunny Sydney Saturday, 14 January 1978, was good news for WSC. A record crowd of 14,833 spilling onto the arena behind roped-off square boundaries when Ian Chappell won the toss reflected the fact that, for the only occasion that summer, there was no official Test match in another town to tie people to television sets. Australia’s Test team had lost to India across the road at the Sydney Cricket Ground two days earlier, while its Supertest men were coming off a strong victory. WSC crowds in Perth, moreover, had been prime-time Sydney viewing.
After the premature loss of McCosker to Procter’s back-break, Laird’s century stand with Ian Chappell escorted the Australians past lunch. Watching his Westralian picks, Laird and Langer, add a spirited 90 in two hours further gratified the captain.
Laird’s second consecutive century arrived at the third stroke: a six swept from Greig was disallowed when a bail proved to have blown from the stumps, and four leg-glanced became four leg-byes two balls later. The opener’s robust hook from Roberts, though, raised his hundred in four and half hours.
Buoyed by improved sightscreening, the Australians felt more comfortable against Garner. Screens originally too short had left Garner’s hand in darkness at release, sharpening his menace in fading light.
He didn’t need help. ‘With Holding and Roberts, say, the ball would reach your midriff off a particular length,’ Langer recalls. ‘Garner would hit the same spot and it would get up to your throat. Although I’d always been a front-foot player, I began moving slightly back and across to Garner while still trying to come forward whenever I could. Most of the time, I must say, I ended up going further back.’
And it was Garner who tarnished the Australian day, yorking Laird and having Langer caught at the wicket in three balls as the light weakened. The following morning, by having Greg Chappell caught in the covers, he hastened an unruly collapse to 304 all out.
Despite Lillee’s absence, though, the Australians jessed the visitors whenever they seemed about to take off. The two Richardses threatened mayhem for half an hour, but after 36 runs Barry was bowled by a perfect Gilmour inswinger. Greg Chappell then proved a point with a bouncer that cracked Viv across the forehead. That Showground pitch was frightening,’ he says. ‘Faster than the WACA wicket at its quickest. Bouncing Viv was probably the most satisfying delivery I ever bowled. If I’d hit someone in the past it’d generally been when they’d got right through the shot. But this time I beat him for pace.’
Chappell watched in satisfaction as Dennis Waight applied icepacks. ‘It proved what I’d been saying: that on that pitch all the West Indies had to do was roll their arms over and it would go past head-high.’ The batsman, then 74, welcomed stumps a hazy fifteen minutes later.
With the second-day gate of 12,612, WSC was in danger of success, but rain then abridged the following day. Either side of a three-hour hiatus, Richards felt his way for a century with unaccustomed care in conditions suited to Walker and Gilmour. The former, profiting from extravagances by the World’s final five, strung together 7’88. What suited him, however, delighted Roberts and Procter for the final half-hour. The wicket had sweated beneath the covers and McCosker and Laird fell in a trice.
At the Commodore that night, Roberts’ usual early-evening disappearing act was disturbed by a meeting with John Crilly in the lift. Struggling for a word, the director suggested he join the evening’s bar school.
‘Don’t drink,’ said the saturnine fast bowler.
‘Come and have an orange juice then.’
The fast bowler declined, polite but firm. ‘No, thank you.’
Crilly was surprised soon after, though, to be joined in the saloon by none other than Roberts. The fast bowler wordlessly accepted an orange juice, which he cradled for the next hour while following, if not adding to, conversation. Then he was gone.
Roberts might have heard the coming storm, which scotched play for the first three hours on the Tuesday, and had Langer tugging down his cap to secure it against the gale behind the Antiguan’s arm. Recollection of it still brings a chill. ‘It was cold front, absolutely howling,’ he says. ‘And because the wicket had been under the covers in the overcast atmosphere, it was green as green.’ For five overs Langer jabbed and jumped, ever later in his strokes. An involuntary boundary ricocheted from his bat to third man as he shouldered arms too slowly. Invisible to the naked eye, the next ball plucked out his off stump.
Knott had moved back some paces, but could still see Greg Chappell’s response to the next ball: a perfectly sadistic bouncer crushing the Australian’s hand against his glove. ‘It was one of the fastest deliveries I have ever seen, and his colour just drained/ wrote the wicket-keeper. Roberts’ sequel—a little wider, a little further up—struck from the inside edge of Chappell’s withdrawing bat and scattered the stumps crazily.
Brother Ian hooked defiantly, but was in mid-stroke as a bouncer rebounded from his glove to Fredericks in the gully. Marsh was trying to withdraw his bat as he tickled Roberts to Knott, and Gilmour’s brief counterblast owed as much to the bowler’s pace as the batsman’s eye. His two fours and two sixes in an over were acclaimed. ‘Snicks,’ he says. ‘I was getting halfway through the shots, getting a nick, and they were carrying over deep fine leg.’ His middle stump then disappeared as though burgled.
The World was just 65 runs from victory with nine wickets standing and Barry Richards entrenched that night when Crilly again met Roberts in the hotel lift.
This time the West Indian broke the silence. ‘Will you be having a drink tonight?’ he asked.
Crilly didn’t much feel like it. ‘No, don’t think so Andy,’ he said. ‘Just going to unwind, and have a room service dinner.’
‘Good idea,’ Roberts replied. ‘I’ll join you.’
Moments later, Roberts banged on Crilly’s door. ‘We ordered some food,’ the director recalls. ‘And he sat there for the whole evening, not saying a word. I switched on the TV and what should come on but the bloody highlights of the day’s play. Andy just sat there through the whole thing, smiling to himself, as his wickets were replayed.’