Nobody worked more willingly at his game than Rick McCosker, but having passed 40 twice in eight Supertest innings, and gathered a dozen runs besides, The General’ was palpably out of form.
His trait of playing late had been admirable against the moving ball in England, where his Test average was 48, but in WSC it looked almost retroactive. Ian Chappell suggested technical adjustments in a net session. ‘He’d noticed that even though my first movement had always been back and across, the extra pace meant that I was still moving sometimes when playing the shot,’ says McCosker. ‘And he got me to shorten my back swing so that I didn’t get so hurried and cramped.’
But charity from bowlers was unforthcoming. ‘Rick was a very good cutter and made a lot of runs off his pads,’ partner Bruce Laird remembers. ‘But Roberts and Garner and Procter gave him nothing for either shot. They’d obviously given him a lot of thought and worked him out beforehand.’
McCosker had even borrowed one of Amiss’ helmets, but discovered that his unusually small head wobbled as though within a fish bowl, and its stifling confines on hot days aggravated his sinuses. He needed time, but in this campaign the wounded had to walk.
That’s the reason I think WSC was tougher than Tests,’ Ian Chappell says. ‘At least when you struggle in Tests you can get back into form with a few Shield runs. How the fuck could you get back in to form when you were playing Roberts, Holding, Garner day after day?’
Had he not been at the Showground in the Fourth Supertest between 14 and 19 January 1978, for instance, McCosker might have been at Lismore’s Oakes Oval where a second World attack of Holding, Daniel, Julien, Barlow and King was tattooing bruises all over Trevor Chappell. The youngest of the brothers spent five and a half hours over 56: the Country Cup game’s only half-century.
Lismore’s turf trampoline was actually the best Ross Edwards’ Australians had encountered. Groundsman Neville Clarke, reputed never to have worn a shirt in his life, knew how to dress a pitch. ‘It was probably as true and fast a wicket as I’ve played on,’ believes the well-travelled Graham McKenzie. ‘Made me feel I was ten years younger.’
When teams reassembled in Sydney on 20 January, McCosker’s need of refuge from further public failure was urgent. Ian Chappell rested him with Laird, Langer and Bright for Davis, Edwards, Walters and Malone in an International Cup match.
On another pacy portion of the Showground square, batting was energetically instantaneous. Garner, hooked for two sixes fine by Greg Chappell, retaliated by striking Edwards in the throat. Things started to look a bit funny after that,’ the batsman recalls. ‘I could see two stands, two Joel Garners, two balls, the whole lot.’ Queasily conscious as he retired, he was told he had been hit in a carotid artery and lost the blood supply to his brain.
Once again, though, the pitch was also tailored for Caribbean stroke play. Jim Allen turned the sort of party trick Lloyd had been hoping for from him. His 14 fours saved his side seven overs and left its International Cup record at five victories in six attempts.
Mick Malone reviewed his options. They weren’t abundant. Line and length, he guessed. The pitch was lifeless, and the dirt-streaked white ball in his hand had long lost its swing ‘We’d gone to WSC and said: “These balls are ratshit, they do not swing”,’ he says. ‘But they’d said: “You’re wrong, they do”.’
No, the only thing swinging would be West Indians. Malone had two deliveries left, and the last West Indian pair—striker Wayne Daniel and partner Joel Garner—needed five runs from them. It was 11.48pm on Tuesday 24 January 1978, and the bowler’s isolation seemed all the starker in the floodlit cavern of VFL Park.
He looked to Ian Chappell at cover. ‘Any thoughts?’ Malone asked.
Knowing that umpire Gary Duperouzel would probably turn a blind eye to a bouncer, the captain suggested one.
‘No,’ said Malone. There’s no bounce. I don’t think I can get it over him.’
‘OK, try to get it on leg stump. Just don’t give him any room.’
John Cornell’s agony in the VIP lounge was almost exquisite as he watched. Malone’s suffering was being shared by a crowd of almost 25,000 people. It had taken the whole season, but at last the alchemy had a golden glow. A bumping pitch, blinding lights, five to make and a last man, record crowd and eight television cameras in.
He and Packer had juggled WSC’s schedule for this, the second of an International Cup night triple-header, and Cornell had managed to reach the absent impresario in Honolulu. The Boss’ was en route home from some coarse golf on the Monterey Peninsula in the Bing Crosby pro-am with partner David Graham, and was delighted to know what he was missing.
Drizzle had been visible at light-up time the night before, and the Australians’ truncated game with the World continued where twilight ice-hockey would have been cancelled. But 10,272 people had come, and the apparatus was clearly in order.
Tuesday’s half-hour rain delay cost four overs, and Cornell accepted a 3.30pm attendance of less than 5300. But the game turned at tea. Some 18,400 faces were visible in the gloaming at 7pm and the final 24,636 was the second-largest cricket crowd of the summer anywhere. Only the first day of the official Third Test at the MCG surpassed it.
The game itself had all the compressed excitement one-day cricket promised. Greg Chappell commandeered 68 in 73 balls, Jim Allen’s spontaneous strokes replied, then Ray Bright retrieved the game by bowling him and Collis King in a confused, dramatic over. King stood his ground, ignoring the incriminating stain of the fallen bail and Marsh’s pleading. ‘Collis didn’t want to go but it looked all right from where I was,’ Bright recalls. ‘And we were pretty glad to see the back of him. We knew he could really hit a ball.’
Julien and Murray conspired, though, and Garner’s nerveless hitting in Greg Chappell’s final over had deep fielders fumbling away 16 runs. Malone had been in hiding since conceding 25 in his first three overs, but his captain had exhausted his other bowlers’ quotas.
As the crowd bubbled, umpire Duperouzel hared to the sightscreen to repel children already storming the playing arena, then reprieved Malone from a palpable leg-side wide to Garner. Garner’s swipe to Greg Chappell at long on finally pitted Malone against Daniel for the penultimate delivery. Cameras swivelled round the ground like prison-yard searchlights, capturing Ian Chappell’s urgent dialogue with Malone, a mid-pitch conference of terrified tuition, and a West Indian dressing-room full of curiously camera-shy Australian women.
‘I’d probably bowled at Daniel before,’ Malone recalls. ‘But I just thought: “I’ll pitch it up and see what happens”. It was a bad ball, it was too short, it was too wide, I gave him too much room.’ Seeing the ball veer to leg, Daniel’s eyes shut with the effort of connection. So did Malone’s. The invading crowd lost sight as the ball vanished over mid wicket. Only Ian Chappell was silent. ‘Ian didn’t say a word and he didn’t need to,’ says Malone. ‘I didn’t need a “bad luck Mick”, because I knew it had been a bad ball. And I didn’t need “You’re a bastard” either. Ian’s silence was deafening. But I think I did play the next game somewhere like Toowoomba!’
The West Indians had only one gripe as twelfth-hour victors, although it was to become a common one. Return to the Old Melbourne at 2.30am meant that, with the cricketing equivalent of a hangover, they were coaxed to their bus at 11am next day for the afternoon’s match against the World. Fredericks and Greenidge fell blearily, and their 20-over total of 3–83 was marked by leg-weary running. It took Richards and a fifty-minute, seventh-wicket thrash by Julien and Murray which added 83 to set the World as many as 239.
After hovering over the 17,923 watching the World reply, though, Packer bounced from his helicopter. At a contented press conference, he jested about his rusty golf swing and an Australian Cricket Board announcement stating an ‘interest’ in its own night cricket: ‘I seem to remember them saying night cricket was absurd, just a circus act. It seems remarkable they should have discovered it so suddenly.’
Asif Iqbal went out to bat with eyes peeled for the white ball. He’d failed to lay a hand on a chance he’d lost in the crowd while fielding, and bent forward vigilantly to exploit the fatigue of Daniel and Garner. As Imran matched him stroke-for-stroke from 5–81 and as fielders flagged as well, 15 overs from the heroes of the previous evening yielded 125. The Pakistanis piled 158 in 107 minutes.
The cramming of cricket was, in fact, starting to cause ructions. Lloyd was annoyed to learn that Greig—to whom he was to be vice-captain in the merged World at the Fifth Supertest at Gloucester Park on the Friday—apparently wanted to take non-players Bob Woolmer and Dennis Amiss to Perth, rather than sending them to Hamilton for a simultaneous Country Cup game. That meant that Deryck Murray, exhausted by two months’ unbroken glovework, would cop another three days’ duty. When manager Rudi Webster pressed the point with Mike Denness, Amiss defused the situation by volunteering for Hamilton while Jim Allen offered to keep in Murray’s stead. The show had to go on.
Australia Day weekend in Hamilton was a far cry from VFL Park. It was not much of a town, Melville Oval was not much of a ground (one grandstand, classified by the National Trust, and one row of seats inside a mesh fence), and it wasn’t going to pull much of a crowd (4000 in three days).
But there was an unusual amount hinging on the game for the Australians. Rick McCosker, after a ten-day net, was searching for form. Mick Malone was hoping for redemption. Doug Walters gave little away, but his solitary fifty for a season’s work certainly troubled Ian Chappell. Then there was David Hookes. He’d taken his first steps back to big cricket two weeks after his broken jaw, face still full of wire as he batted in the nets of his West Torrens club. They’d really stood by me, wanted to play me, and gave me practice even though we were banned,’ he recalls. They just said: “If anyone complains about you practising with a broken jaw they’ll look a bit churlish”.’ Removal of the wires freed him to rejoin the tour.
Comebacks have been simpler. From the first delivery on a raw pitch, the ball refused to go straight. Openers McCosker and Kerry O’Keeffe played the thin air as Michael Holding let fly, and even the fast bowler pulled up. ‘No way man, this is dangerous,’ he said. ‘I’m going to slow down for a while.’
The Australians were thankful for the hospitality, until McCosker overstayed it by thick-edging Holding to Allen. O’Keeffe recalls the way Holding’s pleasure at taking a wicket so decently turned to disbelief when the umpire’s finger stayed down and McCosker customarily stayed put.
‘Awww, come on umpire,’ drawled Holding. No response. ‘Heeeey, Riiick.’
McCosker stood there.
The mood changed in a ball,’ says O’Keeffe. ‘Holding went back to his long run, came in at a thousand miles an hour and threw in a bouncer. Rick gloved it off the bridge of his nose and, as it lobbed toward gully, I virtually shouted: “Catch it!’”
As the ball fell just beyond reach and his partner called for a single, O’Keeffe’s heart sank. ‘I hadn’t done a thing,’ he recalls. ‘I’d been very gallant. You can make up the rest. It cut me in half, slammed into my ribs and they just went through us. Because Rick wasn’t a walker.’
Fortunately for Hookes when he arrived at number six, a couple of wickets had restored Holding’s humanity. His comeback ball from the Jamaican was a slow full-toss on leg stump, which he pushed gratefully to leg for a single. Thanks,’ said Hookes arriving at the non-striker’s end. ‘He just smiled,’ the batsman says. ‘It was the only freebie I got in two seasons.’
‘A bush match,’ Holding explains. ‘If it had been a Test match I wouldn’t have done it. I don’t believe in playing that sort of cricket too fiercely. Someone might get hurt.’
Ian Chappell knew he’d lost ‘a bastard of a toss’. He had Lillee back for the Fifth Supertest on 27 January, but Gloucester Park was airless and the pitch at its best on the first day. Greig put his feet up, watching the scoreboard and the thermometer: temperatures would hit a city record of 42°C.
Barry Richards occasionally failed in such situations. In recent years at Hampshire, he had seemed a speculator among batsmen, dying to dare. But his roommate Knott had already noticed Richards’ immersion in WSC’s challenge. ‘He practised and trained with 100 per cent dedication, always continuing when others had finished,’ the keeper wrote. ‘You were always worried that if you agreed to throw and bowl to him in practice you would be there all day, because he just wanted to bat and bat.’
Richards looked a little overdressed at Gloucester Park in a Vellvic globe, but the helmet he’d worn since Rockhampton reflected his attentiveness. ‘If I’d been five years younger I may not have bothered,’ he says. ‘But I also didn’t know what to expect. I realised that this was going to be cricket designed by marketers and it wasn’t clear how competitive it would be and, especially, how the pitches would play.’
At Rockhampton he’d discovered the helmet’s main drawback. ‘I’d grown a beard as an experiment,’ he says. ‘But when I started sweating in the helmet, it itched like hell. I can’t remember how many I got [it was 93], who got me out, anything about the ground, but I remember shaving the next day.’
Richards’ Gloucester Park itch was runs. At Hampshire, Richards had also often happily allowed the rising Gordon Greenidge his head; in Perth he unostentatiously reasserted his seniority. Greenidge had carved 51 from 98 balls at lunch, but Richards had 60 from 87. Where Greenidge sought sixes as early as 29, Richards waited until he was 84. Pipping his partner to a century in the same over of Ian Chappell leg-spin, Richards had faced 30 fewer deliveries. Both were 114 when Greenidge began hobbling, complaining of a sore hamstring as he limped off. ‘Gordon,’ as Ross Edwards observes, ‘had a habit of retiring when he felt like a bit of a rest.’ Barry Richards didn’t need one.
Greenidge’s departure brought Viv Richards to challenge his nominal rival as batting’s brand-leader. ‘We had a big problem there,’ says Max Walker. The papers were asking who was the best batsman in the world? Richards or Richards? Black or white. Barry already had a 100 when Viv got out there so it was clear we weren’t gonna get Viv out for much less than 200.’
The South African enjoyed it. It reminded him of partnering Graeme Pollock. The main difference,’ he observes, ‘was that Graeme was always keen for a single at the end of an over. So Graeme’d try to hit five fours and a single every over, while if Viv could hit all six balls of an over for four he would.’
It was no contest. In their hour and a half straddling tea, Viv could manage just 41 to Barry’s 93. Effort was sensed only when Barry caned 16 from three deliveries in Bright’s thirteenth over: an on-drive for a fourth and final six looked premeditated. ‘Never a dull moment that day,’ Bright remembers. ‘I reckon a few blokes down the order would have been fast asleep waiting for a bat by then.’
Bright bothered them finally at 4.53pm, when a miscue to deep mid-off Greg Chappell ended Barry Richards’ innings at 207. ‘Only someone with Greg’s concentration could have caught that,’ says the spinner. ‘Everyone was on the boundary and they were thinking more about stopping fours and getting the sixes back.’ Some 136 of Richards’ total had come in boundaries. He had run just one three. Sixty overs up, 1–369, and that would do. He finally removed his helmet.
There was cause for some regret. The long weekend, and the option of watching the Fifth Test televised from Adelaide had left the South African a gallery of just 3150. Not even Packer was there: he’d stayed in Sydney to visit a WSC coaching clinic instead. Instead of revelling in the skills of a personal hero, West Australian captain John Inverarity was a dissatisfied guest. ‘It was obviously cricket of a very high standard being played by some very great players,’ he says. ‘Richards was a favourite of mine but I maintained that his innings lacked any meaning because the result did not matter. The sort of cricket being played was very hollow and I wasn’t moved by the experience. The environment was meaningless.’
Blofeld saw the day epitomising cricket’s rift instead, peering across Nelson Crescent at the WACA. ‘During the match I was able to look out the windows at the back of the press-box and see a club game in progress,’ he wrote. ‘It only underlined the strong “them and us” feeling which had grown progressively stronger since the WSC matches had begun.’ Richards had deserved better but, to a South African, such sensations were familiar.
Tony Greig enjoyed his moment, batting his full card on Saturday as the World pushed on from the overnight 1–433 to 625. The Australian bowlers participated passively in dismissals, between eighty fours and eight sixes.
Max Walker was the unfortunate impediment when Viv Richards’ bullet-like hook at 170 zeroed in on him at deep fine leg. ‘It would have been six because I took it right on the fence,’ he says. ‘I tried to get my little finger out of the way but I couldn’t, and I couldn’t straighten it out after that.’ Only when Lillee struck a recoiling Greig on the back of the helmet did the key change. Lillee pointed to his own head meaningfully, drew a sheepish smile from the World captain, then had him caught at cover by Ross Edwards off a woozy drive.
When Greig then prevailed on Greenidge to resume with himself as runner, Ian Chappell startled umpire Duperouzel with the demand that Greig wear his full batting kit. The mild set-to ensuing was broken by a droll Rod Marsh. ‘He can’t wear his helmet,’ said the wicket-keeper. ‘It’s at the panel beaters.’
The Australian room was a hot, bothered retreat as Ian Davis and Bruce Laird prepared to open. Greg Chappell was nursing a right arm injured in a run-out attempt, Walker’s little finger was broken, and concern was growing of widening cracks in the salt-addled surface. Davis was immediately ill at ease. The cracks were an inch wide and they looked terrible, although to be fair it probably played easier than it looked. I thought: “How are we going to play on this?’”
Davis did not last Roberts’ first over, and just 20 runs came in the first hour as Laird and Kent fell to Imran while Roberts shattered Ian Chappell’s finger with a ball leaping from a crevice. Edwards tried to shield his captain for the remaining eighty minutes, moving stoically into line as he was peppered with short bowling.
Edwards drew the day’s final over from Roberts and, striving to cover off stump and keep his bat from harm, twice let the Antiguan strike him on the shoulder. ‘Christ they hurt,’ Edwards recalls. ‘But then Andy gave me the perfect ball. It pitched middle and cut in. I was so far to the off it just got round me and hit the top of leg stump’. One bail dropped mockingly. Australia 4–73, its captain in agony, its best batsman lame, 552 the deficit and the follow-on inevitable.
The invalids, however, gave it their all on the Sunday. Ian Chappell’s finger, lashed to a steel splint that drew blood as it stabbed his hand, swept at everything Underwood offered. His brother’s sore shoulder made him play straighter, and he exploited Greig’s cocky attacking field placings.
The skipper was adeptly caught by a cheeky, stooping Garner behind square leg, but Marsh, Gilmour and Bright remained with Greg Chappell for a total of four hours as the batsman set to rights a Supertest average of 26. Two sixes at the tail of his eight-hour 174 were his only frivolities.
Bright and Walker prolonged the chase into Monday, seeking 58 to elude the follow-on as even Greig’s off spinners begin springing from the cracks. Two flew past the prodding Walker’s nose: They went shooting over Knotty’s head: the worst bouncers I ever had, and Greigy was a blooming off spinner!’ They fell 32 from home, a difference the Australians had still to erase an hour later when Kent was their third second-innings wicket.
Ian Chappell could bat no higher than number nine, and Greig’s jollity was galling. Bright broods on his first-ball fall: ‘Greigy bowled me one of the lovely little offies that didn’t turn. I played for the turn, of course, and he knocked my off stump out. It was just about over, but it made me as irate as any dismissal in my career.’
The Australian captain’s playing summer was over as he walked in bested by an innings and 73 runs, but he wouldn’t go quietly. Kent, whose meek pair had been completed with a tame prod to short leg from Imran, was buttonholed earnestly. ‘Ian had a knack of picking the right moment,’ Kent recalls. ‘He said I had to do a bit of thinking.’ What Kent had done, his captain said, was shirk, protecting himself when his wicket was paramount.
The address marked the Queenslander deeply. ‘Ian did it all the time. He was always in the front line. Here I was getting a short one and just sticking my gloves up. If I’d taken it in the ribs or the shoulder I wouldn’t have been out. I decided I had to be a lot more cautious about preserving my wicket. I mustn’t take the easy option.’
But Chappell’s main fury was directed at Greig. He confirmed the World as ‘the best bunch of cricketers I’ve seen—with one exception.’ At the Sheraton, he even rounded on Packer to complain of Greig’s thickness with the businessman. Packer hadn’t enjoyed Australia Day weekend either—what with 13,652 rolling up to his match—but forbore the tantrum. Perhaps he hoped all behaviour in the west had been aberrant.
Greig himself had taken a telephone call at the Sheraton that he’d long expected: Sussex secretary Stan Allen in Brighton informing him, more in sorrow than anger, of the county committee’s unanimous vote sacking him as captain. Though just a month had passed since his reappointment, a kaleidoscope of events in Australia, England, Pakistan and Singapore, and Greig’s own temper, had made his fall inevitable.
Since late in 1977, Greig, Knott, Woolmer and Underwood had been keeping a friendly eye on the fortunes of former English teammates in Pakistan. Mike Brearley’s team similarly sought news of the Australian summer. Whatever their allegiances, cricketers throughout the period remained—like soldiers on opposite sides of barbed wire swapping cigarettes and family photographs—aware of commonality under the skin.
Bob Willis and John Lever, though two of the more determined anti-Packer ideologues, actually sent Derek Underwood a postcard from the spinner’s favourite sub-continental cesspit, Hyderabad’s Sainjees Hotel. Their dysenteric greetings had heartened Underwood considerably: ‘The fact that they’d taken the trouble to drop a line to Deadly, their old teammate, made me realise that there was no direct animosity against me, more animosity against what WSC stood for.’
Their worlds, though, were about to collide. While playing at Orange against the West Indians in the Country Cup on Wednesday 11 January, Imran Khan, Zaheer Abbas and ultimately Mushtaq Mohammad received invitations via Pakistan’s Canberra embassy to play in the Third Test at Karachi in a week’s time.
Packer ‘excused’ the players willingly, flying to Singapore with Cornell and Taylor to broker the deal personally with Omar Kureishi, an emissary of the Board of Cricket Control for Pakistan selection panel. Dividing the International Cricket Conference was the route to its conquest: if one board unilaterally readopted WSC players, others would surely follow. Just days before, the ACB had smartly rejected Packer’s symbolic offer of players for the pending West Indies tour.
As Mushtaq, Imran and Zaheer left Sydney on the Friday, however, the plot was complicating. English players were in revolt. Mike Brearley, broken arm in plaster after injury in a one-day match, was about to fly home, but made his last act as captain a statement of solid team opposition to the ‘Packerstanis’. His deputy Geoff Boycott then attacked WSC signatories as ‘have bat, will travel’ mercenaries, and their welcome was chill.
‘The attitude of baggage handlers was instructive,’ recalled Imran, ‘As they examined my luggage as if I was carrying gold bars, I heard remarks like: “I’d play for my country for nothing”, and it was no use trying to point out that the same applied to me.’
Players mingled suddenly with politicians. British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, on a state visit to Pakistan, met manager Ken Barrington at Lahore. Pakistan’s cricket-dotty strongman General Zia ul-Haq invited Boycott to tea. Riots were foretold if Mushtaq, Imran and Zaheer did not play but, twelve hours from the Test’s starting time in a press conference at the Intercontinental Hotel, BCCP president Chaudhury Mohammed Hussain announced he had overruled his selectors. Future selection was be restricted ‘to those available at all times for Pakistan cricket’.
Greig blamed Boycott, bristling at the Yorkshireman’s successful seizure of moral ground: ‘I saw red. It was a case of someone in a very fragile glass house throwing stones.’
Greig had been reprimanded by the Test and County Cricket Board in July 1977 for publicly disparaging the Old Trafford pitch, and honoured promises to Sussex that he would be guarded in future public remarks, but could no longer restrain himself. In his column in Sydney’s Sun, Greig called Boycott ‘the last man in the world who should comment on who he will play against’, having ‘steered well clear of the game’s best fast bowlers for the past five years’.
‘Imran Khan was itching to get a crack at Boycott. He’s in the same position as Andy Roberts, who has been chasing Boycott for several seasons. It’s an incredible fact, but Boycott has never faced Roberts in county cricket. His ability to be where fast bowlers aren’t has long been a talking point among cricketers.’ (It was a fact, although it was credible: Hampshire’s 1974 fixture with Yorkshire was rained out, Roberts had been injured the following year, absent touring with the West Indies in 1976, and Boycott had been batting in his comeback Test in 1977. Greig might also have noted that Boycott’s highest first-class score was an unbeaten 261 for MCC against a President’s Xl attack in Bridgetown headed by Roberts in 1973.)
Greig received a two-month suspension to go with his sacking. ‘He was a very saddened man when I told him,’ Allen reported. ‘It’s a sad day for me too because I like to think of him as a friend. He has done a lot for Sussex cricket.’ What had begun as an effort to build a bridge between WSC and the establishment had actually burned another.