Tony Henson’s meeting with Rod Marsh in the foyer of Sydney’s Chateau Commodore on Saturday 4 February 1978 soon became a committee. C & D’s engineer had arrived with his first batch of new-fashioned fibreglass helmets, but he and Marsh were quickly surrounded by cricketers and camp followers milling after the Australians’ International Cup semi-final defeat of the World at the Showground.
Prototypes were perused and modelled with interest. There was approval for the aesthetic advance. Marsh too, who’d been trying out his own baseball catcher-type variant, liked the fruit of his visit to C & D with Robertson a month before. A Truth journalist sidled up to ask the obvious question: would Marsh wear it in a game?
‘Naaah,’ said the keeper. ‘No way.’
Henson shrank, then his eye caught Marsh’s wink. That was my introduction to Rodney Marsh,’ he recalls.
The space-age Vellvic had become more than protective over the season. For many it was a badge proclaiming World Series Cricket’s ‘otherness’. Bob Simpson had a head born for green baggy felt, Tony Greig one made apparently for gridiron.
But critics were more divided than cricketers. Barry Richards’ argument that head injury was an occupational hazard of his profession had broad appeal. When John Dyson went for a check-up in December 1977, the twenty-three-year-old opener found even his GP in favour. ‘What do you think of these helmets?’ the doctor asked. ‘Do you think you need one?’
When the New South Welshman replied with shibboleths about safety in secure technique, the doctor shook his head: ‘You know, it never ceases to amaze me. You guys will spend $4 or $6 on buying a tin or plastic box to protect your nuts, but you won’t consider protecting a far more important part of your anatomy. Do you know how vulnerable the temple is?’
‘When he spelt it out,’ Dyson recalls, ‘I couldn’t think of any good reason not to wear one. I couldn’t get used to the motorcycle helmets in the nets, so I tried wearing a baseball helmet in a club match.’ His decision to trial headgear for Randwick against Gordon, and to adopt it in his Sheffield Shield rig was significant. Dyson had been picked for the Second Test in Perth—where Indians Mohinder Amarnath and Chetan Chauhan were also struck, coincidentally on the same day Hookes was flattened—and was using an alien accessory. ‘People would give you strange looks and a few bowlers were interested in knocking it off,’ Dyson says. Though I found that if you made runs against them that shut them up.’
Vellvics had sprouted after the Second Supertest, with Knott, Zaheer, Mushtaq, McCosker and Davis joining the initial trio of Amiss, Greig and Barry Richards as trialists. Says Davis: ‘I thought: “If I’m going to be getting four an over at a hundred miles an hour going past my head then the percentages are that I’ve a fair chance of being hit”.’
Even the International Cup was a danger zone and, when the West Indians met the World in a semi-final at the Showground on Friday 3 February, Andy Roberts showed that one-day attack can be the best defence. In 20 balls yielding six runs, Amiss edged him to second slip, Majid and Asif to Murray, Woolmer onto his stumps and Richards could not avoid a riser that Lloyd levitated to snare at first slip.
David Hookes’ helmeted half-hour reintroduction to World Series Cricket at the end of a straightforward six-wicket Australian victory saw the team into Sunday’s final. Four from Underwood was cheered, six from Mushtaq acclaimed, and a mishit from the former to the latter forgiven.
Hookes, it seemed, had acquired a figurative substance. Wrote Adrian MacGregor: ‘Hookes’ martyrdom was the greatest service he could have performed WSC. Any suggestion of sham disappeared.’ No one seemed to mind the helmet hiding Hookes’ blonde locks if, thanks to its protection, they could see him bat.
Mr and Mrs Tony Henson were among 19,000 at the Showground for the International Cup Final: Greg Chappell’s Australians against Clive Lloyd’s West Indians. A smorgasbord in the VIP area looked inviting when Australia were set a meagre 125, but at that moment Austin Robertson tapped Henson’s shoulder. ‘Marshy wants to see you,’ he said.
With Bruce Laird’s hand broken by Imran, Marsh had volunteered to open the Australian innings. He theorised that keepers just off the field should be ideal openers, their eyes attuned to light, line and pace. So when Henson arrived in the Australian rooms, he discovered Marsh padded up, with a cigarette protruding from between peak and visor of a new C & D helmet. ‘I wanna wear this out today,’ he said simply.
‘No way,’ said Henson emphatically. ‘You can’t. This is only a prototype.’ It was barely that: little more than a reinforced fibreglass bucket with a flat sheet of clear polycarbonate bent, rather than prestressed, round the front. If Marsh was struck and injured, Henson thought, C & D’s name and the whole helmet concept would be mud. But Marsh wouldn’t be swayed. Henson returned to the VIP room, appetite lost.
Passing the commentary box on his way, he met Tony Cozier. What’s wrong Tony?’ the West Indian asked. ‘You’re white as a sheet.’
The distant Marsh and Davis (in his own Vellvic) were walking out to open. Henson explained and, hearing debate in the box about what Marsh was wearing, consoled himself with the thought that at least his helmet truly looked like a cap. He had now to hope it proved more protective.
The Australians wanted to win as quickly as possible; the pitch did reward strokes and Marsh carved about him. Henson, though, felt rather unpatriotic. ‘I’m ashamed to say I sat there hoping every ball that Rod would just get out,’ he recalls. ‘One ball and a serious injury could have put the idea back years.’
He choked a cheer when Marsh holed out to Garner at deep backward square and felt a more appropriate disappointment when Ross Edwards was run out attempting an unwise second on Jim Allen’s arm. Then Hookes’ arrival stirred all: twice from successive deliveries he swung Roberts for six, his habitual tug of the cap peak now replaced by an adjustment of his visor. Chappell responded with two upright strokes through mid wicket, and their 50-stand in thirty-eight minutes left Australia needing 49 from its remaining seven wickets.
But if Hookes’ overeager chip to mid wicket Richards dismayed the crowd, it devastated Henson. ‘I’d thought my worries were over,’ he remembers, ‘but then I saw Rob Langer coming out to bat wearing Rod’s helmet.’
Langer had long been a potential helmet consumer. Wary of head injury after a schooldays football injury, he had suffered a worrying series of headaches after being struck in the head by Len Pascoe playing Sheffield Shield. Unfortunately, he had been a little overkeen. We’d no idea at this stage that there should be different sizes for different players,’ Henson explains. ‘And Robbie had this huge bonce. His head was as tight as a pea in a pod and he couldn’t get it on properly.’
After trying for a couple of overs to adjust the helmet, Langer jettisoned it. His bareheaded hook at Garner was caught behind. After the bowler also trapped Chappell, and had Walters caught from an elderly self-protecting poke, Wayne Daniel removed the Australian tail with the team still shy of 100. There’d been no poetry to the International Cup Final, but much motion.
Capitulation in Canberra’s Country Cup Final the next day meant the WSC Australians had now played for $50,000 in a week and come up with less than nothing. Ian Chappell, Bruce Laird and then Gary Gilmour would be convalescents during the Sixth Supertest, and Marsh’s nagging knee meant he would probably play as a batsman alone. Rick McCosker, Richie Robinson and Pascoe were called up.
At the fag end of a punishing season on 9 February 1978, VFL Park’s pitch was tame but still tricky. As Davis and McCosker settled, Garner struck the former’s helmeted head. His only injury was a stiff neck for a few days thereafter, mostly from bearing the new burden.
Davis found some elusive touch, though McCosker—like Chesty Bond behind a vast abdominal pad—still found form elusive. He searched and snicked, but stayed, and looked more secure when injuries to Roberts and Daniel after their summers of endeavour reduced the World’s bowling resources.
Greg Chappell’s innings in Perth had revived him and he rolled into his strokes fluently. With Tony Greig and Asif Iqbal having to bowl more than 30 overs, batsmen could finally see a way out.
Garner was the greatest menace, his off cutters skidding into Chappell’s pads so regularly that their cane shattered. The exposed bone was permanently dented. ‘I had a ball-sized indentation in my shin for years after that,’ he recalls. The wicket was so dicey that you had to be conscious of getting that second line of defence there.’
But luck was finally siding with the Australians. McCosker grafted longer than all his previous innings in toto for 129. By the time he was caught in the gully, Chappell had passed his score and with a carefree Hookes added 152 in less than an hour and a half. The stand-in captain’s declaration an hour from stumps on the Friday suspended his 246 in six hours a teasing run short of his highest Test score.
Marsh had decided that his knee was negotiable for keeping, but Lillee—ankle-strapped and wary of the sandpit surface—found his rhythm even more elusive. Just when he didn’t need it, Lillee’s captain dropped a straightforward chance from Viv Richards when the batsman was four. Ten fours followed in an hour as the bowler’s head sank.
Ross Edwards despaired in the covers as Richards demonstrated the martial art of cricket. Lillee was bowling as badly as he’d ever seen him. ‘Fot was all over the place,’ he recalls. ‘Yards too short. And every time he dropped one in, Viv’d hit him over mid wicket or over cover. He’d got into the 90s and I was thinking: “For fuck’s sake Fot, don’t bowl short”.’
Lillee did. ‘Halfway down,’ Edwards recalls. ‘Viv pulled it so hard that he kept spinning round and finished up facing cover. And he just looked straight at me and raised his fist.’
Edwards also remembers Richards’ fury when a ball from Bright zipped beneath his bat after four and a half hours and trapped him leg-before for 170. ‘Christ was he shitty!’ Edwards says. ‘It was just a little spinner that kept low and he walked off in a real stink. He’d really set himself to beat Greg’s score that day.’
The Australian lead of 104 looked too slender when the ball truly began to tunnel. Garner picked out Chappell’s shin again to the first ball of his second innings, and the normally introverted Australian rebelled. ‘You big bastard,’ he shouted at the West Indian. ‘You hit me on the shin again and I’m going to come down and hit you with this bat.’ When caught cheaply glancing, he was partly relieved to have escaped further denting.
Hookes, though, was in good heart. Almost too good. ‘Greg told me off at lunch when I was 15 or 16, because I was playing the same way as I had in the first innings at 3–360,’ Hookes remembers. ‘He told me it was another day, and to forget about too many shots.’ He sobered up in his second half-century of the match, underpinning the Australians’ 167.
The 235 runs separating the World from a clean sweep on the last day looked more difficult when Lillee at last salvaged something from the summer. Viv Richards edged his second delivery, first slip Chappell was awake, and the Antiguan’s average tumbled to 95.
Still ill at ease, Lillee notified GTV-9’s outside broadcast van: would they film his bowling action front-on? After several overs study at lunch, he finally exclaimed: ‘Got it!’ His arm had not been coming over straight. Reaching tall in the afternoon, he claimed 5–82, and Walker’s fifth scalp for 62 banked $33,333 for the Australians. At last.
The summer of 1977–78 ended with cricket still profoundly split. As WSC concluded in Melbourne drizzle before a damp 2700, Bob Simpson and his fifteen Australians were boarding their airliner in Sydney for three months in the West Indian sun.
Turning forty-two a fortnight earlier, Simpson had felt half his age. After his season’s second century, he had taken the last wicket of a picaresque six-day Test against India in Adelaide to clinch a well-contested series 3–2. Simpson bestowed two birthday cakes sent by Indian manager Polly Umrigar on the’ local children’s hospital, as a This Is Your Life crew circulated filming tributes to the Australian. ‘On those few days in Adelaide,’ Henry Blofeld wrote, ‘Test cricket needed no legal advocate. It defended itself in a brilliantly coherent and unanswerable way.’
As well as promoting an echelon of young Australians, summer had rehabilitated a few others. In the preceding year, Gary Cosier’s marriage had broken up, he had been left behind by colleagues embracing WSC and, while in England, learned that he had lost his job at home after a change of ownership at radio station 5AA.
Jeff Thomson had helped bring Cosier together with his own patron, Brisbane’s 4IP. Its $12,500 contract was a lifeline. ‘It wasn’t big money or anything, and I’d enjoyed my cricket in Adelaide and didn’t really want to go,’ he says. ‘But a job’s a job, especially one where I was going to get time off to play.’
Simpson’s side was cheerful and exuberant, but its artificiality was evident. ‘There were a lot of new faces, and everyone was trying to make a name for themselves,’ says vice-captain Craig Serjeant. ‘It was a good feeling, although I don’t know there was the comradeship of a really close-knit side. You didn’t tend to share in the other blokes’ successes all that much, because they were competitors.’
Players were projected into roles. Finding himself a senior player, Cosier felt obliged to entertain: ‘I was reasonably aggressive anyway, but I kind of felt that perhaps I should be doing something to get these crowds in to watch. Whack a few round.’ Though he batted productively, a faulty pull cost him his wicket four times: ‘I made runs, but if I’d been smart about it I would have played more patiently.’
John Dyson could not quite feel a Test cricketer. ‘It was my first experience of the interstate media and you couldn’t help reading what they wrote,’ he says. ‘People were searching for solutions that summer and all the papers felt that their own state players should be in the team. So I felt every time I went in: “This time I’ve just got to get a score”.’
Unable to break the Indian spinners’ line, he batted starchily. They bowled well to their close fielders and you got very little loose stuff,’ says Dyson. ‘Because I couldn’t sweep I tended to drive everything on middle and leg to either mid on or mid wicket, and they got wise to that.’
Serjeant traces his pair at the Gabba to idle perusal between innings of a newspaper that unkindly referred to the duck in his last English innings. Trouble duly came in threes. ‘I hit my second ball in the middle,’ he recalls. ‘But, because I was so tentative, it came down on my foot and just rolled back onto leg stump.’looked forward. They need
Closer in age to the selectors than to his side, Simpson was a somewhat remote figure, most at home among the young New South Welshmen he’d coached. On the field he was a director rather than a chairman, and disappointed Serjeant by rarely including him in decision-making. ‘Obviously there wasn’t a lot of need to consult me because we were all pretty young,’ he says. ‘But you can only learn so much by watching. You can learn a lot knowing what’s in a bloke’s mind when he’s making a decision.’
Nor was Simpson a pacifist. He gave nothing away of his feelings towards the Chappells, and spoke as though they’d been written out of history altogether. When he finally declared his availability for the West Indies on 14 January, Simpson looked forward. They need me,’ he said. There is a need for me to lead this team and to try and achieve what we set out to do—rebuild the Australian team.’
As he thoughtfully ate ice-cream beneath a WSC sunhat at VFL Park on its season’s last day, Packer was aware that he was still building. There were fewer around him than had attended his opening day three months earlier. His six Supertests had attracted an average 5311 people per day to their improvised grounds, compared to the 11,540 drawn daily by Tests ordinaire.
While it had started from scratch, WSC’s $3 million loss had been exacerbated by abrupt changes of plan and a schizophrenic attitude to costs. The cricket enthusiasts and CPH executives running WSC had never been in sympathy. The former, loose in cricket heaven, regarded the latter as ignorant yes-men. The latter moaned of the former spending all their time watching games rather than running them.
Publicist Chris Forsyth in his contemporaneous The Great Cricket Hijack ended up lampooning general manager Vern Stone for ‘hard-nosing his way out of tight corners’ in ‘near total ignorance’: ‘Little wonder that people involved in planning, administering, conducting and promoting a 12-week cricket series could scarcely hide their dismay.’ But, as Stone found, cricket is rich in coaching texts and poor in accounting manuals. Because of CPH reservations about WSC, spasms of spending were followed by periods of penitent austerity. Packer would allow John Cornell to spend $49,000 on each WSC advertisement—eight times a standard cost—while Stone was plied with memos from CPH deputy chairman Harry Chester demanding vigilance and discipline.
Stone couldn’t win. When the VIP area cost $17,000 to feed at the First Supertest, Stone and Chester agreed to limit fare at the Second Supertest to open sandwiches. Without warning Packer walked in there with an eight-person entourage including Neville Wran, and enquired when the buffet followed. He was not a happy magnate. Raiding a downstairs wedding reception, Stone’s offsider Ern Steet produced the buffet within forty-five minutes. Packer had gone.
WSC had also failed to explain itself promotionally. Accustomed to a century of green-and-gold tradition, cricket fans were unconvinced by the premise that better money improved standards. A widespread sentiment was that Dennis Lillee had bowled for Australia in Tests, but bowled for himself in Supertests.
Some of Forsyth’s news releases were almost deliberate baits. His infamous boundary-count after the First Supertest—where he cited the eighty-seven fours and three sixes struck in the game as proof it had been ‘memorable and far superior to what went on in Brisbane’—was loudly heckled. Jack Fingleton retorted: ‘Chris old chap, fours have not a single thing to do with it, but the fact that the Packer outfit had to put out this particular piece of propaganda is indicative to me.’ But because Forsyth was known at CPH to be writing Hijack, his eccentricities were indulged.
Yet in the context of the CPH organisation, however, WSC had been counted out rather wishfully. While ratings figures had been merely respectable and its commentary box had sounded strained in striving to acclaim the talent on display, CPH had enjoyed a harvest of budget local television. Even the equivocation of sponsors and advertisers was not entirely a setback. While critics scoffed at the high proportion of ‘in-house ads’ for CPH products like Women’s Weekly and other television attractions, Packer was actually replicating the strategy of American Broadcasting Corporation’s Roone Arledge in the US: after coarsing its coverage of the 1976 Montreal Olympics with program promos, ABC had enjoyed an enormous ratings pay-off.
Indeed, if cricket ‘revolution’ had not quite occurred, there was patently a television uprising in progress. Producer David Hill, red phone at his side connecting him to a superintending Packer, had spent his $1.4 million adroitly. With eight cameras and rich replay resources, he had shocked, irritated and eventually intrigued viewers used to a reverent distance.
John Crilly and Brian Morelli had spent hours explaining to rookie cricket cameramen that a call for ‘umpire’ did not mean the one at square leg, and that ‘batsman’ meant the man on strike. Videodisc jockeys needed to know that replaying dismissals demanded only the frames either side of a disintegrating wicket, catch or lbw shout, not the tale from the top of the bowler’s run to the arrival of the new batsman. Although they had resisted David Grant’s boundary interviews, the players had adapted to pitch microphones. On one occasion, Gary Gilmour had even used them to communicate with twelfth man Ray Bright. When Bright’s attention proved hard to attract one cold day early in the season, Gilmour had leant to the bottom of the stumps to advise: ‘Brighty, do you think you could send a jumper out before a man freezes to death?’
Snug in condoms for protection, the microphones had given a new, sometimes blue, perspective on the game. ‘The count for the first season was something like 13 shits, 14 you bastards, three fucks and one cunt that got on the air,’ Crilly recalls. ‘We were still learning and a few people were a bit slow with the faders.’
WSC’s techniques gingered even the ABC. The national broadcaster began filming tosses and roving with a backpack cameraman, for whom it unsuccessfully sought permission to accompany twelfth men onto the field at drinks breaks.
WSC did, though, need the crowds. While gate takings had a lesser role for corporate cricket, people meant popularity and share of public imagination. Crowds would ratchet up ratings, and finally dictate advertising support.
Tests had bested Supertests at the gate, but the comparisons tended to distort the relative strength of the Australian Cricket Board. WSC had been at the obvious handicap of exile to non-cricket grounds, and it was already apparent that this was temporary. Among Packer’s guests at the Sixth Supertest was Queensland’s Sports Minister: the Gabba’s arms had been opened.
Packer knew that WSC could never reproduce Test tradition. In fact, he resisted efforts to try. Stone recalls his employer’s scandalised response to the idea of green WSC caps resembling the official lid: ‘Listen son, you’ve gotta earn those.’ Absence of antiquity, however, held an advantage. WSC’s only loyalty was to itself. There was, in the end, no need to stage any match in Adelaide if it lost money. Even Supertests were dispensable if uneconomic. WSC could concentrate on venues and variants of the game that had greatest commercial logic.
Almost 60,000 had attended four mid-week night matches, which cohered with leisure statistics showing rising attendances at after-hours entertainments like trotting and greyhound racing, and crowds shrinking at football and horse racing. As sports historian Shayne Quick concluded: ‘By the end of WSC’s first domestic season, it was obvious where its future success lay; with a different style of cricket and a different breed of fan.’
The ACB’s outlook was therefore bleaker than was recognised. Neither WSC nor the ACB was going to make serious money from a single-product market now split by competition. The new domestic duopoly had slashed ACB takings for five Tests to less than $400,000, compared to $1.13 million from six in 1975–76. And on that money, plus the largesse of Benson and Hedges and the ABC, the board had to subsidise Australian cricket root and branch. WSC’s losses were offset by its television value, and it was not obliged to sustain money-burners like a Sheffield Shield. The true toll of the International Cricket Conference’s High Court misadventures also emerged when chairman David Clark and secretary Jack Bailey visited Australia on a global jaunt in January. They advised the ACB and brother boards that they were already saddled with $350,000 in legal costs and faced finding more if they decided to appeal. Nobody felt litigious.
The ACB’s Test match summer had ended in Adelaide on an apparent upswing. It had done everything right and WSC had done a lot wrong. But that was the problem. The board could not afford to falter, and WSC had a whole winter to prepare itself for the 1978–79 season.
Packer, moreover, was not about to blink. As he told the 170 players and guests at WSC’s break-up bash at Lazar’s in Melbourne, their organisation was planning to grow. There will never be a shortfall of cash,’ he said. The only thing that will stop us is a lowering of the standard of cricket… We were amateurs this year. Next year we’re going to do it properly.’
The players had been well paid for their loyalty. In addition to the $1.3 million in salaries distributed, winner-take-all prize money of more than $200,000 ($78,375 to the West Indians, $61,700 to the Australians and $61,425 to the World) had been deposited in a trust for tax-efficient dispersal after three years.
Touring life could also be a money-spinner. Meal allowance was based on three square Old Melbourne feeds—a $7.15 breakfast (juice, cornflakes, omelette, toast, coffee), a $9.70 lunch (seafood cocktail, soup, steak, apple pie, coffee) and identical dinner—and distributed on all days. Dressing-room lunches during playing days put $10 in your pocket. Patronise the regular cocktail evenings and receptions, and one could bank a tad more.
But loyalty towards The Boss’ was not entirely a bought one. A curious fondness and mutual awe had evolved, born of Packer’s affinity for sporting champions and the cricketers’ rudimentary understanding of business.
Packer had been everywhere, joining practices, mowing outfields, opening his house to players who made use of his tennis court and swimming pool. He even tolerated Hookes’ jibe when he visited: ‘Here comes the big capitalist.’ One of Packer’s few role models—aside from his father and Genghis Khan—was William John Smith alias Gunboat. A Sydney trade unionist turned financier and industrialist— the architect of Australian Consolidated Industries—he wrote at his plutocratic peak: ‘The world goes well with me. I direct industry on a vast scale … I have no trouble with labour. Men who have grown up with me in the industry call me “Bill” and I call them by their Christian names. I know every man in our works.’ Packer’s works were screens and fields, but he sought the same satisfaction.
It was an odd rapport. Packer’s alcoholic abstinence caused him some discomfiture and—placing Jack Nicklaus on a professional pedestal—he could never completely come to terms with his cricketers’ eccentric, superstitious ways. But his familiarity was far removed from the ACB’s distant paternalism. Packer was younger than Bob Simpson. A 1970s man. ‘I thought he was a great guy,’ says Gilmour. ‘He’d eat with us, drink with us, come to practice and bowl to you and dive round the field. He was a sportsman really, a competitor. If he’d played marbles, he would’ve had World Series Marbles.’ And while he swore round his players, he was unaffectedly sweet with their partners. Ross Edwards’ wife Lyndall remembers Packer crossing the floor at a Perth dinner to introduce himself. ‘I should just like to tell you,’ he said, ‘how well your husband acquitted himself in court in London.’
Appreciative Australians had wondered what to offer ‘The Boss’ at Lazar’s in farewell. ‘What do you give the guy who’s got everything?’ recalls Max Walker. ‘You can’t give him a silver cigarette case. He’s probably got a gold one. So we went for the old autographed cricket bat.’ Packer seemed genuinely moved. ‘You probably don’t understand how much I’m going to treasure this,’ he said. ‘It’s gotta be the world’s most expensive cricket bat. I’ve put $2.9 million into this bat and you guys, so far, and I want to thank every one of you. It’ll never leave my side.’
On behalf of the West Indians, Rudi Webster presented Packer with a premonitory gift: an elaborate voodoo doll. For Packer had always wanted to see some cricket in the islands of the Caribbean.