Some hex was on Craig Serjeant on the gloomy Friday morning of 3 March 1978. Expecting to spend the First Test at Queen’s Park on substitute duties, he learned at the Trinidad Hilton that he would be replacing Rick Darling as Graeme Wood’s opening partner. Darling was a nervous kid, who often walked to the centre from a pavilion toilet. But his retching ritual had begun the night before and he was unfit to play.
Dismay filled the team when it arrived at the ground. Their unlockable dressing-room had been ransacked. Serjeant’s missing Gray-Nicolls bat was discovered half-way down a toilet. ‘Hey Serj,’ came a voice. ‘Your bat’s in the dunny.’
His captain, meanwhile, had returned from the centre cursing. Aware of the eccentricities of Caribbean curation, Simpson had been unconcerned the day before when told by the Australian’s Phil Wilkins that the Queen’s Park groundsman was hosing his pitch. But the combination of watering with an inclement morning had now made mud of the pitch square.
Respectful of Trinidad’s tradition of turn, Australia had included spinners Jim Higgs and Bruce Yardley. But the only spin important that day was the coin. Clive Lloyd won it. The West Indies would bowl.
Hoping for a prolonged delay, Serjeant spent the morning pressing the water from his bat as ground staff mopped up the oval. Surely at worst he would not be batting until late afternoon. But then came the final curse: the umpires wanted one over prior to the 12.30pm lunch. It actually became one over during lunch, for it was 12.32pm by the time the last of the ground staff’s tackle was removed and Wood looked up to see Andy Roberts at the end of his run.
The Sunday Times’ Robin Marlar described the match in his report as ‘the one over Test’. Wood barely had time to raise a protective arm as his first ball rebounded from a length, and gladly scuttled a single as the ball glanced fine. Serjeant’s first ball struck the same length, took a piece from the pitch and clipped his bat’s shoulder en route over keeper Deryck Murray’s head. Murray was again a spectator as the fourth ball soared over Wood, bounced again and eluded capture. Serjeant sat down at the break with the score 0–6 feeling far older than twenty-six.
The misfortunes of Bob Simpson’s team began, literally, on the runway. Landing in New York after a San Francisco stopover, manager Fred Bennett discovered that direct flight to St John’s in Antigua was impossible because of a pilots’ strike at Caribbean carrier BWIA. Squeezing aboard the only available transport, a chartered nineteen-seat Primair Heron, the Australians fidgeted for half an hour on the tarmac while the pilot tried to start the aircraft with jumper leads.
Five hundred steel bandsmen helped the airsick Australians attune to the local vibrations, as did their tour opener against the Leeward Islands. There were no practice wickets, an unusable centre wicket and an impossible outfield. Simpson then noticed that local boy Jim Allen was ingenuously wearing his World Series Cricket outfit. Coalitions of environment and allegiance would haunt his team for the next three months.
Having abided the International Cricket Conference embargo under protest, the West Indies Cricket Board of Control had welcomed the High Court mandate of free selection. Public sympathy, it had discovered, was firmly with WSC. As the schools blended, though, there was genuine debate about which played the superior cricket. Strangely, considering they had dominated the elite WSC, Lloyd’s team had as much to prove as Simpson’s youngsters. After all, England had embarrassed a mostly WSC Australian team, while Simpson’s combination had a fine series victory to their credit. Tony Cozier recalls:
The English press was in such a state of confusion that they were actually writing that Australia was better now that Chappell and his players were out of it. And, because people were going to such extremes to rubbish WSC, there would have been strong reaction if Simpson did even reasonably well. Lloyd’s team wanted to win as convincingly as they could to settle the argument.
Relations between the WICBC and its WSC players were strained. The board was embarrassed that it was powerless to prevent WSC signatories wearing their Packer kit. Snarled communications showed from the first one-day international: Collis King was picked though still in Australia, Alvin Kallicharran omitted when thought to be in Australia but actually in Guyana. It happened that no one shone in the game more brightly than a spunky twenty-two-year-old Bajan called Desmond Haynes, whose breakneck 148 contained a century in boundaries. His eagle eye had Wilkins calling him ‘just about the most beautiful piece of batting merchandise not signed by Kerry Packer’.
The Australians also clapped bats for the first time on the now-feted Joel Garner and the less-heralded Guyanese fast bowler Colin Everton Hunte Croft, each of whom took three cheap wickets. Garner they’d seen from afar in Australia, but Croft was something else again: a crazy contraption of arms unwinding from the extremities of the popping crease and following through with a homicidal glare. Two sixes from Cosier in a brave 84 saved some face, but the game proved a mismatch.
As the beaten Australians warmed up for the First Test at Port-of-Spain with a game against Trinidad, a third factor got on Simpson’s nerves. Four Australians were left wondering how they’d been given out, a scoreless Serjeant so far down the wicket when adjudged lbw that he was almost run out by short leg. ‘As I passed Graham Yallop he was laughing his head off,’ he says. ‘It was easy for him. He had 60-odd.’
As far as Simpson was concerned, it would also have been fitting had Douglas Sang Hue—an umpire in Australia for WSC—been wearing its badge during the game. Having always thought highly of the umpire in 1965, Simpson would write: ‘In this match he revealed a different temperament and seemed to be trying to exert his authority in matters which were not his concern.’
Kim Hughes then succumbed to appendicitis, and only Wayne Clark’s iron constitution proved immune to local food and water. At least Australia’s win against the locals suggested that Queen’s Park would be a ‘Port-of-Spin’, and the West Indies selected their own novice off-breaker for the rubber’s first match. But the twenty-three-year-old from the speck of Nevis, Derek Parry, would not relieve Roberts, Garner and Croft until Australia’s second innings was well under way.
Serjeant’s bat could have stayed down the toilet for all its industry at the crease. ‘I batted sixty-three minutes for three singles,’ he recalls. ‘I was just concentrating on playing down the line and protecting my stumps so it didn’t matter how much I played and missed.’ When he finally did touch Croft to Murray, Australia had added 10 to its lunch score in 13 overs for the loss of Wood and Yallop, and Australia was 4–23 when Simpson was late on Garner’s inswinger. Peter Toohey and Gary Cosier interjected, but the former’s willingness to hook aroused the lurking Roberts.
‘I liked the hook,’ Toohey says. ‘But I didn’t play it particularly well. My footwork wasn’t good enough and I didn’t stay side-on.’ That was sufficient to dispatch Roberts’ ‘sucker ball’ safely, but its sinister sequel went straight into Toohey’s forehead. Patrick Eagar’s famous photograph catches the kneeling batsman trying to wipe the blood from his face with a handkerchief, while an attendant Vivian Richards stands, hand aloft, signalling the dressing-room like a paramedic signalling ‘man down’. The batsman’s bloody hand prints stained twelfth man Trevor Laughlin’s shirt as he was assisted off.
Toohey remembers the tableau. ‘I was conscious the whole way through,’ he says. ‘Although I was in a bit of state of shock I can remember being propped on the dressing-room table while this local doctor stuck three stitches in my head without an anaesthetic.’ Watching Cosier’s lone hand—ninety minutes of back-foot slash-ing—Toohey resolved to resume if the batsman was still there when the eighth wicket fell.
Cosier was surprised by Toohey’s reappearance at 84. They’d patched him up, poor bloke,’ he says. ‘It was like sending a wounded man back to the battle front.’ Toohey struck a defiant three and a two but Garner yorked him, and next over Cosier slashed his last. He’d sensed Gordon Greenidge slipping back behind point as Croft approached, but gambled he would clear the fielder and only just failed. That was the way of it. Greenidge and Haynes had the West Indies within a dozen runs of Australia’s 90 by stumps, the beamish boy pulling Thomson and Higgs for sixes in his 53.
Toohey had almost forgotten a miscellaneous blow on his thumb but, back at the Hilton, it wouldn’t stop aching. ‘It gave me hell that night,’ he recalls. ‘When I woke up the next morning it was blue and I knew it was broken.’
Down to nine of its original eleven, Australia needed greater dividend from Jeff Thomson’s testing spell than umpire Sang Hue granted. Then Lloyd seemed to have snicked Wayne Clark to Steve Rixon, but Sang Hue again was unmoved. ‘Lloydy had got his gloves off and was about three or four paces away from the wicket,’ says Cosier. ‘He must have seen us coming from slip, saying Sang Hue had to be joking, because he turned around and just walked back as though nothing had happened.’
Lloyd added 164 with Kallicharran, milking the leg spin of Higgs and Simpson, who bowled long spells in curious preference to off spinner Bruce Yardley. Lloyd flogged his rival captain over long on for six in a run-a-minute romp on the second afternoon. Thomson finally broke the stand with the first ball after tea, and the Australians worked hard to restrict their eventual deficit to 315.
With five batsmen to last the best part of three days, though, Simpson received further bad news. Clark had been carrying a back injury since Adelaide and picked up an involuntary jerk in his quicker ball that Sang Hue suspected was a throw. Sang Hue also disliked Yardley’s bent elbow. He told WICBC president Jeff Stollmeyer that he would no-ball both if he found himself at square leg when they were bowling.
For Simpson, this was the ‘dizzy limit’. Clark and Yardley would have to bowl from Sang Hue’s end for the rest of the tour. The captain and manager Bennett refrained from telling the team. Morale was already frail. Toohey had wanted to bat on during the first day, but now he had to be talked out of wanting to go home. Kim Hughes was staying only because he was too ill to travel. As Phil Wilkins summarised: The boys are growing up fast in the West Indies. It is that sort of cricketing hotbed where international newcomers, wet behind the ears on arrival, grow old and a little grey overnight.’
Batting on the third day had a martyred air. Wood was concaved by a blow in the groin, and Serjeant’s ribs buffeted as the pair fought their way to 59 within sight of lunch. Then Wood was obviously lbw to Roberts, and Serjeant less obviously to Garner.
Having begun the match in a toilet, Serjeant’s bat ended it in a door. Silence fell and Simpson’s admonitory look told all. Bennett told Serjeant he would have to apologise to the ground authorities … after his aching ribs were X-rayed.
Yallop, his father Aub watching in the pavilion, negotiated most of the afternoon with Cosier and an hour after tea with Simpson. But the West Indies lowered the boom after the Victorian’s defeatist drive at 194 and the last seven sold themselves for a feeble 15. Wilkins picked up the Mighty Sparrow’s jeering calypso: ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be, Simmo bring down a shit side.’
The barbs hurt Simpson, who prescribed hard graft for Bridgetown. His disenchantment turned to anger when he returned with Cosier and Thomson from a wreath-laying pilgrimage to the Cave Hill grave of Sir Frank Worrell: his young team were discovered skylarking in their Kensington Oval dressing-room instead of practising.
Simpson exploded. They were still in the dressing-room pissing about and they should have been out there,’ Cosier recalls. ‘But I’d never heard an Australian team given a rocket like this one. Greg had got up us once in Christchurch about our fielding in a Test match, and we went out and played really well after it. But Simmo blasted the shit out of them, called’ em every name he could think of.’
Heads fell. Yallop recalls: ‘I think the only reason we were in the rooms was that the practice facilities were so bad. We would have had some fielding practice, hit the ball against the fence like we usually did, and then gone back to the rooms. He just came back at the wrong time. It was crazy going on the way he did. It got a few backs up.’
A requested reinforcement, Queenslander David Ogilvie, arrived after a thirty-five-hour flight and was rushed straight into the tour match against Barbados. But his presence in Bridgetown would not prove as influential as those of two other Australians: Austin Robertson and Consolidated Press lawyer Malcolm Turnbull.
World Series Cricket’s agents had come at the behest of Deryck Murray. He and Lloyd had noticed the tension of their dealings with the WICBC and, after the First Test, had received an ultimatum: the WSC West Indians had a fortnight to announce availability for the country’s tour of India in November. Stollmeyer had immediately denied that WSC players would be sacked from the Test side, although Lloyd just as swiftly explained his men’s loyalties: they would forfeit their Test places if necessary to honour their Australian contracts.
Robertson’s presence in dressing-rooms no longer passed unremarked. Stollmeyer extracted verbal undertakings from Haynes, Kallicharran, Croft, Parry and Richard Austin—the five at Kensington Oval not in Packer pay—that they would not sign anything with WSC’s name on it. The Test match proceeded with disquiet in both teams: the Australians on trial, the West Indies on guard.
WSC Supertests began as imitation Test matches, but the first day at Bridgetown showed that currents were flowing both ways. Graham Yallop became the first Test batsman to adopt a helmet—one of two flown in before the Test—as waves of fast bowling swept in with tidal inevitability. Batting conditions were good, but the end of Yallop’s composed 92-run stand with Wood seemed to rob the rest of the order of its resolve. Five wickets fell in 44 runs, and Bruce Yardley was left to rebuild.
Yardley, a thirty-year-old off spinner, had crawled from the crack in the cricket world. A West Australian medium pacer who’d played just one 1966 Sheffield Shield game, Yardley had gradually reinvented himself as a spinner-batsman. Giving the ball more overspin than side-spin with an unconventional grip, he relied on bounce and trajectory for his wickets. A customised batting technique meant he rarely avoided arrest too long but almost never came quietly. Success in the Sheffield Shield and the absenteeism of rivals turned him, in eighteen months, into a Test player.
Kensington Oval reminded him of home at the WACA, where anything short tended to clear the stumps and rewarded the slasher. A square cut soared over a disbelieving deep point for six, a reflex pull off the bridge of the nose flew for another. The crowd were enchanted when Yardley drove fearlessly as Garner overpitched, and even happier when the bowler hit the retreating batsman on the elbow, then the throat, then the toe.
Fair enough, Yardley thought. They were young, they were keen and I was going for them. But when I got hit in the elbow I thought my whole arm was gone … and I can’t have been thinking too straight because the next ball I tried to hook. It hit me in the throat.’
Colin Croft’s beamer brought an apology from Lloyd at slip, but no other pardons were begged. Yardley’s half-century came in fifty-one minutes. Next ball he was dropped by Croft at third man. ‘I did think about retiring,’ he says. ‘I thought: “You know, I’ve improved my average here, maybe it’s time to get out of the way”.’ But he didn’t for an hour and a half and his 74 came out of 89 before Garner produced a yorker to end the Australian innings at 250.
The crowd’s buzz had not faded when Jeff Thomson took the new ball for a spell straight from his salad days. While he was a reluctant tourist who seemed to spend most of his spare time on the phone to wife Cheryl, a blow in the ribs from Roberts seemed to spur him. For the first time in the fifteen months since his shoulder injury, he rediscovered his old, lethal geometry.
When his third ball cracked across Greenidge’s knuckles and rebounded to Serjeant at gully, the Australians seemed to have the break they needed. But Greenidge stood his ground and umpire Steve Parris was silent. Disgust deepened as the batsman requested ice for his bruised and shaking hand. Thomson would not be denied, however, and had the opener caught at slip by Cosier in his next over via glove and chest.
Viv Richards’ magisterial entrance raised the tempo further. Thomson’s yorker had surely to be lbw, but Parris shook his head again as Richards hobbled to one side. A spiteful bouncer top-edged must be a catch, but substitute Trevor Laughlin dropped the waist-high chance on the run. When a riser hit his shoulder, Richards almost rubbed it. ‘I’ve been fortunate enough to see some fast bowling in my time, but that was incredible,’ Cosier says. There was no way Viv was going to stick around while that was going on.’
Richards’ response was a form of West Indian roulette. As Thomson no-balled stretching further, the Antiguan essayed a pull shot, off-balance, but four. A hook, full-blooded, and six into the stand behind square leg followed, then a hairy back-foot drive over the bowler’s head. At last came a priceless second glimpse of the Antiguan’s wicket. The miscued hook hung over Laughlin forward of square and Clark behind as the crowd stomped and whistled.
‘Thommo had taken a bit of tap but he’d really taken Viv on,’ recalls Clark. ‘When the catch came I wasn’t sure whether Trevor should go for it or me because he was quite close. In the end I made a late decision and had to dive.’ He hit the ground as the ball hit his hands, but the catch stuck. Richards had been dethroned, and Thomson completed the coup with the day’s final ball. Kallicharran edged a ball into his thigh pad that, as verification of its pace, rebounded all the way to a tumbling Yardley at backward square leg. The fast bowler sagged exhausted into his corner of a dressing-room that, for the first time, felt like celebrating.
It was too good to last. Thomson’s calf muscle played up after three overs next morning, and Haynes, Lloyd and Murray thrived in his absence. By the time Thomson had returned and served a sentence passed by umpire Ralph Gosein for time off the ground, the West Indies were 13 ahead with four wickets in hand. Thomson crankily kicked the stumps when Yardley’s slack return cost a run-out, and he flung a V-sign at the hooting 14,000.
While Thomson was able to limit Australia’s deficit to 38 with three further wickets, the Australians were in distress by day’s end. Wood alone, with a second half-century, passed 20 in their 5–96 and three-day defeat loomed. Simpson, what’s more, had apparently ducked the issue by dropping to number seven. Mutters at his ‘stand back and slice’ methods on the first day grew when first Cosier then Rixon were sent out ahead of their captain.
Simpson’s poise against India’s spinners had been universally admired, but his decision to tour the West Indies was a brave one. Reflexes did not return. ‘At home he’d been a great enough player to get away with batting against India,’ says Cosier. ‘Kicking them away with his pad, flicking ’em round the corner. But while he’d faced Hall and Griffith in the West Indies in 1965, there hadn’t been another Hall and Griffith coming after them.’ As Rixon emerged as nightwatchman a full half-hour before stumps, sections of the crowd seethed: ‘Come on Simmo, come on and have a bat, man. They kill you man, they kill you.’
The Australian rooms were tense, especially the West Australians. ‘He was a recognised batsman, certainly more competent than Rixon,’ Serjeant says. What he did was wrong. There was no justification.’ Adds Clark: ‘It didn’t help the relationship. Someone needed to set an example and that was a case where the captain could have done it. That had an effect on the long-term thinking of a few of the guys and it wasn’t positive.’
Even the loyal Toohey noticed the fallout. ‘It cost Simmo a bit of esteem in the team and he really hadn’t been getting on with some in the side already,’ he says. The guys from WA were pretty cliquey over there, and I think they felt that Simmo favoured the eastern staters in the team.’
Rixon, however, bought Simpson just ten minutes. The captain came out—in the words of John Benaud in the Age—as ‘a victim of his own tactical ploy’. ‘Simpson,’ he wrote, ‘is simply unable to cope with the pace, and his dithering, especially in the first innings, is diluting the other batsmen’s confidence and stroke play.’ Benaud refrained from asking if Simpson merited his place in the team but, when he fanned at Roberts’ leg cutter the next morning, the captain’s series contribution was 40 runs and 1–95.
Only Yardley, Wood and Thomson could salvage much from the West Indies’ nine-wicket win. At his post-match press conference, Simpson pleaded for the Australian public to be ‘tolerant for a while, because we are going through a new era’.
Robertson and Turnbull, meanwhile, had completed a quiet Test hat-trick: the signatures of Desmond Haynes, Colin Croft and the twenty-three-year-old all-rounder Richard Austin. Robertson even partook of the West Indies’ champagne for another win inside three days. Jeff Stollmeyer was dismayed, given both the promises of the new defectors and Test pay rises to which the WICBC had agreed in Trinidad. Unlike Robertson, he now felt ‘like a stranger in the West Indies’ dressing-room’.
Deryck Murray’s request for deferral of the WICBC availability deadline so as to discuss some Pax Packerana freeing players for India sounded like hubris. When 23 March 1978 brought silence, the WICBC realised that its bluff was being called: did they dare sack WSC men?
The answer Lloyd received on Easter Sunday evening at Georgetown’s Pegasus Hotel, when he joined selectors Joey Carew, Jackie Holt and Clyde Walcott to pick the team for the Third Test at Bourda, took him unawares. The West Indian captain was optimistic when he met a friend in the lobby wondering if he’d be free later, and surprised when Carew chimed in: ‘No, this could be a long session.’
In a rather messy equivocation, Lloyd’s co-selectors had resolved to drop Haynes, Austin and Murray. Lloyd went hoarse with protest and, as he left the meeting at 3am, gave in his resignation. Given that his team would almost certainly follow en bloc, the WICBC now faced going into a Test match nine men short. It was a double bluff.
‘The public was overwhelmingly in favour of Packer,’ comments Tony Cozier. ‘But the board had a pretty sound case for what it was doing. In fact they should probably have sacked the whole side straight out.’
The Australians were unaware of events as they recuperated at the Pegasus themselves that evening, after the second day of a warm-up game against Guyana at Bourda. Concern was for Yallop, nursing a jaw broken in the match by Croft, who would now be missing from the Test as well as Toohey and Hughes.
And Croft kept them occupied next day, knocking Yardley cold when the off spinner danced into a leg-stump bouncer after a feisty 37. ‘Bruce must have been crazy,’ recalls partner Cosier. ‘He got Croft away and walked down the pitch calling him a chucker: “Keep your arm straight, Crofty, keep your arm straight”. Bruce was virtually on the uncut grass when he got hit in the back of the head, and Crofty actually did pretty well to find him.’ Unable when he regained consciousness to remember how he’d needled Croft so effectively, Yardley asked Alvin Kallicharran. But the little left-hander just laughed: ‘Bruce, you got what you deserved.’
Off-field events were about to envelope both. A resignation statement from Lloyd that he’d drafted with Guyana’s sports minister Shirley Field Ridley was circulating at the Pegasus. Yardley was addressing the new West Indian captain.
At 11pm on Wednesday 29 March, the famous Guyanese advocate Sir Lionel Luckhoo asked his distinguished Australian dinner guests if they could take to their carriages. Having beaten the BWIA strike and arrived in Georgetown, Stollmeyer and WICBC secretary Peter Short were on their way to his home for a private meeting.
When Simpson arrived back at the Pegasus with Fred Bennett and the ABC broadcaster Alan McGilvray, he learned why: the other five WSC players—Greenidge, Richards, Roberts, Garner and Croft—had boycotted the Test. ‘I knew,’ he recalled, ‘that all hell was about to break loose.’
That was the WICBC’s fear, and Stollmeyer wanted Luckhoo’s reassurance that Guyana, the poorest quarter of the West Indies and Lloyd’s birthplace, would accept his board’s firm anti-Packer front. Reservists for Kallicharran to lead were being spirited into Georgetown independently to avoid problems with the air strike. How would the Guyanese take to two virtual second XIs playing in Friday’s Test?
Gnawing at their nerves was news that Packer himself was Georgetown-bound by private jet with WSC’s West Indian manager Rudi Webster. Luckhoo advised them that it was a case of alea jacta est: to cancel the Test would be riskier than proceeding. When Packer finally held a press conference at the Pegasus the following evening, it was an epilogue to Stollmeyer’s announcement of a new West Indian side. The Australian painted the WICBC as intransigent, while Lloyd complained of the clandestine arrangements for the reserve side. But as Cozier observes: ‘Lloyd and the WSC players were really the last people who should have complained about sharp practice. They had simply been trumped.’
Packer in fact was in transit. He had organised a weekend at Bridgetown’s opulent Sandy Lane Hotel for the whole WSC West Indian family: Lloyd, Webster, players, wives and girlfriends, the Sobers, plus Lloyd’s cousin Lance Gibbs. Keen to colonise the Caribbean with a WSC tour, he gladhanded in Barbados and Jamaica, appearing on television and talking to newspapers. He even autographed dollar notes: a local custom suggesting that WSC would not be unwelcome.
Although a virtual armoured division of riot police shepherded team buses to Bourda on Friday, their presence was needless. A spectator boycott of the Test urged by WSC sympathisers meant that patrons were almost outnumbered by paramilitaries.
As an even Test match unfolded, the Australians glimpsed how the overwhelming majority of West Indian cricketers lived. There was a dangerous opener schooled on Jamaica’s sugar cane fields, Basil Williams, nicknamed ‘Shotgun’ for his arsenal of off-side strokes. The Australians called him the ‘death or glory man’. A slight twenty-four-year-old left-hander in ageing, buckskin pads from Port-of-Spain, Larry Gomes, was just as hard to bowl to. ‘Pitch it up anywhere near straight and he would hit you through mid wicket,’ recalls Serjeant. ‘Any width outside off and he’d cut. The margin for error was minuscule and he was so disciplined. We used to say: “This bastard doesn’t play like a West Indian”.’
Both made centuries, and a brace of half-centuries came from local off spinner Sew Shivnarine, known as ‘Blackjack’ for his pigment and personal drapery in gold. Pitched into Tests after just four matches for Barbados, twenty-three-year-old Sylvester Clarke honoured the traditions of pace’s locus classicus. The weird windmills of Dominican Norbert Phillip were a useful complement.
At the end of the third day, in fact, Kallicharran’s men were in charge: the Australians needed 359 to win in the remaining two days, and were ailing. Strikes in Georgetown had reduced the Pegasus to a ghetto, without electricity, without lifts and with water available only by bucket from wagons. Players stumbled round its stifling sixteenth floor—known as the ‘casualty ward’ for its occupation by the ill and injured—bent double with dysentery. A dip in the pool with its inoperative chlorinator risked cholera. ‘You couldn’t flush the toilets,’ remembers Cosier, ‘the pool was green, there was no ice in the bar, all you had was warm Coke. The only thing that worked was McGilvray’s scotch bottle. That worked pretty well. Killed a few germs.’
That the phones also worked was a blessing for Clark, whose wife was expecting a child any day. Roommate Serjeant, facing a pair on the Tuesday, had a sleepless preparation while the fast bowler kept a hotline open to Perth.
Rick Darling, David Ogilvie and Simpson had been undone by Clarke’s bounce for 22 when Serjeant joined the stubborn Wood in the ninth over, and he also popped his second ball to short leg’s right. It did not go to hand. ‘Although I hadn’t made runs in the Tests,’ he says, ‘I hadn’t really felt out of form. All I needed was one break. That half-chance might have been it, because I could see the conditions were good. It was getting hotter and, if you got one through, the outfield was like lightning. I batted an hour before lunch and got 17 and I thought: “Strike. This is it, I’ve got a real chance here”.’
Fielders flapped as he and Wood flitted eighty singles. The flux of left and right-hander upset inexperienced bowlers. Wood passed his fourth consecutive no-frills Test half-century, and at the tea score of 3–199 was nine from a maiden Test hundred. Serjeant cooled his heels on 80.
Serjeant left his partner standing after tea: three consecutive boundaries brought up the right-hander’s century in three and a half hours. After three overs on 99, Wood finally cut Holder to the fence. It took the second new ball and a brilliant catch of Serjeant on the deep fine leg fence to end their 268-minute, 251-run partnership.
But two wickets fell in the last twenty minutes after a break for bad light, and Cosier—wearing one of the Vellvic helmets for the first time—discovered why Yallop kept custody of the other. ‘When I pulled the visor down there was a bloody great scratch across where your eyes were. No wonder Graham only used the other one.’ A tangle of bat, gloves and pads, he was bowled playing back. And Wood, after a consummate display of running, responded fatally to Rixon’s call in the day’s last over. The Test debutant Trevor Laughlin faced the next day with Rixon with 69 runs needed. Reclining at the Pegasus, Serjeant tested the Victorian’s nerve. Well, Larry,’ he said, ‘the entire future of Australian cricket is in your hands tomorrow.’
‘Thanks Serj,’ said Laughlin.
Simpson hadn’t missed a ball of Australia’s 1960–61 series against the West Indies, but saw nothing bar his team’s winning runs the following day. ‘I’ve never known a Test to be so desperate,’ he explained. ‘We had to win or the tour wasn’t worthwhile any more ... but just as importantly it was vital for the players themselves. Some of them on thresholds of careers were facing the possibility they wouldn’t play Test cricket any more.’
Rixon was nerveless. Laughlin failed only in his sober prod of a return catch from Parry’s full toss, but Yardley advanced on the target with typically bold strokes. With scores tied, he pulled a gleeful boundary. Wayne Clark became a father. A hex had lifted.