Bill Macartney leaned back in parodied self-satisfaction as his companions looked down on the sea of faces beneath the SCG’s executive chamber. ‘So,’ he drawled, ‘what do you think of my crowd?’ It was 8pm on Tuesday, 28 November 1978, and WSC had 50,000 rocking, rollicking converts.
‘After all the hype and the publicity,’ said ticket manager Bruce McDonald, ‘I would have been disappointed with anything less.’
Their frivolity actually caused some offence in the party. ‘I really had anticipated a big crowd,’ McDonald recalls, ‘so I was quite underwhelmed. But it upset a few people when they thought I was pooh-bagging the whole thing.’ For many in attendance, WSC had become more than cricket, more than business, an end in itself.
McDonald had called Packer before gates opened to describe lines of spectators twisting down Anzac Parade. The 2.15pm toss was transacted for Ian Chappell and Clive Lloyd by fifteen-year-old Glen Michelic, a WSC coaching find from Fairfield, and the Australians fanned in the field to the strains of ‘C’mon, Aussie’ hurling give-away white balls into the 5000 early arrivals.
Curious and deferential WSC officers, like an occupying army visiting the deserted bunker of a routed enemy, studied the memorabilia lining their executive room two floors up in the SCG members’ stand. Attentive to the play, they toasted Lillee’s third-ball victory over Viv Richards. But, as Australian success filled the afternoon, and the Hill’s voice swelled, their celebrations became less of cause than effect.
Packer arrived in mid-afternoon, joining McDonald at the turnstiles in the fashion of a retail chain owner keeping his common touch at the till. Reality dawned at tea when an updated crowd figure of 30,000 was confirmed in expectation of the Australian innings. A glance out the back of the executive room confirmed more to come. WSC was not against the establishment this evening. It was the establishment.
Packer had already taken the venturesome step of admitting ladies to the members’ for the first time and, when worried police asked that the gates be opened to ease queues still banked up at turnstiles that had clicked 44,377 times, approval was readily given.
John Cornell, who rarely permitted himself more than a sly smile, was beside Paul Hogan, Austin Robertson, Delvene Delaney and himself. ‘These people have found truth,’ he muttered mystically. He rushed the attendance figure to the press box personally, and dashed to fetch Lillee when the Australian innings began.
JP Sport’s first client, 4–12 in the bag, had never visited the executive room before and admired the view with awe. ‘There were hordes of people and cars as far as the eye could see,’ he wrote. ‘As I looked out in the gloomy light I got a tingling feeling through my body.’ Tony Greig, arriving late after a cross-country flight with the Amisses and Woolmers, choked back tears.
Chasing 128, the Australian batsmen never had to touch the heights. Ian Davis, striking Bernard Julien for three smart fours, joined his captain in an even-time stand of 42. When the target narrowed to 34 runs with 20 overs remaining, three cheap wickets stirred the Hill’s ‘C’mon, Aussie’ choir, but robust blows from Davis and Marsh clinched the match by 9.20pm.
Match reports were revealing, not so much in what was written but what was not. The local press contingent was three-strong: the Australian’s Phil Wilkins had only two news agency companions. Packer’s Fairfax rivals gave their syndicated copy grudging space, although the organisation’s National Times a fortnight later carried Adrian McGregor’s colourful, intelligent tribute. ‘The incongruity of it all,’ he wrote. ‘That Packer at that moment, so absolutely removed from the hoi polloi, should have … achieved the proletarianisation of cricket. He had enticed sports fans out of the pubs … transforming the subtleties of traditional cricket into the spectacular that is night cricket.’
English journalists applied their own interpretations. The Times’ John Woodcock had been repelled by publicity for the Australians: The fact that most were discredited when they came back from England 14 months ago has been forgotten. Packer, for the time being, has made them into idols again.’
Others were filled with respect and foreboding. Alan Lee wrote of a ‘wild and wonderful experience’: ‘One thing was certain. Packer had struck gold and found something that would arouse the envy of the traditional cricket authorities.’ David Frith, a heartfelt, but not fanatical traditionalist, preferred not to ponder. Personally he could not enjoy night cricket. The nausea I felt this evening I put down to fatigue, for the cricket had its moments. If I’m prejudiced at all perhaps it is in favour of cricket in God’s sunshine.’
At his moment of triumph, Packer was also reflective, and intently entertained a cross-section of his world: the day-time television favourite Mike Walsh, celebrity sportscaster Mike Gibson, the telethinker Bruce Gyngell and agent Harry M. Miller mixed with Lillee and Marsh, Sobers and Lloyd.
Greig found his boss thoughtfully absorbed when he whispered his belief: This is it.’
‘Yes,’ Packer replied, ‘I think you’re right.’ Greig was amazed at Packer’s serenity. ‘It was almost like he had known it was going to happen all along,’ he wrote.
As the ground emptied in the cool of the evening, Packer deflected one journalist with a perfunctory ‘it’s been an encouraging start’ and repaired to the top tier of the stand alone. When Andrew Caro, who had missed the game with commitments in Perth, sought his views next morning, Packer merely muttered: ‘No, it wasn’t bad. I thought your lot started partying a bit early though.’
Graham Yallop’s first pre-Test press conference as Australian captain at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm airport next day was an unavoidable chore, and demanded an optimism he didn’t feel.
Encircled by cameras, microphones and forty journalists, the question of how Australia would fare floated down the pitch like a welcome long hop. Yallop’s flippant expectation of a ‘six-nil’ series victory was the press equivalent of the bad ball taking a wicket.
Yallop was looking, above all, for the selectors Sam Loxton, Neil Harvey and Phil Ridings, whose decision had skyjacked him leaving Perth the previous week. Just as WSC’s caravan had been arriving, Yallop’s outbound flight with Victorian teammates had been interrupted by their Ansett pilot’s voice: ‘The Victorian Sheffield Shield players will please remain on the plane when it lands in Melbourne.’
At Tullamarine, Victorian Cricket Association secretary Dave Richards had boarded to announce the Australian team for the First Test against England in Brisbane ten days later. Colleagues congratulated Yallop, Trevor Laughlin, Alan Hurst and Jim Higgs on their selections as Richards added that Yallop was captain, Australia’s third youngest at twenty-six.
So frequent were the calls that Yallop requested a silent number, but the captain hoped vainly for contact from at least one official. And when he met his governors in Brisbane, their thoughts were more of Sydney. It was raining there, but another 20,134 were watching the WSC Australians win their second SCG stanza, and Bob Parish was composing a congratulatory announcement for his board’s bête noire noting the ‘excellent’ crowd and attractive concept, one that the ACB would replicate ‘if changes are demanded by the public’.
Problems had also arisen in trying to update ACB contracts. Wood, who had signed with WSC for 1979–80, did not want another two years with the board. ‘As far as I was concerned, what they were doing was wrong,’ Wood says. ‘We were part way through a contract as it was and they wanted to tie us up even longer. I got legal advice that they couldn’t do what they were trying to do.’ He held out, successfully, for a one-year contract.
Elaborate trimmings being planned to counter the potent Packer marketing package—cheap children’s tickets, skydivers, a brass band, a commemorative coin toss—contrasted with ramshackle arrangements for the team itself. Although Yallop knew his appointed vice-captain Cosier well, his team had experience of just fifty-five Tests and were virtual strangers to one another. He had no manager, no advisers, and two days to achieve the magic of unity. ‘Boy, it was mind-boggling,’ he says. ‘No one knew anyone else in the team. The selectors were just stabbing in the dark, guessing. And because they didn’t believe in managers in those days either, I had to do everything myself: tickets, taxis to the ground for the boys, laundry, everything.’ For Yallop, who had only left his father’s APY Castings business that year and who Ray Robinson remembered as the most introverted Australian captain in his lengthy experience, the cares of office were doubly demanding.
Locals were pessimistic. ‘“I only watch the best—I’ll be at the Packer matches” was the comment I heard more than a few times,’ Lee reported, ‘once combined with a confession from a broad Australian that he had backed England to win every Test match.’
Yallop finally caught up with his patrons at the Gabba on the Friday, the day before the Test, and examined the pitch with Loxton. ‘Looks like a perfect batting wicket to me,’ said the selector. ‘Looks like whoever wins the toss should bat for three days.’ The following morning Yallop was handed his team in batting order, with Cosier inked in at number two and the seam-bowling all-rounder Phil Carlson at number twelve to accommodate two spinners. He pondered fielding when he won the toss, but played safe: ‘At the time I was so young, I just thought: “Well, they’re great men with a huge amount of Test knowledge and experience, they must know”. As soon as the first over was bowled I thought: “Oh boy, what have we done?”’
A poignant chant of ‘C’mon, Aussie’ from schoolchildren on $1 tickets accompanied Cosier and Wood to the centre. Sixteen Tests gave the former twice the experience of any colleague, but he worried that his runs that year for Queensland had been made at number five. And that he and Wood had never run together.
Bob Willis’s opening over from the Stanley Street end began with an exchange of singles, but Wood’s snappy call from the fifth ball and the economical movement of cover point David Gower left Cosier stranded. Exploiting sideways movement and increasingly tentative strokes, Brearley’s roster of seamers seized the day in an hour and a half. The only sounds were of appeals and juvenile voices still trilling despite the 6–26 scoreline. As Lee wrote: ‘Perhaps they didn’t understand what was happening out there in the middle but, in the circumstances, they sounded absurd.’
England passed Australia’s 116 with seven wickets standing. Although the unheralded Rodney Hogg and Alan Hurst limited the deficit to 170, the Australian top order proved almost as brittle at the second attempt. One ball sufficed for the hapless Cosier, bowled through a wretched drive by Willis’s first delivery. ‘It was a bad shot,’ he agrees. ‘But if you’re a conditioned opener you don’t try and drive the first ball of an innings, even if it’s a full toss. I wasn’t. And Bob Willis got one on the stumps first up, which probably never happened with him again.’
Peter Toohey again followed quickly. That had a big impact on me, and on England’s bowlers as well,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t a new ball player and I certainly wasn’t an opening batsman which I virtually was in that Test. My technique wasn’t good enough, and they were so good at bowling that nagging off-stump line.’
Four and a half hours’ resistance from Yallop and Kim Hughes and a defiant tail finally extended Brearley’s men, but they had their expected one-nil lead by 3.15pm on the Thursday. Yallop’s ‘six-nil’ throwaway had taken a week to throw away. Even harsher was the testimony of the ticket sellers. The Brisbane Test had drawn just 43,523 people, fewer than WSC had herded into the SCG in a night even before Packer opened his gates. ‘I was fighting wars on two fronts,’ Yallop remembers. ‘And I couldn’t really win either of them.’
Having swaggered into direct competition with official cricket the previous season, WSC was playing its cards more cannily. The Cavaliers began a low-key fortnight in northern Queensland during the Test, wending their way down from Cairns, through Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, Gladstone, to the Gold Coast and Toowoomba.
The next Australian face-off with the World at the SCG was fixed for the First Test’s rest day. TV broadcasts just after evening news in eastern states caught the new name Garth Le Roux. In three deliveries he removed both Chappells, then upended Laird an over later for figures of 5–2–6–3. Two hours’ loitering later Le Roux was recalled to hit Lillee with three consecutive deliveries to Tony Greig’s undisguised glee. ‘It was stuff that showbiz is made of,’ wrote Phil Wilkins. ‘And from the VIP room, Kerry chortled and rubbed his hands with glee and counted the cash.’
Greig’s pleasure was, however, increasingly vicarious. His average of less than eight from fourteen innings had brought him to the verge of surrender. Meeting his World selectors Asif Iqbal, Mike Procter and manager Mike Denness at the Old Melbourne to select an XI for the floodlit First Supertest against the Australians, he told them he would spend it in the nets instead.
The selectors sympathised, though Procter was struck by the incongruity of Greig’s faith in practice. ‘I admired his honesty,’ he wrote, ‘but he really only had himself to blame: as captain he was never with the World side in the nets on the eve of a Supertest—he was always off doing a commercial or a TV interview.’ Even Greig’s humility was given a theatricality: as Asif’s team was inserted by Ian Chappell, there were live crosses to VFL Park’s nets where Greig was undergoing bowling-machine therapy under Sir Garfield Sobers’ supervision. As the game’s best-paid twelfth man, Greig also performed on-field cameos on a motorised drinksmobile.
While ‘one-night’ cricket worked, packaging ‘Test cricket’ as four consecutive seven and a half hour days from 1.30pm was a bold move. One consequence was apparent as Lillee released his first white ball of the match at Majid Khan. The film of child spectators could raise just a thin chant of the bowler’s name. Night cricket’s population pattern meant that barely 600 saw the game commence, although 15,000 were in attendance at the break and an excellent 19,000 saw stumps drawn: the reverse of the long-form game.
Nor did the entertainment grab WSC’s new constituency. The rejuvenated Lillee permitted just 51 runs in 33 overs, and on a mud mat of a pitch the World crept to 175 at fewer than two runs an over. ‘It was hard-grinding Test-style cricket,’ Alan Lee noted, ‘and the hordes of converts whom Packer had collected with one-day cricket were probably bored and bewildered.’
At stumps at 10.30pm, Lee also noticed metabolic effects. He was ravenous, having worked from mid-morning to midnight without a break. ‘It then occurred to me that the WSC players faced something like twenty-five such days in the season.’
The seven and a half hours broken by a half-hour ‘tea’ and one hour ‘dinner’ were indeed passing strange. With two and a half hours ahead, most players passed up dinner. ‘It was an odd feeling to finish play for the day at 10.30pm,’ Knott wrote. ‘I would normally have a meal round midnight, unwind by watching a late-night movie and get to bed about 2am.’ He felt the format too long, and a threat to standards.
Lillee and Le Roux’s oneupmanship was conventional enough. After Lillee’s pawing appeal won an lbw appeal against the South African, Le Roux raked the Australian order and had Lillee fending to Majid to give his side a lead of 25 runs.
Majid’s six-hour 77 was then orthodoxy itself though, as the white ball turned grey on being forced to serve beyond the usual 50 overs, Ian Chappell missed his flying edge from Lillee in the second day’s evening light. Chappell caught Majid’s edge of a more pristine second new ball low to his left, but by then Procter had helped the Pakistani set the Australians a target of 283.
The game was the boss. Wessels gouged 46 from the surface in three and a half hours. Then Greg Chappell donned his new helmet for VFL Park’s peculiar light configuration, which players had found inferior to that at the SCG, and spent four and a half hours over a meticulous 81. ‘I felt that if ever I was going to get cleaned up, it was going to be under lights,’ he says. ‘It was that much harder to see the ball, your reaction time was that much slower, and at VFL Park in particular the four light pylons cast four shadows on the ball instead of the single shadow you get during daylight. The ball coming toward you, being rimmed by shadow, actually seemed smaller than a normal one.’
Imran found also that he could make the grey marble jackknife by rubbing away its residual lacquer. He induced a final collapse by bowling Marsh as the wicket-keeper shouldered arms, and took 4–8 with his last sixteen deliveries.
Packer had been in good humour throughout, ribbing David Frith about the writer’s freebie Benson & Hedges overnight bag from the Gabba: ‘Bet it doesn’t last until the end of the summer.’ But the Australians’ 102-run defeat was a setback for WSC. Wessels, expecting modest commendation, received instead a personal chiding. ‘I was overoptimistic,’ he wrote, ‘because he proceeded to tell me in no uncertain terms that he did not import players to score 40s, and that I must get my arse moving.’
Fortunately Packer had found a player on whom such psychology worked. A shaken Wessels decided to make Packer eat his words.
The Australians spent the better part of the next month force-feeding detractors. As crowds followed a sequence of five International Cup games in which the Australians suffered only one narrow defeat, WSC fed from their success.
As important as the turnstile to Packer, of course, was success at the home box-office. And according to the Roy Morgan Research Centre’s new ‘people meter’ computers, only the Melbourne Cup and VFL Grand Final had attracted more viewers than the SCG’s opening night spectacular. ABC ratings dwindled as Tests were lost in Brisbane then Perth.
The Australians’ waxing fortunes were built around their bowlers. Lillee was running in like the trained sprinter he now was. In a poor summer for pitches all round—only John Maley’s VFL Park track favoured batsmen—Len Pascoe, Max Walker and Ray Bright also prospered.
Wessels scrapped hard for reward, a prefabricated disciple of Ian Chappell who revered Greg Chappell, Marsh and Lillee. They used to grade people according to whether or not they would like to have them with them “in the trenches”,’ the South African recalled. There are no others I would prefer to have “in the trenches” with me than these four and I hope they would say the same about me.’
David Hookes worked to exorcise his fast bowling demons. Ten trance sessions of positive thought with an Adelaide hypnotherapist, Lindsay Wilkie, smoothed his flow of runs. But Ian Chappell was the only other reliable source of runs. His brother, Ian Davis and Bruce Laird struggled technically in the unremitting cycle of fast bowling.
It so happened that everyone else suffered more. While their batting depth meant they thrived in the longer contest, the World players, older and less mobile in the field, found the sprint of the International Cup a strain.
The West Indians remained athletic and elastic for 50-over stretches, but a run-drought among their batsmen, especially Richards, and injuries to Holding, Garner, Daniel and Fredericks handicapped them over longer distances.
Even wicket-keeper Deryck Murray, injury-free for fifteen years, suffered a dislocated shoulder, and burdened his stand-in Desmond Haynes. The twenty-two-year-old opener could juggle roles over a day: on 19 December he blazed an undefeated 97 against the Australians at VFL Park. But two days later, as the World thrashed the West Indians in the Second Supertest at the SCG, he could hardly hold the bat and failed twice after nine and a half hours behind the stumps.
Packer was furious at the West Indians’ sudden frailty. He stormed the SCG rooms after their dismissal for 66 in an International Cup loss to the Australians two days after Christmas. He’d bloody well send them home. In the meantime, they could bloody well play another match that day. West Indians hung their heads and Joel Garner wondered if they weren’t suffering delayed reaction to their Test ban. ‘Most of us played as if in a daze, and we could not blame the weather, the kind of cricket or the locations,’ he wrote. ‘I think that what really affected us was a kind of guilt... we remained at heart West Indies players. I felt that this meant we should be playing Test cricket. We all began to appreciate more fully what the Australian players had put up with during that first season of WSC when they were out in the cold.’
That WSC’s gruelling nature was marketable soon dawned on Bill Macartney. After Christmas he wrote a memo to players and managers:
It seems we are gaining a substantial number of new fans who traditionally may not have come within the bounds of cricket followers. Women are a significant and important example. So to continue the flow of ‘different’ information, and give the feature writers something to talk about, I would like to tell them about the injuries gathered by professionals in the ‘gentle game’ of cricket. For that purpose, could you list the injuries you’ve suffered during the course of your career, and what sort of incidents in brief caused them?
Five frantic days round the New Year sum up the bruising, brawling, boisterous business of the WSC machine.
A sort of amphetamine cricket of low scores, irresistible fast bowling and slick fielding was played during the first International Cup triple-header at the Gabba, the wretched First Test pitches having gone wild.
Some 5300 attended the ‘neutral’ West Indians-World game on Saturday 30 December. An attack minus Holding and Croft constrained all but Barry Richards, but loss of Garner to a broken finger in the field deepened West Indian despondency at a 90-run defeat inflicted by Le Roux and Sarfraz.
On the Sunday, some 18,000 hung from the rafters to watch Australia—thanks to an Ian Chappell-Gilmour stand of 75 for the sixth wicket in 51 minutes—set the West Indians 166 to win. Lillee, resenting a first-ball bouncer from Roberts, immediately had Haynes caught at square leg, Richards caught behind first ball and examined umpire Peter Enright’s glasses when Lloyd was given not out waving at the next delivery.
The West Indian captain thrashed three sixes from Gilmour onto the dog track, but Lillee returned to dish out consecutive bouncers at Roberts and polish off the innings. The match ended in chaos to the strains of ‘C’mon Aussie’. Pascoe ran out Roberts, Gilmour ran out Croft and Ian Chappell upended a child in his haste for the pavilion.
On New Year’s Day, however, the Australians found themselves sent in on the worst pitch of their trip. South Africans Le Roux and Rice took the field to the Rocky theme, and worked cruel tricks using the white ball’s outsize seam. ‘When I caught Greg Chappell at slip off the second ball it was like catching a razor blade at l00mph,’ remembers Barry Richards. The pitch was a real Clem Jones special.’ After a dozen overs, they were 4–9. By noon Le Roux (5–6) and Rice (4–14) had rumbled them for 54.
With Lillee nursing a thigh injury, Richards went out to slap 21 in 21 balls. Javed Miandad took the same time to smack 25. Majid, obstinately correct, managed to connect twice in 23 deliveries. The match’s conclusion at 1.11pm entailed a post-lunch exhibition for the 8179, while players performed double duties at Goodyear Autograph Booths: hero-worship made easy.
On comfortably the week’s truest surface at Port Macquarie’s Oxley Oval the following day, Viv Richards finally prospered. His four sixes, one lodging ten metres up a Norfolk pine, curtailed the game at the adjacent East Port bowls club. The West Indians won by seven wickets, but even then not without cost. The luckless Murray, kneecapped by Collis King’s sharp return, was ice-packed all the way back to Sydney’s Chateau Commodore that night.
Back on treacherous turf at the SCG on Wednesday 3 January 1979, Croft, Roberts, Daniel and Julien reduced the World to 7–49 … odds at last in Greig’s favour. Weaving and wearing bouncers during a frenzied 62 at number eight, he won favour from 14,000 with a six into the Noble Stand. To Lee he exhibited the bruising on his left thigh. ‘I may not get many more,’ Greig said. ‘So I’d better show this one off.’
Before Gordon Greenidge’s unbeaten 82 made the game safe, Le Roux bowled daggers at Viv Richards, striking him in chest and back and removing his cap with a ball Alan Knott took overhead. The bloodsportsmanship disturbed the humane Tony Lewis. ‘The most dangerous act in the entertainment business these days is not balancing on high wire or even putting a head in a lion’s mouth,’ he wrote. ‘It is batting in Kerry Packer’s Flying Circus. Fast bowling and repeated bouncers are destroying some of the best batsmen we have ever seen.’
Nonetheless, the bottom line of WSC’s tour was significant. It had coincided with Melbourne’s Third Test. The pinnacle of the official summer had been attended by 128,758. But WSC’s hard sell, on far smaller grounds in three cities and with Australians playing only twice, had still attracted 50,000. Mike Brearley’s Englishmen overflew the illuminated SCG that last evening as their Fourth Test appointment at the ground loomed: a reminder that their rival attraction was working the night shift.