Cairns had not expected night cricket, but when ‘Packer’s Sheffield Shield’ visited on the first two days of December 1978, it turned out that way. As Eddie Barlow’s Cavaliers triumphed in tropical twilight, they were already living a remarkable low-life.
Composed largely of those Australians unemployed in the capital cities like McCosker, Walters, Edwards, Robinson, O’Keeffe, Langer, Malone, Prior and Trevor Chappell, the Cavaliers were a convenience. With peripheral internationals like Mushtaq, Haroon, Snow, Amiss and Woolmer, and wandering West Indians in Holford, Allen, Julien and Austin, they were rural ambassadors, country coaches and punching-bags for World, Australian and West Indian teams released from higher profile duties.
At World Series Cricket’s selection table they had a stool. Bernard Julien might be a Cavalier against the World one day, a West Indian against the Cavaliers the next. Success, too, was its own punishment. Barlow and manager Graham Ferrett were resigned to losing players as soon as they glimpsed form and to inheriting the lame and the blind.
By Cairns they had already surrendered their promising colt Kepler Wessels to the WSC Australians, and accepted the out-of-touch Martin Kent. The barren Cricket Association Ground pitch favouring Mushtaq and O’Keeffe before Haroon’s torchlit swinging with Walters was good for morale. ‘I think it helped that they couldn’t actually see their opposition,’ says Ferrett.
That was no reason though, they discovered, to get uppity. West Indians sharing their evening flight to Townsville did not share the Cavaliers’ pleasure at a maiden victory. ‘We were pretty carried away after slogging in the dark,’ recalls O’Keeffe, ‘so we hit the drink pretty hard when we piled into the plane, while they sat up the front, all sullen. We probably overdid it.’
Comeuppance was inevitable. The pitch at Townsville’s Endeavour Park was like foliage underfoot. ‘We’d stared three days at this flat thing without a blade of grass on it,’ O’Keeffe continues. ‘Amazingly enough, none of us were terribly keen on batting.’
Though Ferrett demanded that a disbelieving groundsman shave his pride and joy, Roberts and Holding trampled the Cavaliers for 131. West Indian honour was satisfied. Ross Edwards was aggrieved. ‘I’d been coaching in Townsville for three days,’ he says. ‘So I hadn’t even played in Cairns.’
Such was the Cavaliers’ lot for the next two months: moments of success, long periods of failure, and changing faces on bat-and-bone-jarring pitches. The sham shield did Kent no good. His week of ducks in Townsville, Cairns and Rockhampton was broken by a single in Mackay.
There were, however, worse lives. Wives and children travelled at discount ticket and room rates. Tour managers blended Ferrett’s teenage son Tim, Ian Chappell’s wife Kay and ticket manager Vern Toose, a Consolidated Press relic and returned serviceman who relived surviving a Japanese bayonet wound in gruesome detail. Some who found WSC’s upper reaches alien came to prefer the small occasion.
Rockhampton was typical. Rain left Ferrett with a restive crowd, and Gordon Greenidge proposed an outfield catching competition with Walters and Haroon, and WSC hats as prizes. Ferrett gave away hundreds. Ten Cavaliers began the game, with a midday airport dash to collect Bob Woolmer seven hours after he’d left Sydney. The Englishman had barely finished padding up when he was on duty, his unbeaten 69 surprisingly serene.
Two days later on a Gladstone greentop, though, Woolmer was scratched for six weeks with a finger broken by Holding. The player, together with his wife Gillian, accepted Ferrett’s offer to join the Cavaliers’ management. ‘It was a role I gratefully accepted and enjoyed,’ Woolmer wrote, ‘looking after all the paperwork, marshalling the team onto planes or trains at the right time and the correct place.’
Country crowds of 2000 disenchanted some of the Pakistanis, accustomed to five-star treatment at home. Sarfraz Nawaz seemed to crave a batman more than a bat. ‘I think he expected to be treated a bit specially,’ says Ferrett. ‘Like a full international tour. I had to let him know things like he was expected to carry his own bag up to his room.’ Breakfast table debates about the Bhuttos also proved inscrutable to Australians.
Countryman Haroon Rashid, however, proved a revelation with his virile, fearless stroke play. One of Pakistan’s most underrated batsmen, he lost nothing by comparison with Viv Richards when the pair made centuries at Rockhampton, in firepower or physique.
‘He was the darkest, hairiest bloke I think I ever saw,’ Edwards remembers. ‘In the dressing-room, he was like a coconut. By crikey, though, he could hit the ball.’ Haroon even took it in good part when O’Keeffe slipped him ‘unclean’ roast beef and horseradish sandwiches.
Peaked-cap players slow to adapt to a helmeted age suffered on the poor pitches. Walters did not reach 30 in a dozen innings after Cairns, and finally joined the ‘managers’ with a broken finger. McCosker, Amiss, Kent and Redpath all averaged less than 20.
Rob Langer, Test material had he not signed with WSC, found a degree of rationalisation necessary. ‘I eased my mind with the thought that, in twenty years’ time, could I say I’d earned the privilege of Test cricket? I would have been proud, but I think there would have been sniggers if I put my green cap on the trophy shelf.’
While the likes of Snow, Julien and Malone could prove lethal, spinners Mushtaq, Holford, Padmore and O’Keeffe were all but paid spectators. O’Keeffe, thoughtful and serious about his leg-spinning art, drifted. ‘I basically kept to myself a lot,’ he says. ‘You got frustrated because the scorecards never told the full stories about the degree of luck involved. The bush telegraph wasn’t strong. To come under consideration you had to win a match, and leg spinners didn’t do it. I was a stayer being run over sprint distances. Sometimes I’d catch them up but most of the time I’d tail off and if I was lucky pass a few tired runners.’
At least he knew he was in good company: ‘Players were playing and failing in up-country games that meant nothing, who could have been plundering some Test attacks round at the time ... The saviour for me was that there were so many people to like. I got as much pleasure dining with Mushtaq and John Snow as I did from dining with the Chappells.’
Indeed, the resolve of most players was remarkable. The enthusiastic Barlow enforced fitness drills with scoutmasterly verve, glasses fogging at his own exertion. As injuries and promotions raked the Cavaliers ranks, journeymen like Rohan Kanhai, Lance Gibbs, the Pakistani wicket-keeper-batsman Taslim Arif (who the following year would make the highest Test score by a keeper) joined up. When the Cavaliers first played the Australians at Maitland even Tim Ferrett appeared, attired by Ian Davis and Trevor Chappell, ferrying drinks with John Snow’s three-year-old daughter.
The Australians—star-struck by the growing capital city success of WSC—proved the Cavaliers’ meanest opponents. The top side had an attitude that we didn’t,’ Edwards says. They were media darlings and they expected to get what they wanted all the time. Some of them got a bit cocky.’
Competition immediately went up a notch at Maitland Sports Ground when Wayne Prior broke Wessels’ ribs before he’d scored, though the South African made his cussed way to 92. The Cavaliers could manage only one more between them.
Animosity, though, was then replaced by fear. When an air strike grounded all aircraft, players looked askance at a DC-3 chartered to fly the team from Williamtown to Melbourne. But the alternative of thirty-two hours on a bus was not an option for those in a VFL Park International Cup game next evening.
Sick bags were located when the aircraft backed off the tarmac to raise take-off speed, gunned its engines and made a lurching dash into the air. There was then the obligatory storm. ‘It was,’ recalls Davis, ‘like one of those old movies where the little biplane flies through the thunder and lightning and you’re hoping the hero won’t crash.’
‘The pilot said he was going to try and fly round it,’ Langer recalls. We reckoned he went through the middle. I mean, the plane was absolutely chocka. Bodies, equipment, hostesses, wives and kids everywhere. My dad and I were sitting up the back, my son and Ian Chappell’s little daughter were so scared they fell asleep next to each other.’
Langer rivalled Rick McCosker as the team’s worst flier. On Hercules transports during his national service, comrades had kept a book on how quickly Langer would be sick. Neither, though, went worse than a whiter shade of pale—even when the DC-3’s captain insisted on a scenic lap of VFL Park to admire its lights—before the plane touched down. McCosker promptly threw up with relief.
The trip was immortalised in the ‘Song of the Cavaliers’, to the tune of ‘Mull of Kintyre’: ‘Far have I travelled and much have I seen ... By coach, train and Cessna and a DC-3.’ It was with some pleasure that librettist Edwards inked in the last verse at Morwell on Christmas Eve, when the Cavaliers rolled Greg Chappell’s Australian XI: ‘We’re aged and injured or just out of form/Rejected dejected we’re sorry we’re born/When other teams play us they think it’s a farce/But we wipe off their smiles when we give them the arse.’
Martin Kent’s hopes had been sustained by Ferrett’s advice that Ian Chappell was watching from afar. ‘Bertie’d really like you to get a few today, Super,’ the manager say. ‘Get stuck in.’
Leaving Lismore in the New Year with a single-figure average, though, Kent knew that attention wouldn’t last. There was nothing for it. He would slog. Three days and 1600 kilometres later in a heat-haze at Mildura’s City Oval, Kent entered at 3–13, and watched Le Roux break Walters’ hand.
Between a dust-storm and a thunderstorm, the Queenslander scored a cyclonic 114 out of 141. ‘Le Roux and Imran were bowling, and they were just trying to knock my head off,’ says Kent. ‘And when they weren’t doing that they were trying to york me. But it was a pretty slow track, a bit like the Gabba, so I just kept smashing them.’ A half-century at Bendigo’s Queen Elizabeth Oval three days later, and Bertie was briefed that his headstrong hopeful had finally ‘got a few’.
Bendigo, though, was a watershed. The World swiped Haroon and Amiss and, with Walters and Woolmer still mending as managers, Kay Chappell was asked about her match fitness. Kanhai and Graham McKenzie were fetched, and O’Keeffe recalls opening the bowling at Barry Richards: ‘Sometimes Eddie Barlow had some strange ideas.’
‘Bunter awakes with a recurring dream/Concerning selections and picking a team,’ runs the salient verse of the team song. ‘One day it will happen but we don’t know when/That we’ll walk on the field with more than ten men.’
Barlow himself was then out of action at Tamworth two days later, and his stand-in David Holford saw even Snow and Kanhai purloined. Overwhelming defeat provoked a long team meeting, Ferrett agreeing that the Cavaliers’ pride in being the ‘no fuss’ team was being abused. ‘Support and co-operation from the three main sides in regard to players being released for country matches has been completely inadequate,’ Ferrett noted in his minutes. ‘Furthermore, the morale of the Cavaliers was dented due to the imbalance of the sides and were therefore incapable of making the match of high standard.’
Having to rely on newspapers for information was also not fair. ‘It was resolved that the Cavaliers desire a meeting with the executive regarding their future as individual members of WSC,’ he wrote. ‘At the moment they feel left out and ill-informed of the future of WSC.’ Protest registered, the team boarded a coach for Armidale with a week in Orange, Wagga and Albury to look forward to.
Drain on the Cavaliers could be traced straight to the top. Sounds of success there mingled with those of splintering bone. Men the Australians and West Indians played a meaningless $3000 stake game at Football Park on the first Saturday of the new year—largely to appease South Australian Premier Des Corcoran—some 22,068 people watched teams of crocks. Max Walker had joined Lillee on the injured list, and Davis was playing in spite of a broken finger. Murray, Rowe, Fredericks, Roberts and Holding were scratchings, and an inconvenient hat-trick by Gilmour (Haynes, Lloyd and Allen) forced Garner to bat with his broken finger to ensure a two-wicket win in the last over with Holford.
Garner soldiered on to VFL Park two days later, where a refreshed Andy Roberts began an arduous match by fracturing Majid’s cheekbone. As Tony Greig and Mike Procter shared the day’s highest partnership of 24 in a total of 103, they were humiliated regularly by steepling bounce.
Procter’s warning to Garner between innings that the ball tends to follow a broken digit proved good. A very reluctant last man at 9–67, Garner had his middle finger picked out by Clive Rice’s tailored bouncer. Hurling his glove to the ground, the West Indian reeled from the field. The West Indians buckled again against the Australians before a teeming 39,252 at VFL Park the following day. Chasing 174, the side’s last eight wickets dissolved in 38 runs.
England’s tour had also been bloodstained, and Queensland’s David Ogilvie sold a hamper of C & D helmets to the tourists at the Crest Hotel just before the First Test. ‘If great batsmen like Ian Chappell feel they should be worn then it makes sense for me to wear one,’ diarised the young David Gower. ‘If it helps my confidence, what have I got to lose?’ While the technician Boycott did not ‘feel the need’ personally, he recognised it. ‘£15 is not a very high price to put on a skull,’ he wrote.
‘The reasons behind the outbreak of such injuries were not easy to define,’ Alan Lee wrote, ‘although the further we went … the more disturbing standard of pitches became. Gone were the hard and even-bounced wickets for which the country has long been known; in their place a motley assortment including seamer’s delights and raging turners.’
It was no coincidence that Wessels, the summer’s most consistent scorer, frequently made others look nude in his protective array. A front-foot player, he needed all his armour for a century in the Third Supertest at VFL Park on Friday 12 January 1979.
Left with a splitting headache by Croft at 17, and hit in the groin as his century approached, he passed out at tea and had to be revived by masseur Dave McErlane so he could stagger the necessary runs. Wessels savoured Packer’s habitual stumps visit, as Ian Chappell reminded ‘the Boss’ of his swipe at the Springbok a month earlier. ‘You reckon that’s worthy of an import?’ said the Australian captain acidly.
‘For once Packer was lost for words,’ Wessels wrote. ‘And I thoroughly enjoyed watching his reaction.’
The Supertest became, however, a relative frolic on an even-tempered Maley pitch. Wessels’ introspection helped Hookes complete his return to batting health during their largely wordless partnership of 145. ‘He didn’t talk much, which suited me at that stage,’ Hookes says. ‘Batting conditions were good, and I could just concentrate on my own game.’ Hookes proceeded to what he felt was a ‘maiden Test century’ with fourteen fours.
Lawrence Rowe’s reputation, meantime, had always puzzled younger Australians. ‘We were always hearing what a good batsman he was,’ Mick Malone recalls. ‘And he was always disappointing. I’d never seen him make a run.’ With new, soft contact lenses, however, Rowe’s touch had been returning, and Malone was among the helpless bowling witnesses.
‘You always made the mistake of chasing Lawrence’s shots,’ says Ian Chappell. They’d be timed well-enough just to reach the boundary. With Viv you just waited for someone to throw the ball back, but Lawrence probably tired you more because you always felt you could catch them up. But you never did.’
Rowe taunted fielders two dozen times in the next six and a half hours, teasing also with his unbridled driving. ‘You’d think he was short,’ says Ray Bright. ‘But his top hand would always get forward of the ball and he’d be hitting you along the ground through covers again.’ With his last scoring shot of the second day, Rowe reached 150.
Even Lillee patted Rowe on the back when he sauntered off with 175 next morning. The match was the one international attraction— Supertest or Ashes Test—to aggregate more than 1000 runs that summer: quality batsmanship, no one brained and even 53 overs of Richard Austin’s becalming off-spin. Normal abnormal service, however, would resume in just forty-eight hours.
For some weeks, WSC’s Barbara Loois had been foraging in curtain shops and department stores for pastel fabrics. Plans to breach cricket’s colour bar were reaching fruition. Her only difficulty was that strawberry dye matching the West Indian mousse would not take to the synthetic surfaces of normal leg guards. Leather pads were imported.
The wattle Wessels and Davis opening the Australian innings in a reef of coral pink fielders on 17 January had 45,523 at the SCG blinking and television viewers fiddling with sets. The Australians acclimatised fitfully in their 9–149. Hookes holed out to Rowe as he lost a bouncer against the pale pitch and Marsh swayed sightlessly into another Daniel lifter that removed his helmet as it cut his eye.
The game was significant in WSC’s progress, for West Indian victory would see the team graduate to the International Cup Finals against the Australians: the optimum arrangement. Among on-look-ers was England’s captain Mike Brearley, whose American companion Dudley Doust was reminded of baseball as they studied the curious kaleidoscope.
Even moments of pandemonium seemed impressive, as when Lillee made an unsuccessful lbw appeal against Austin that became an attempt to run Rowe out. ‘All the fielders were converging while Austin was still running for his life toward the bowler’s end,’ Brearley wrote. ‘He had no idea what was happening at the other end, where Rowe was running back down the wicket shouting to attract Austin’s attention ... As a piece of cricket it was a mess but, with the yellow and strawberry colours, the game was more dramatic because one could see who was on which side.’
They left, though, before rain made the match truly bizarre. WSC managing director Andrew Caro bustled to the centre to remind umpires Douglas Sang Hue and Gary Duperouzel of their responsibilities, and the game recommenced with the pinks apparently pursuing 48 in 16 overs.
The plot thickened when the West Indians reached their target in nine overs and players began filing off. The umpires reasserted themselves by insisting that the required minimum of 15 overs be played, an impossibility when the SCG lights had to be extinguished by 10.30pm to meet Randwick council by-laws. The West Indians were 4–66 as the black-out fell, and some newspapers were baffled by the possibility of a draw. The Age guessed correctly, its story blessed with a Walkley Award-winning headline by subeditor Bob Parsonage: ‘Pink bats beat the weather!’
Argument smouldered next day as players attended a pre-arranged ‘At Home’ at the Packer residence, 76 Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill. Ian Chappell was adamant about the match’s invalidity. He was also furious at the brawling, sprawling crowd behaviour leading to twenty-five arrests.
The Packers soothed ruffled feathers, and Ross Edwards was floored to hear Ros Packer greet his wife by name: ‘You must be Lyndall, I’ve heard so much about you.’ That really impressed me,’ Edwards says. ‘She’d really done her homework.’
The guests had other questions. An International Cricket Conference delegation—chairman Charles Palmer, past-chairman David Clark and secretary Jack Bailey—had now spent a fortnight in Australia since meeting the Australian Cricket Board in Melbourne. Columnists wondered if a healing of world cricket’s WSC wound was near.
English attitude to Packer was still summed up by comic Warren Mitchell, whose Sydney season of Johnny Speight’s The Thoughts of Chairman Alf featured a routine griping about ‘that bloody Kerry Packer’. But Brearley’s team had performed as unpaid WSC servants a week earlier by securing the Ashes with a fine Fourth Test victory at the SCG.
WSC’s crowds might have been from the gutter, in contrast to traditional cricket lovers, but they were looking at the stars in great numbers. Now the ACB had two ‘dead’ Tests to promote, and more than two months of cricket in which to sustain interest. The ICC also had a World Cup in England that year to think about, and peace was paramount. When word leaked that Palmer and Bailey had met Caro and Taylor at CPH on Wednesday 10 January 1979, imminence of a truce was hailed.
But it wouldn’t be that simple. Packer had no love for the global body, or indeed for any nosy pom sticking his oar into Australian waters. A follow-up discussion the next Tuesday attended by Packer, Caro, Taylor and CPH deputy chairman Harry Chester was civilised, but abbreviated when Packer told the blow-ins: ‘I can’t understand why I’ve got members of the MCC in my office discussing what is basically an Australian problem. If I’m going to speak to anyone, I want to speak to Parish and Steele.’ At their Royal Sydney Golf Club lodgings, the Englishmen realised that the ACB would have to act on the ICC’s behalf
Packer would tell his players little at dinner. There was still little to tell. But he knew at last that, with the ABC’s television rights finished at season’s end, he had never been closer to his original goal.
Giving up was hard. Some felt Packer could still be thwarted. ‘I’d have been inclined to go on and fight it out for another year,’ says ACB treasurer Ray Steele. ‘Because I could see he was losing an awful lot of money. Everybody that worked for Packer was paid and paid big money, and cricket had thousands working in an honorary capacity. We had players under contract so he couldn’t recruit, while his players had a limited life and couldn’t go on forever.’ He recognised, however, that a fight to the finish might prove just that.
Chairman Bob Parish ensured he had the ICC’s explicit mandate. Dated 17 January on the golf club’s notepaper, Charles Palmer’s four-page handwritten letter arrived with the key paragraph: ‘I confirm that, as chairman of the ICC, I hereby authorise you to hold unilateral talks with WSC on the lines above, and I also confirm that talks only be accepted on condition that Mr Packer is present himself.’
The ACB’s first 1979 meeting in Adelaide nine days later, on the eve of the Fifth Test, was briefed. The ICC advice was read out. Steele faced a bleak financial picture. ‘When you have two bodies promoting cricket, you automatically divide sponsorship available, crowds, public interest, TV and radio income,’ says Steele. ‘We’d already lost a lot. The QCA told us it was on the verge of going through. At the VCA we were a bit better off because we’d built up some assets and owned our own building, but we were also in trouble.’
Secretary Alan Barnes reported an unusual volume of mail urging rapprochement, and the meeting officially attributed the burned-out Ashes summer to the divided cricket market and the weakness and anonymity of local players. But the ACB had also been outsold in a battle for public imagination. When Test selector Phil Ridings handed Mike Brearley his Fifth Test winner’s cheque in Adelaide on Thursday 1 February, and proposed that differences between the English and Australian sides were not as profound as the 4–1 scoreline suggested, a derisory voice sang: ‘What series have you been watching?’
Permitted by the meeting to negotiate exclusive commercial television rights, the ACB chairman wrote to CPH indicating its peaceful mood. He met formal but sympathetic response. ‘Parish and the board were the losers that summer,’ Caro recalls. ‘I mean, we outmarketed the bastards. But the poms were absolutely pusillanimous and they delivered Bob Parish’s head on an absolute platter, like John the Baptist.’