‘C’mon, Aussie, C’mon’ surged from speakers a night early at Sydney’s Entertainment Centre. World Series Cricket’s Australians, guests of American pop group Chicago, were invited on stage for an encore of their anthem. Chicago’s vocalist Peter Cetera had been lured to the SCG as part of the Fourth Supertest pre-publicity that day, shaped as a southpaw in coloured pads and helmet, and left a fistful of concert tickets.
The tune anticipated rout at the SCG and, spinning into a stiff breeze at the Paddington end, Ray Bright reaped six West Indian wickets in a session. ‘I’d got used to bowling with the white ball, too, and I found it unusually easy to grip,’ he adds. ‘Unlike the red one I could get it to curve in with the arm before spinning it away.’
Roberts and Croft swept away the Australian top order, but Hookes found Ian Redpath a tenacious ally. The South Australian admired his thirty-seven-year-old partner’s masochistic pleasure at being a full-fledged ‘Aussie’ again, teasing him as he accepted body blows without shrinking: ‘You old goat, go back to your antique shop, you shouldn’t be out here.’
Despite Bright’s success, Lloyd ignored his token spinner, Albert Padmore, to keep the Australians in check. ‘I don’t think Clive would have played a top-class spinner at the SCG even if he’d had one,’ says Greg Chappell. The bounce was up and down so it gave fast bowlers as much help as slow. If he’d played a spinner, too, he would have increased the number of balls per hour, which could have been crucial in a low-scoring game. The West Indies approach was like the Chinese water torture. If you just kept at ’em and at ’em and at ’em, they’d break mentally if not physically.’ Redpath’s nine runs lasted 143 minutes but he did not break, or even bend. The 71 he added with Hookes was the basis of a useful Australian lead of 22.
Lillee had been conserving his energies, coaxing a complaining hamstring to greater and greater extensions under Doc McErlane’s supervision, until stung by Colin Croft’s bouncers at the Australian tail. The West Indians were left two and a quarter hours’ floodlit batting on the third evening, and he neutralised five of their first seven, including an inert and apprehensive Viv Richards. The Australians’ ten-wicket win brought $10,000, and Ian Chappell pondered pay-off time.
Almost $100,000 rode on the Australians’ last fortnight. The $35,000 best-of-five International Cup Finals against the West Indies beginning on Saturday 27 January at VFL Park were followed by the $61,000 Supertest Final against the World scheduled the Friday following.
Those Ian Chappell considered his one-day specialists were called on. Martin Kent in Wagga had been planning a journey north to be best man at a friend’s wedding when his call-up came. Mick Malone felt his faith in Chappell vindicated. ‘Ian was always watching you, even when he wasn’t actually around,’ he says. ‘You’d go four or five matches without seeing him and the first thing he’d say when you saw him would be: “Saw you got 4–26 and 3–19 at Toowoomba. Keep that up and we’ll be needing you.” Ian could make me feel like Dennis Lillee when he threw me the ball.’
Ian Davis was also recalled, and with Wessels launched the first final with crisp strokes. Accompanied by a chant of ‘C’mon, Kepler, C’mon’, Wessels then added 116 in less than an hour and a half with Greg Chappell and was unstoppable until bowled for 136 from the innings’ final ball. The West Indian top order were a negligent contrast, top-scorer Gordon Greenidge run out by Rod Marsh in an evening daze as he wandered from his ground.
Wessels continued his rich vein of form in the second final, although Davis’s enjoyment was seasoned with annoyance. ‘If Kepler felt he was playing well he’d drop singles and make sure he got five or six balls an over,’ he recalls. ‘After an hour I was facing one ball an over, and I felt like I’d just been hung out to dry.’
Wessels, though, called one too many: Richards pounced on what seemed a perfectly realisable single wide of cover and threw down the non-striker’s stumps in the one movement. Losing impetus, the Australians seemed short-changed by their 8–189.
Victory still appeared likely when mistiming and misfortune dogged the West Indians on the slow surface. Rowe and Richards added 57 with the day’s surest strokes, but the former’s mishit to leg from Greg Chappell was extraordinarily caught by Marsh. The keeper covered the thirty metres from his crouch to square leg when the ball bisected converging fielders. ‘It was one of the greatest catches I’ve seen,’ wrote an expert watcher in Alan Knott. ‘Chasing a skier, overrunning it and then diving back parallel to the ground about three feet above it, catching the ball with arms at full stretch. How he held onto it when he hit the ground I cannot imagine.’
Collis King’s pinch-hitting, however, levelled the series with two overs of daring against Malone and Lillee. The last ball of the penultimate over, joyfully back-foot driven to the long off boundary, completed the rescue.
The West Indians had found their form at last and Wessels’ 70 on the Australia Day Monday in 6–200 was insufficient when Greenidge made a smart 81 in two and a half hours and confirmed the Australians’ lingering regard. A mid-season poll of their ranks had discovered that he was the opponent most Australians’ wished was a countryman. Some, like Malone, preferred bowling at Richards: ‘You could keep Gordon quiet with five balls, but if the sixth was a half-volley he’d hit it for four. You’d been looking at a maiden and suddenly you were thinking: ‘There’s my over ruined”.’ The Australians’ season of self-disciplined adaptation to one-day cricket now hinged on the fourth final on Tuesday 30 January.
Andrew Caro was in no doubt of his duty. WSC had been spared timing problems the night before only by the West Indians’ three spare overs at the finish. Now this fourth final was going to run past 10.30pm if played to a finish, which Packer and John Cornell could see was unsatisfactory in a decisive match. Packer wanted the overs played out. And that was Caro’s job.
Caro groaned. Once again it was down to him. For a year he’d been WSC front and back, from trials to turnstiles, and now he was worn out. ‘Basically I should have told him to piss off,’ Caro says. ‘In fact he probably would have accepted that. There was no way he could go on interfering with playing conditions as he pleased.
‘But I was basically exhausted. I’d been round the world umpteen times, and I was traumatised from dealing with Packer all the time. Most of my staff were terrified of him, so I was always the one who took him on. Kerry can be a great man when things are against him, but in success he can be insufferable and overbearing.’
Chasing 241, the West Indians had receded as far as 6–132, been revived by a partnership of 40 between Lloyd and Bernard Julien, then stalled by injury to the former requiring a runner, Richard Austin. As bats flailed and fielders muff-dived, Caro went in search of an extra fifteen minutes. A staffer went to slow VFL Park’s clock as he sought ground officials to brief. Then he tried to raise the Waverley Council for permission to keep the lights on.
The players, though, were still in the dark, and Caro dashed at last to the Australian dressing-room. Kerry O’Keeffe was parking the drinksmobile, so he told Wayne Prior to tell the umpires that the match was now to be played to finish. Prior headed for the centre. He told Ian Chappell.
The captain moaned. He would now have to find fill-in bowlers in order to conserve two overs from Lillee for the final follies. But WSC’s problem was deeper: umpires and West Indians were still playing to time and a revised target based on run rates.
Hookes was jeered as he took the ball at the commentary-box end, but Julien promptly shelled him to mid on in his first over. In his fourth over, Andy Roberts lofted to long off where Lillee took a gymnastic catch perilously near the boundary rope. Roberts, blind to the catch because of the ground’s sloping contour, did not see Lillee’s back-flip beyond the boundary. Nor did umpires invoke the experimental English law that would have ruled the catch a six. With the benefit of GTV-9’s all-seeing eye, however, the West Indians were brooding when Roberts returned.
But they were also punching calculators. At 10.19pm (real time kept by scorer Irving Rosenwater), Lloyd and Garner tugged seven from Malone’s forty-fourth over to drag the West Indians to 8–197. At 10.23pm, Hookes was recalled. His four gentle overs had cost just 18, but Lloyd now swung a boundary and Garner a six beyond mid wicket. Julien sprang from the dug-out at 10.27pm to deliver the final account: at 8–210, 17 were needed from what would now be the game’s last over to eclipse the Australians’ run-rate of 4.8. The umpires were also informed. But not Ian Chappell.
One more over, from someone, and Chappell felt he could recall Lillee. Malone was bowled out. So was Gilmour. Walker had conceded 32 from seven overs, but it would have to be the Victorian. In Rosenwater’s precise hand, the over reads: 10.28pm Walker: Lloyd 6 4 1—Garner 1—Lloyd 4 2. The score: 8–228. The West Indian run rate for 46 overs: 4.95. Lloyd, Garner and Austin raised their arms, the umpires lifted the bails. The time was 10.34pm, but the Australians felt they had just seen four overs and $35,000 vanish. In disbelieving disorder, they traipsed off.
In the dressing-room, Ian Chappell sought answers. Marsh scattered his gear, and disgust seethed among their juniors. ‘We’d been told the game would finish when it finished and they were playing under a different set of rules,’ says Kent. ‘We felt cheated, and cheated out of a fair amount of brass.’
WSC officials were incriminated by their silence, until Packer himself appeared. He would make it up: the Australians would receive parity of prize money. ‘You can take your money,’ bellowed Chappell. ‘And stick it right up your arse.’
Silence fell. ‘I thought we’d all been sacked,’ says Ross Edwards. The players piled aboard their bus for the Old Melbourne, variously dejected and demented. Marsh finally told the team as they arrived that they’d ‘taken it like Australians’. He organised a wake, charged to WSC.
Caro took the rap and resigned. ‘It was my fault and I accept that,’ he says. ‘All I can say is that, after a year of dealing with Kerry, I was worn out and my judgement was impaired,’ he says. The freedom Packer and Cornell felt tampering with official match rules, however, left them equally culpable.
The findings of a VFL Park inquest were laid before journalists at a midnight press conference. Packer told pressmen he had apologised: ‘Obviously I had to apologise to them because of the breakdown in communication. We’ve had a mistake made. I feel very sorry for the Australians.’
So sorry he then made for the Old Melbourne and knocked at the door of Marsh’s wake. Ian Chappell was not around but, when the teetotal Packer accepted a beer that Marsh wickedly forced on him, ‘the Boss’ achieved at least partial forgiveness.
Like many similar columns, Tony Greig’s involvement in his Sunday newspaper scribbling was mostly confined to signing his name, but its rich rhetoric had Ian Chappell handing out photocopies as the Australians arrived in Sydney the next day for the Supertest final. Greig had tipped a comfortable World victory, enriched by a personal century: ‘If I’m good in any situation it’s the big one, and the more they hoot me, the more the bowlers throw at me, the better I’ll like it.’
Greig’s willingness to offer himself as a hate-object was readily accepted. ‘We were working so hard to show it would work.’ Edwards says, ‘that to have someone swanning round and pretending to be a superheavy when his performances didn’t justify it we found offensive.’ The dangerous direction the match seemed to be taking convinced Eddie Barlow—replacing the injured Majid as Barry Richards’ opening partner—that he should finally get that helmet.
Greg Chappell was out before he was in. An irritated eye he had noticed lunching with his wife Judy in King’s Cross proved to be Bell’s palsy on the right side of his face. Packer had been a fellow sufferer and, on collecting the batsman from a series of X-rays at Sydney hospital, took Chappell to his own Macquarie Street neurosurgeon. Not only would Chappell be confined to Supertest Final commentaries in dark glasses, but his West Indies trip might be in jeopardy.
When Garth Le Roux and the SCG surface began taking their toll, it seemed a good match to be missing. Within half an hour of the 3.30pm intermission, Le Roux and countrymen Mike Procter and Clive Rice had reduced the home team to 7–80. Ian Chappell’s imprudent hook at his ninth ball had been the sole gesture of defiance. Bright, Gilmour and Pascoe more than doubled the score, but two more Springboks, Richards and Barlow, were walking to the centre by the time the ground’s lights were on.
Though Richards swung Lillee’s third ball over square leg for six to strike a blow for batsmanship, Barlow was pegged to his stumps two balls later and Gilmour bowled an inspired spell. Despite his constant complaints of an inability to run, he shuttled 19 consecutive overs from the Randwick end that evening and had picked off Rice, Zaheer and Asif Iqbal for 42 when finally relieved at 10.15pm.
Greig lasted just five panicky deliveries. Lillee drew jerks and twitches and hazy swings from him, then induced a touch to Marsh that was celebrated like a ritual slaughter. The game’s most important batting, amid all the talent on tap, came from Le Roux and Derek Underwood. Resolute in their helmets for 81 minutes on Saturday, they turned 9–104 into 168 and narrowed the Australians’ lead to just four runs.
Hookes and Laird battled the elements for much of the rest of the day. Hookes was assured, Laird coming from a beggarly 58 in seven Supertest innings that season. Imran’s cutters darted about in the evening but, at 9.20pm, Hookes heard Greig tell the Pakistani he could have just one further over. Laird snicked the second ball to Alan Knott. Imran kept the ball. Hookes cursed.
Asif Iqbal’s dash at deep square leg then cost Kent dearly. ‘I could see it was Asif and I knew he was one of the best around,’ says Kent. ‘But I was running to the end further away, so I took my time over the first and only realised I was in trouble on the way back.’ As the ball soared beyond him to the non-striker’s stumps, Kent stuck his bat out in attempted interception. ‘It came down my backhand side and I missed the bloody thing. Goodnight Dick.’
When Marsh followed before stumps, the Australians needed Hookes to extend his overnight 93 on Sunday. Never dismissed in the 90s before, he pondered 150. But he had added only three when he overanxiously dragged a Le Roux half-volley onto his stumps.
The World’s target of 226, though, should still have been beyond its reach. It was the match’s highest score. The Australian bowlers were at their hungriest and the pitch was crumbling underfoot. Barlow, double-glazed behind his new helmet and old glasses, lasted ten scoreless deliveries before following Lillee’s leg cutter to Gilmour in the gully. Even Richards looked vulnerable. Greig stalked the dressing-room chain-smoking.
Zaheer played a flurry of shots, Rice and Asif failed, but Richards grafted unrecognisably. His first 40 took almost two and a half hours and thirty-six overs, and partners found him anxious for reassurance. As critic rather than cricketer, Greg Chappell watched his toil. ‘Without the build-up of Test cricket I wouldn’t have been happy playing World Series,’ he says. That was what Barry had done all along. I don’t think he batted particularly well, but it was just sheer effort of will that allowed him to do it. He called on those great reserves of determination and experience and willpower that we always knew he had.’
Richards application was an education for the Australians. ‘Usually he did it so easy,’ says Bright. ‘But he earned his stripes that day. Dennis was beating him over and over but we couldn’t break Barry’s concentration.’
Procter took up the scoring slack with a six over extra cover from Bright and hooks and square-cuts from Pascoe. When Bright parted them with 50 still required, Richards finally seized the night. Gilmour disappeared for four and six over mid wicket, then was driven straight with a sting like a headmaster’s strap. An over later Gilmour was driven and stroked through mid wicket for boundaries. Three from Lillee turned Richards’ five-hour vigil into a match-winning century.
The Australians sank sullenly. With two runs needed and Richards on strike, Ian Chappell took the ball and hurled it for four leg-side wides. His team had returned penniless from its $100,000 week, although the greatest rub was losing to Greig. Chappell smoked a cigar at the post-match presentations, and refused his rival’s hand-shake. ‘Great contribution from you again,’ he snapped instead.
It completed a year of estrangement between two pillars of WSC. Three years before, Chappell had described Greig as ‘almost an Australian’ in fair-minded competitiveness. In WSC’s mid-season questionnaire, Greig had classed Chappell the Australian he most respected. Now they were irreconcilable. ‘It’s the sort of thing I have come to expect from him,’ Greig told journalists. ‘But I’m happy when Chappell does something like that because then I know he is hurt—and I like to see him hurt.’ Chappell retorted: ‘I didn’t shake hands with Greig because I have no respect for him as a cricketer or a captain. I used to have but it’s all gone.’
Procter delightedly tallied South Africa’s contribution to the World’s win—two-thirds of its runs, 16 wickets, five catches—and chirped to Chappell that the game would have ended a day earlier had there been more Springboks assembled. That went down really well,’ he wrote.
The World’s twelfth man Bob Woolmer recorded: ‘I shall never forget ... the faces of the Australians as they trudged off the field, realising they had lost the match and seventy thousand in bonus money ... That match was labelled a fix by the media. Nothing could have been further from the truth: it was pure and great Test cricket with both sides keyed up to do well and performing at a very high level.’ It had certainly been a test.
Test cricket proper returned to the SCG a week later, but a sorry series for Australia was given a pauper’s funeral. After WSC had drawn almost 40,000 in its three days, the Australian Cricket Board could find only 22,000 in four willing to attend Australia’s fifth defeat.
England had prevailed with maximum efficiency and minimum aesthetic effect. ‘We wanted larger crowds,’ recorded David Gower, ‘and we were conscious of the success of WSC, but felt our priority was a convincing win. It wasn’t our fault the crowds stayed away towards the end—are we to blame because the Aussies don’t like a losing side?’
Of the seventeen leaderless and directionless Australians called on, five alone had lasted more than four consecutive Tests. Vice-captain Gary Cosier lasted two, his axing passed on—in time-honoured fashion—by journalist Dick Tucker after the Second Test in Perth.
‘Has the team been announced?’ Cosier asked.
‘No, not yet,’ Tucker replied. ‘But you’re not in it.’
Peter Toohey and Bruce Yardley, successes against India and the West Indies, grappled uneasily with failure. ‘I got theories left, right and centre and in a short time my confidence was absolutely shot,’ says Toohey. ‘You could have taken me to Blayney against the worst bowler in the world and he would have got me out. They had the choice in the Fifth Test of dropping me completely or making me twelfth man. Frankly I wish they’d dropped me.’ Yardley had been easily read by players fluent in off spin: ‘The way the Indians and West Indians played had really suited me. The English players sat on you, never took a chance.’
Taking two-thirds of the English wickets in 40 per cent of the overs, Rodney Hogg and Alan Hurst had saved Australian face. But Graham Yallop, a tongue-tied contrast with Brearley, had been perplexed by Hogg’s various humours. Recalls Hurst:
These two would be talking about resolving things face to face behind the pavilion, and it was a downer in a team that needed all the positives it could get. For young guys like Wood and Darling there was nothing worse than seeing their captain was not getting respect. Simpson had been well above the rest of his team obviously in experience and age. But Yallop was really just on the same level as the rest of the players. You couldn’t look up to him. Basically he didn’t want the job, and he didn’t have the experience or the personal manner for the role.
For twenty-two-year-old Andrew Hilditch, his Test debut in Sydney was a dizzying turn in an already disorienting career. Named New South Wales’ captain after just two matches the previous year, he was run out unluckily and caught behind very unconvincingly for three and one. ‘The second innings will always stand out,’ he says. ‘The ball came off so slowly that, when I touched it, I was absolutely confident it wouldn’t carry. I could turn round and watch it bounce. It’s amazing there wasn’t a scene, but I guess it was my first Test and I was a bit timid.’ In fairness to wicket-keeper Bob Taylor, he did not appeal and relied on assurances of his slipsmen. But it is intriguing to imagine what might have been the upshot had TCN-9’s omniscient cameras and replays been telecasting the Test rather than the static and myopic ABC. To cleanse his mind of the memory, Hilditch went next door to the Sydney Showground to see the Rod Stewart concert, whose soundchecks had deafened fielders for the duration of Australia’s nine-wicket defeat.
The irony of the nadir of Yallop’s summer is that the match was a personal landmark. His 121 from Australia’s first-innings 198 was touched by genius, though in his own mind is recalled with some bafflement. ‘I just couldn’t believe it because on the first day it was a very good wicket,’ he says. ‘I felt everything was falling apart round me, and I just had to make as many as I could as quickly as possible.’
Though their caps carried the Pakistani pentangle when they arrived from New Zealand for two Tests against Australia on 26 February 1979, Asif Iqbal, Majid, Javed, Sarfraz, Imran, Haroon and captain Mushtaq did little to hide their other allegiance. Warming up at Manuka Oval against NSW, Mushtaq, Majid and Javed all wore WSC shirts, albeit with insignias obscured at the request of manager Ebu Ghazali.
Ghazali’s own position, too, appeared nominal. When the team visited Adelaide, Mushtaq accepted a dinner invitation from his old Cavaliers squire Graham Ferrett for his entire entourage. ‘What time for dinner, manager?’ Mushtaq asked.
‘Oh, 8pm?’ said Ferrett.
‘Very good, manager.’
Fifteen players, wives, management and press arrived at the tick of the clock. ‘Suddenly we were hunting for takeaway restaurants,’ Ferrett recalls. ‘And my wife and Kay Chappell were learning how to make Pakistani breads for thirty.’
Packer himself visited his men at the MCG during Pakistan’s First Test, where he bumped into Ray Steele. In conciliatory spirit, the ACB treasurer invited the businessman to lunch in the VCA Delegates Room, though some gaps remained unbridged.
As they walked to lunch Steele remarked on Packer’s Pakistan tie. ‘That’s because I don’t have an Australian one,’ came the tart reply. A polite lunch ensued, but Steele did not offer one.
The young Australians’ Test initiation was a bracing bolt of WSC. While five of the Australians at Melbourne had seven Tests between them (including the promising NSW left-hander Allan Border), Pakistan was a gilt-edged combination.
Imran had Hilditch caught from a fierce lifter, bowled Border and Yallop, and shortened Peter Sleep’s Test debut with a leg cutter. There were very few occasions I walked off feeling as though I’ve really been bowled,’ says Hilditch, ‘that the bowler was much too good. The ball from Imran just exploded off a length. I couldn’t help feeling I was learning a lot about the part luck plays in cricket in a very short time.’
The Pakistanis played very hard ball, Javed running out Hogg from a no-ball as the tailender went pitch-prodding. ‘We took an instant dislike to some of them,’ says Hurst. ‘We’d got used to the very sportsmanlike approach of the English players, but the Pakistanis seemed a very arrogant bunch.’
Hilditch was more accepting. ‘I don’t think there was any co-ordinated antagonism,’ he says. ‘In fact I found the Pakistanis on the whole behaved in quite a gentlemanly manner on the field. What incidents there were, and there were a few I suppose, probably owed more to a few volatile characters.’
There were none more volatile than Sarfraz. Border, Hilditch and Kim Hughes had ushered Australia to within 77 of a towering last day target of 382 when Sarfraz moodily removed their seven remaining wickets for the cost of a single in 33 deliveries. Border’s maiden Test century was misspent on Australia’s eleventh defeat in fifteen Tests.
Andrew Hilditch explains it still with a faint incomprehension: ‘It is very hard to understand. People asking me about it now assume there must have been more to it than what happened. The impression they have is that there was incredible heat against us when we went out, but I would never have picked the ball up in those circumstances. It seemed just ridiculously hostile not to pick up the ball and throw it to him.’ Sarfraz’s ridiculously hostile response to Hilditch’s politeness now towers over not only Perth’s Second Test, but the batsman’s entire Test career.
Hilditch had arrived ready for a memorable match whatever occurred. With Yallop’s sorry season ending on crutches after a grade match, Kim Hughes would be leading Australia in his tenth Test. Hilditch had been appointed his vice-captain, Australia’s fourth of the summer, in his third. Their first day in charge proved profitable. Only Javed resisted the rapid right-arm Hurst and the workmanlike left-arm Geoff Dymock.
In December 1977, Andrew Hilditch had captained NSW Colts. Two months later, he had led NSW. And on the morning of Sunday, 25 March 1979 he became de facto captain of Australia. Hilditch was taking his habitual daily dose of batting practice when Hughes turned an ankle standing on a ball in an adjacent net.
It didn’t actually ‘feel’ daunting. Events slipped into place as soon as Hilditch led the team out on the third day with a lead of 50. In Hogg’s first over, Majid was expertly caught in the gully by substitute Trevor Laughlin, a specialist who had gone there unbidden.
Laughlin exerted a final influence when Asif Iqbal prolonged Pakistan’s innings on the final morning with last man Sikander Bakht. Australians gathered at drinks to discuss the ease with which Asif was farming the bowling: in thirty-five minutes, Sikander had faced just three balls. Word passed: Laughlin was asked to watch Sikander backing-up.
‘I took a look at the next few balls and he was, you know, three or four metres out of his ground,’ says Laughlin. He crossed to Hurst: ‘If you want him, you got him.’
Hurst wanted him, and Sikander was got. Hurst trimmed the bails matter-of-factly as he ran through the crease. ‘It was very funny to look at,’ Laughlin recalls. ‘Hurstie just ran through and Sikander was off looking the other way, metres down running full tilt for the other end.’ It was the classic ‘Mankad’: premeditated, improvised and leaving all heaven in a rage. Asif swiped at his stumps. Sikander gesticulated. ‘You’ve cheated,’ Hurst told him. ‘So you’re out.’
Hilditch had spent a cool two and a half hours with Rick Darling adding 87 when he entered Wisden’s chamber of handled-the-ball horrors. Mid-off fielded Darling’s drive, but Sarfraz’s fumble of the return rolled to a halt five metres away. Hilditch picked it up and threw it back. He recalls:
I don’t think he even stopped to catch it. He just turned round and started to scream. I thought: ‘No-one can listen to this madman.’ Even as I was going off I expected all the time that the captain would intervene at any moment and I’d get a tap on the shoulder and be asked to go back … My second reaction was that 29 was such a disappointment. Rick and I had been going so well. There’d been problems with the opening positions and we seemed to have resolved them, and I’d been telling myself that this was the real start of my Australian career … Then I gradually started thinking: ‘This could not be happening. Is this going to cost us the Test?’
Australia’s rooms were silent. ‘You could see the anger well up in Andrew when he got back,’ says Hurst. ‘He just said: “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that just happened”. None of us could. Before the game hardly any of us had seen a “Mankad”. We’d certainly never seen a handled the ball. It was like a dream.’
Allan Border, three months after scoring his maiden first-class century on the same ground against Western Australia, now proceeded to win his first Test for Australia. Though rain clouds skirted the arena, Border’s concentration was watertight. Thirty-one-year-old Victorian Jeff Moss, Yallop’s replacement playing in his first Test, looted 20 from two overs by Imran as the match entered its final hour and noise returned to the Australians’ rooms. ‘One reason I remember the game so fondly is the feeling in the dressing-room that afternoon,’ says Hilditch. ‘We were playing an unbelievably talented side and beating them. Players like Allan Border were emerging as the future of Australian cricket.’ Mushtaq capitulated in the fourth last over: he called up opening batsman Mudassar, whose second ball Moss flicked to leg for the winning runs.
A fraternal trip to Pakistan’s dressing-room proved pointless. ‘It wasn’t so often we won Tests at the time, and it was end of our summer,’ says Hurst. ‘So we were keen on a drink. We were just disdained. I sat next to Imran and tried to say a few things to get him talking, but got no response.’ Nor did the WACA echo with ‘C’mon, Aussie, C’mon,’ though it was as meaningful that day as any other in the cricket cascade of the preceding four months.