There was a palpable end-of-term feeling among Ian Chappell’s Australians as they practised at Sabina Park on Sunday 18 February 1979. Two months’ hard Caribbean labour lay ahead but two years’ toil was astern. Plied with rum even before boarding their airliner, they’d shed their flash red and white tour jackets en route for jeans and T-shirts.
Ian Chappell, however, was typically earnest. This might be his last leadership assignment, and it had been on an almost identical tour six years earlier that he had won his first overseas series. Port-of-Spain 1973 was writ large in memory: with Rohan Kanhai’s team 3–219 chasing 333 at lunch on the last day, Chappell’s entreaties had wrung a 44-run win.
Five companions were retracing their 1973 steps: brother Greg, Lillee, Marsh, Max Walker and Kerry O’Keeffe. Passed fit a day before departure, Greg batted behind sunglasses prescribed for the tour’s first week to neutralise his palsy. ‘I needn’t have gone,’ he says. ‘But I had something to prove to myself: that I could make large numbers of runs against their attack. And when I was told there was no reason I couldn’t recover fully, there seemed no point missing out for the sake of a week.’
Lillee’s 1973 trip had been his blackest two months. Breakdown with spinal stress fractures in Antigua had left him a spectator. Eighteen months as a chiropractic experiment had followed. His mate Marsh coveted runs that had eluded him for two years, Walker and O’Keeffe regular team places that latterly had escaped them.
Thanks to cricket’s peace talks, the team had been strengthened three days before by Thomson’s sudden release from his Australian Cricket Board contract. He had been a familiar non-playing face at games during the summer, but his could be little more than psychological presence. He could hardly be fully fit after nine idle months.
Loose talk of truces irritated Chappell, too. In a fifty-two day period, the Australians faced thirty-seven days’ international cricket: five five-day Supertests and a dozen one-day internationals. Passengers could not be carried. Ian Davis had already encountered the ethic, after telling Chappell a week before departure that the Commonwealth Bank was reluctant to grant him leave for the tour. Distressed also by hepatitis, thinking about a young wife, Davis was agonising. ‘I um’d and ah’d,’ Davis recalls. ‘I thought: “Jeez, if I quit I’ll have nothing to come back to” ... I was dumb really, but marriage does change you. When I was in Nowra, I used to eat, sleep, shower and shit cricket. But when I got married I did realise that there was more in life than cricket, and that there was no point dying for it.’
Although Kepler Wessels’ South African passport had already denied the captain one opening batsman, Chappell had not urged Davis to reconsider. He’d turned instead to Rick McCosker, a dedicated disciple who’d previously put bat before bank.
Davis had felt a little like a soldier drummed from the corps: ‘Ian always emphasised how you had to devote yourself to cricket. He once said: “If you want to play Tests, don’t get married until you’re thirty.” He didn’t talk to me much about it, didn’t try to talk me out of it. I guess he thought: “Here’s a young bloke, reckons he wants to play first-class cricket, and he’s knocking back a cricket trip.”’
Similarly at Sabina Park, the captain noted Pascoe’s detachment. With his soulmate Thomson handy, Pascoe chatted cheerily with Jamaicans while loafing through the net session. At a cocktail party later, Chappell decided to get in his ear. ‘So Lenny,’ he said, ‘who booked your tour then? Jetset or Qantas? You’re obviously here for a holiday.’
Pascoe pouted. ‘What do you fucking mean?’
‘Well everyone’s bowling their guts out, and you’re down at fine leg talking to the locals. There’s a third pace spot in this side and I haven’t decided who’s going to fill it.’ When Pascoe seemed to sulk, Chappell thought he’d best try and lighten the exchange: ‘C’mon Lenny. Where’s your sense of humour anyway?’
Pascoe’s paw was on Chappell’s collar in a trice, lifting the captain off the ground, his expression such as hijack victims see on terrorists. ‘I fucking haven’t got one,’ Pascoe told him.
Bruce Laird moved to separate them, but as quickly as Pascoe’s hand had extended it was retracted with a laugh and the captain dropped to the ground. ‘See?’ he guffawed. ‘I have got a fucking sense of humour after all.’ As Pascoe moved off, Chappell couldn’t be sure whether his message had been received.
Translating World Series Cricket into West Indian patois had fashioned a tour unlike any other. In 1973, Australia’s schedule had featured twenty-five days’ Test cricket and twenty-one of first-class cricket threaded over three months. The Australians would work to rule in 1979: seventeen international engagements compressed into eight weeks.
The profit-conscious schedule organised by the Jamaican businessmen on WSC Caribbean—Patrick Terrelonge, Franz Botek and Conrad Pine—meant that batsmen would have precious little opportunity to relocate lost form, bowlers faint hope of attaining match fitness.
The prize pot, though, was without local precedent. The region’s bellwether agricultural trading company, Neal and Massy, had stumped up $US250,000 in sponsorship: their banner draped the Kingston Sheraton proudly as the Australians arrived. West Indian Tobacco had staked each Supertest and one-day match. With match and individual awards from WOT Sports, Heineken, Red Stripe and Ovaltine, some $US55,550 hinged on the series. If this tour did not make money, no cricket trip would profit. Given the purses closed on Jeff Stollmeyer a year before, and Caribbean cricket’s years of financial hardship, it is little wonder that the West Indian Cricket Board of Control president could not bring himself to attend any of the matches he had helped broker.
WSC’s entourage was small. Austin Robertson was tour leader with Barbara Loois travelling ahead to arrange accommodation. Manager Richie Robinson was intended to allow Marsh a few days ungloved. The loyal Dave McErlane was along to massage the cricketers, Bruce McDonald to massage finances and carry scorebooks, while Walker, with forty rolls of WSC film, doubled as tour photographer.
Television coverage was one reporter and one backpack cameraman: GTV-9’s Mike Lester and Greg Cameron. John Maley, part of whose cricket odyssey had been five months at Trinidad’s Crompton club, also strung along for part of the tour. The Australian’s Phil Wilkins continued his devotionals with Reuters reporter Terry Williams, but there was no chorus of publicists, no coloured carnival and—in particular—no ‘C’mon, Aussie, C’mon’.
It was Wilkins who discovered Ian Chappell a week later by the Sheraton’s pool. Ten days in Jamaica and Chappell wore a heavy beard, guarding against the equatorial sun, that made him resemble an escaped convict. Wilkins shuffled up to ask a question about the just completed Supertest. ‘Fuck off, you prick,’ came the response.
Wilkins could make it up himself. Three days after arrival, the Australians had wandered into a one-day international before 8000. The chase for 175 soon turned academic and they had barely survived their allotment. On duty in the second over, Chappell had been left gasping by a blow in the chest from Michael Holding. McErlane had sent him for X-rays when he saw the soup-plate bruise. The match’s only positive had been Hookes’ continued command—he’d hooked Garner over the sightscreen—and brother Greg’s squinting 23 with the naked eye.
Greg had captained the Australians the next day to a one-wicket win in the twilight, Thomson and Walker adding a hair-raising dozen. But the second ball of the innings from Holding had maimed McCosker’s finger, spelling him for a month and turning Trevor Chappell into Laird’s ersatz partner.
Ian Chappell’s week had truly gone awry, after a lay-day, in the First Supertest. Though Lillee, Gary Gilmour and Ray Bright felled the final West Indian at 188, in the remaining hour and a quarter the Australians had discovered the trickery of the improvised sight-board at Sabina Park’s southern end. Emerging from a background of building works in a half-completed stand, Roberts had stung Laird’s shoulder, glanced his helmet, and opened Trevor Chappell’s chin as the batsman arched back from a bouncer. Six stitches were needed to close the wound.
Ian Chappell and Laird were swept aside when Holding moved south, while Greg Chappell’s half-hour before stumps proved figuratively eye-opening. ‘Although they produce so many fast bowlers, West Indian pitches aren’t often as fast as people expect,’ he comments. ‘But that Sabina Park wicket was as fast as any I’d seen. They took us by storm, they were very aggressive, probably thinking that if they got on top of us early we might fall in a heap.’
The Australians fell dishevelled in 100 minutes next morning. Greg feathered his hook at the fifth ball to Murray, Hookes was yorked, and Trevor Chappell’s return proved no more than a courageous cameo. ‘I’d thought: “Shit we’ve got a real chance here, they’ve only made 188”,’ Ian Chappell recalls. ‘But they’d just steamrolled us.’
Lillee led a rally from the southern end camouflage, deceiving Lawrence Rowe horribly second ball. The sound of his ear guard concaving as the ball broke his cheekbone silenced his home town. But Lloyd reversed the steamroller over the Australians as soon as the fast bowler rested.
He and Andy Roberts ruled the third day. Lloyd’s bravura back swing made a contrast with Roberts, whose bat rose grudgingly, as 108 came before lunch. Enjoying the second new ball after lunch, the pair went run-for-run drumming 117 in eighty-five minutes. Fielders fell back until they could go no further: Sabina Park’s straight boundaries are just sixty metres from the pitch. The thirty-five fours and two sixes had stand-in scorer McDonald scrawling to keep up. How did you bowl to Lloyd in this mood? ‘With a helmet,’ Gilmour commented.
At Lloyd’s every pendulous swing, Jamaicans grew more vocal. Only Martin Kent could raise a cheer as he patrolled the wire fence at long on that jacketed the crowd. ‘Kent?’ came a voice. ‘You bin to South Africa?’
‘Yeah,’ the Australian croaked.
The voice continued: ‘You not goin’ again maaan?’
‘No,’ Kent said. ‘No way. Finished there.’ Kent’s section of the crowd bayed delightedly.
They continued as Holding first removed Laird’s helmet with a bouncer, then his off stump with a yorker. The local was bowling with beach cricket glee after a truncated Australian summer. ‘My fitness in those days was very poor,’ Holding explains. ‘I used to do my own athletics and weight training, but I was still learning about stretching. I suffered badly with pulled muscles and anteriors, because there was no match against a county or state team where I could relax. I was very pleased to be home and relax and feel fit again.’ And also to get all three Chappells. Bright was taking his second nightwatch at stumps with the tourists’ 4–91 in vain pursuit of a further 473 in two days.
Ian Chappell was a remote figure watching the last six Australians muster 103 on the fourth day. He brooded as much over the manner of the defeat as its margin: ‘We were starting to whinge: “Aww, the nicks aren’t carrying and they’re playing and missing. And how many bouncers an over can they bowl?” Which was very unusual for us. Generally we took our punishment. But, once you hear that, you know you’re on the slippery dip. So I thought: “I’d better do something about this”.’
He could not remember having to lecture an Australian team since that landmark 1973 tour, but the anniversary was worth honouring. This whingeing isn’t the way we work,’ he told his charges. ‘And if you’re looking to the umpires for protection, forget it. If you think Douglas (Sang Hue) and Ralph (Gosein) are going to stop them bowling bouncers over here, think again.’ The captain, they learned, would be leading from the front. Ian Chappell had decided to open.
‘Ian rarely addressed us,’ says Bright. ‘He didn’t really get into us, so much as say we had it in us to come back.’ The captain’s final entreaty recurred again and again in the coming two months. ‘Whatever we do, let’s make ’em respect us.’
Victoria Park in Castries on the island of Saint Lucia was a proving ground five days later on 3 March, when the Australians almost wrested a one-day game from the West Indies in dying light Laird hit five forthright fours in 56 over two and a half hours, and was caught deep flinging out an uncharacteristic hook. Lillee and Gilmour slapped 29 in ten minutes, but Lillee was bowled by Holding attempting a third six that would have tied the match.
Ian Chappell was happier. Rain next day allowed an early exit for Bridgetown, and a group of players joined retired West Indian fast bowler Richard Edwards on a fishing trip. Though they returned only with seasickness, Thomson and Pascoe had taken precautions at the local fishmarkets and their barbeque relaxed the ensuing team meeting.
But Chappell still felt that his message needed selected amplification. When Pascoe left the team bus idling next morning ducking a net session at Kensington Oval, Chappell decided that the cab fare might work on the fast bowler where words had failed. Thomson was told to fetch him, the bus driver told to drive.
Chappell said nothing when Pascoe arrived, and nothing when the late-comer malingered off two paces. Instead he padded up and, conspicuously leaving his helmet aside, walked into Pascoe’s net. The fast-bowler’s run-up lengthened.
Phil Wilkins calls the next twenty minutes ‘the finest exhibition of net batting I’ve ever seen’. Bouncers hummed round Chappell’s ears like hornets as Pascoe homed in on him from twenty yards and less. ‘Oh skipper, he’s trying to knock your block off,’ chortled locals behind the nets. ‘I think this Lennie want to kill you, man.’
Chappell took his standard twenty-minute session and, as was his custom, thanked bowlers as he left. With heavy emphasis he turned to Pascoe: Thanks, Lennie. Best work-out I’ve had in a long time.’
Still snorting as he gathered his breath, Pascoe could only grunt: ‘Thought you’d fucking say that.’
That evening, Chappell picked Pascoe for his first game on tour. In the next day’s international, it was Pascoe who made the crucial breaches with the new ball, curbing the in-form Gordon Greenidge and Roy Fredericks. The Australians celebrated a 42-run win when Lillee and Walker gathered in the last seven wickets for just nine runs.
The face missing was a number three to stand in for the skipper. ‘I didn’t want Greg to have to bat there,’ he says. ‘Because I always reckoned that if the West Indies were able to pick me up quickly and then get Greg as well they got a bit of a boost and we lost a bit of our edge.’ Kerry O’Keeffe was pondered as a stop-gap, but Greg urged his brother to elevate Kent from the number seven slot that the twenty-five-year-old Queenslander had filled at Sabina Park.
Kent was confident despite the score of 2–13 as Australia pursued 241 the next day. With Roberts and Holding resting, only Joel Garner, he felt, needed constant vigilance. Kent recalls:
I got to know that there were a few blokes who’d always give you something. Andy wouldn’t. He was always just short, preservation was the name of the game. Michael was always up there, too, and Garner. But Crofty and Mandingo [Daniel], they’d slip you one in the slot occasionally. If they weren’t bouncing you they were trying yorkers, which could become half-volleys. They were quick, and a good challenge, but Daniel didn’t do much with the ball and Crofty was bowling mostly in-swingers, so you didn’t have to worry much about late movement.
Batting with Greg then Trevor Chappell, his erect driving swung the game. When Lloyd sought a few cheap overs from Richard Austin, Kent flipped him expertly over the inner ring then pulled him over mid wicket for six. Despite his 109, he cursed as he slapped Daniel to cover-point Collis King: ‘It was there and I went for it, and I shouldn’t have got out. It’d been my day but it was that old syndrome. I’d done the work. I’d made 100 and nobody should have got me.’
Lillee hit a six in the last over from Colin Croft, but was caught next ball by Richards, and Kent was still cursing defeat when his captain sat down beside him the dressing-room. ‘What d’you think of yourself as a cricketer, Super?’ Chappell asked. ‘Where d’you think you’ve got to?’
Due modesty and the day’s lessons in mind, Kent thought before replying. ‘Oh, I’m not bad,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got a lot to learn.’
Chappell’s response came short and sharp. ‘It’s okay to say that, but listen: the sooner you believe in yourself, the better you’re going to be. Back yourself. You’re in this company, so you can play. Believe it. Don’t think you’re always just starting.’ He moved off again.
Kent looked round him. Yes, here he was, batting number three between Ian and Greg Chappell. He could play. That was a turning point for me. Realising I’d gained acceptance. I’d probably done it when I’d played my first Supertest, but it just took a while to realise I had respect.’ If he and his colleagues could widen that respectful group to include West Indians, then a 369-run Supertest defeat could still be redeemed.
Kent’s next heart-to-heart with his captain came two days later, forty minutes into the Second Supertest after Lloyd had inserted the Australians on what flattened into a good batting wicket. With Roberts resting a sprained back, Kent struck off Ian Chappell’s flint. ‘Batting with Ian was career-building and character-building,’ Kent recalls. ‘When I’d batted with Greg in Queensland the partnership had always got me going, the rivalry of going at it with a partner I admired. I found that Ian was the same.’
He flagged, in fact, the moment their 104-run stand was ended by his captain’s dismissal, caught by a diving Lloyd at slip from King. Abruptly, the cares of the innings became his. When his next fifty minutes produced another four stuttering singles, he slashed to point for 78. Kent hung his head again: he had always told himself 80s were centuries. ‘In the 70s I always reckoned you only needed 10 to get a hundred,’ he says. ‘Eighty and you were there, you were a bee’s dick away, you’d make it. I was two short of a hundred that day as far as I was concerned.’
When middle-order subsidence was staunched by Bright and Marsh to allow the Australians a certain comfort at 311, Lillee and Thomson bounced the first three West Indians for 15. Fredericks spun into his hooks as the Australians remembered from Perth three years before, adding 73 with Richards inside an hour, but the Australians had salted a lead of 120 by stumps on the third day.
Ian and Greg Chappell, shovel and pick, displayed fraternal compatibility. Holding felt the former one of very few batsmen who could ‘embarrass’ him. ‘Ian had won the 1975–76 series in my opinion,’ the fast bowler says. ‘He had always got on top of the bowlers, and others like Greg got the benefit: the same role Viv later fulfilled for us. Other batsmen could get on top of you, but Ian would embarrass you.’
The Australian captain did just that for three controlled hours. ‘He hooked me and pulled me through mid wicket over and over,’ Holding remembers. ‘I would not mind a batsman hooking or pulling me generally, I would feel that he was taking a risk, but Ian was doing it without semblance of error, without any risk whatever.’
Now that he could leave his sunglasses by the pool, Greg’s powers were returning daily. His 90 was flawless until he edged Croft low to Murray. Holding had to settle for bowling Trevor Chappell off his pads for 22. Defending 366 on the final day, the Australians felt close to parity in the series. They knew, too, that King was nursing a broken hand, and that Roberts would not be stalking the lower order with his broad, blunting bat.
Greenidge’s leg-side edge left the West Indians’ 2–41, but there were worrisome catcalls from his home crowd when the batsman queried Douglas Sang Hue’s decision. Bottles had bounced from the double-decker stand during rain breaks on the second day, and radio news bulletins were that very morning reporting a military coup in Grenada. As Tony Cozier says: ‘It would have been easy for people to decide that: “They’re overthrowing authority there, why don’t we do it here”?’ Sang Hue’s partner Gosein looked especially concerned: he had been star of Sabina Park’s fiasco ten months earlier, when the riot following Van Holder’s theatrics had cost Bob Simpson’s team victory.
Richards and Fredericks again stirred a frenzy in the stands in the next hour. Steel band kettledrums resounded at the Antiguan’s three sub-orbital sixes. Fredericks stormed past his half-century with five fours off the reel, then stormed from the ground as Gosein judged him lbw to Pascoe. He had barely made it to the fence when bottles began raining from stands square of the wicket. Instead of contemplating the West Indians’ last accredited pair and their 234-run distance from home, the Australians were heading for cover contemplating their own safety.
Riot police stared down the crowd but, when play recommenced fifty minutes later, the chant of ‘We want Fredericks’ accompanied the entrance of Richards and Lloyd. Spectators, rearmed in the hiatus, again pelted the outfield. Back in the dressing-room, where the Australians were told that the atmosphere had grown too dangerous to continue, Lillee was ‘heartbroken’: ‘It seemed to me there was something suicidal about visiting teams doing well in the Caribbean. We were playing our hearts out ... but as soon as we looked like winning we’d put ourselves in danger with the irate crowds.’
As it happened, the Australians’ worst injury occurred between ground and hotel. O’Keeffe, on tour expressly to play as second spinner on the traditional turning pitch in Trinidad, was jogging with Mick Malone to stay fit for the big moment.
‘We’d just got to the racecourse and there was a designated stop sign,’ he says. ‘And I ran out from the left as this woman was looking to the right. I saw her coming and thought she’d stop but, as you sometimes do when you’re looking to turn, she didn’t.’
O’Keeffe was shovelled onto the car’s bonnet and deposited dazed on the pavement, where Malone tried to figure the extent of injury. Try and run it out,’ the West Australian urged.
‘It was broken in three places and all the medial ligaments were shredded,’ O’Keeffe recalls. ‘So I crumpled in a few paces. Run it out! Mick’s career option was not physiotherapy.’
Next time teammates saw him was in hospital, his tibia fractured close to the right knee. Austin Robertson was organising passage home. O’Keeffe rolled his eyes at their parting gift of a warm bottle of Coke: ‘You extravagant fools.’
His only chuckle came when island police returned with a transcript of the statement he had given, containing O’Keeffe’s account of the accident translated into local Bajan. It all came back to him as he read: ‘I got up from de road, and my leg did pain me awful bad.’
Witnessing twin West Indian wins in 1978, Trinidadians in Port-of-Spain had behaved irreproachably. And WSC Caribbean wanted to keep it that way: Queen’s Park Oval is the region’s biggest and the eight days’ cricket scheduled there were the trip’s cash cornerstone. A steel band played and thousands of balloons were released as each player was announced individually and introduced to the President of Trinidad and Tobago, Ellis Innocent Clarke.
Ian Chappell was without O’Keeffe, but his belief in Trinidad’s turn was profound. Despite the pitch’s dampness, his priority on winning the toss was to avoid batting on the last day.
If the match made it that far. It seemed over in an hour and a half of Holding. Long spells had seemed unattainable in Australia, yet here he had spring for nine opening overs and ran the gamut of Chappells with Hookes caught down leg side for good measure. Only Laird and Marsh stood between the West Indians and the Australian tail, and the opener had six single-digit scores in nine innings behind him.
‘Maybe facing those guys two years in a row had worn me down a bit,’ he says. ‘And once you were out of form in WSC you were stuck.’ Stuck on this pitch, he watched his partners come and go helplessly. ‘They soak it at Trinidad for the first day to hold the pitch together,’ he recalls. ‘And that morning the Windies were just putting it there and it was taking off.’
Laird had gathered a dozen of Australia’s first 40 just before lunch when granted a critical reprieve by Lloyd at first slip from Croft. As first Marsh then Bright managed to settle, his fluency began to return. Croft allowed him room for his pet cut, and a marble outfield rewarded every stroke.
His half-century arrived just after tea, and Laird prospered further with Lillee at the expense of a tiring attack. As his unbeaten 112 from 204 was toasted at stumps, McErlane ice-packed him gently. ‘Poor old Bruce,’ says the masseur. ‘He just couldn’t get out of the way.’
Solemn handshakes from Fredericks, Greg Chappell and Viv Richards were accepted, and Ian Chappell still puts the innings on a pedestal. ‘“Stumpy” never made a Test hundred, but he made three WSC hundreds that rank up there with the best I’ve seen,’ he says. ‘You’re always told about Stan McCabe’s three great innings, and when the players get together now “Stumpy’s” are innings mentioned the same way.’
Lillee was a steely partner when play resumed, unmoved by Holding’s prompt acceptance of a second new ball. The Windies were pretty cocky when they were on top by this time in World Series,’ Laird recalls. ‘When I met Dennis in the middle we decided we’d just stick around and try and guts it out. So Michael comes in, bowls a bouncer first up, and Dennis hooks him into the stand for six. Just stick around, eh? Dennis looked down the wicket at me and sort of smiled, but I don’t think he’d intended to do it.’
Laird misread Roberts’ line and allowed a ball to hit his off stump twenty minutes later, but had seen 200 added for the last three wickets. The Australians’ 246 grew more defensible when Thomson had Fredericks caught on the fence hooking and plucked out Rowe’s off stump after the Jamaican twice edged him through slip. Richards, Lloyd, Greenidge and King were shifted when set, and only Roberts’ two-hour half-century on the third day shoved the West Indians to within 16 of the Australian total.
Their advantage was lost, with both openers, in the first over. Ian Chappell’s miscued hook looped back to Holding, then Kent’s edgy call for a single to mid-on Greenidge next ball sacrificed Laird.
The Queenslander concentrated contritely, and drew much of the bowling as Greg Chappell settled. Chappell watched his protege closely. ‘The West Indians gave him little to drive and Martin wasn’t a hooker or cutter,’ says Chappell. ‘But he’d worked out ways to keep up the scoring rate. Every time Andy’d overpitch, trying to bowl a yorker, Martin’d belt them into the ground and bounce them over the bowlers’ head. Andy didn’t like it.’
Albert Padmore’s off spin posed most problems. Three of four wickets clustered round tea on the third day came his way, although Chappell and Bright had steered the Australians to a lead of 171 by stumps.
Chappell conserved and husbanded his energies by conceiving three levels of concentration—one prior to batting, one between balls, one facing—and now was moving smoothly between gears. When Lillee joined him, he felt relaxed and detached enough as non-striker to let his eyes wander through the crowd. ‘I could always spot particular people arriving,’ he said. ‘It used to amaze some friends that after play I could usually say: “Oh you came in at 11.30am and went and sat in the fifth row of the members”.’
A factor in Greg Chappell’s favour in the Caribbean was that very clarity of eye. He picked up the red ball being used more quickly than the white employed throughout 1978–79 in Australia. He later recalled with West Indian manager Rudi Webster the experience of facing Max Walker at practice with red balls after a session using white: ‘The difference was amazing! I saw it so much quicker and easier … I know that other people see the white ball quicker but in my case the reverse is true. Perhaps I have been conditioned to see the red ball.’
After watching videos of his cricket with Richie Benaud at home, Chappell had also decided to eliminate technical adjustments he’d dabbled with. Returning to the unadorned methods of his decade of first-class cricket, he played well forward to Padmore, surely back to pace, and drew special pleasure from sweet strokes against the second new ball. Chappell’s eight self-absorbed hours at the crease did not end until he sought to poach a few runs upon Lillee’s fall at 256. Having gathered 150 while six partners had scraped 92, he tugged Fredericks to mid wicket.
The turn Padmore had extracted was now sole cause for West Indian concern, and they hared for their 299 target. With pedantic correctness, Greenidge smacked three fours in Lillee’s first over. Fredericks demonstrated the pitch’s lifelessness to Thomson, then pounced on Bright after tea to prevent him settling into a groove.
The West Indians had gone a third of the way to their target in even time without as much as the rumour of a wicket when Lillee devoted his second spell to the cutters that would, in time, prolong his career. Ian Chappell at once scooped up Greenidge at first slip. But the West Indians would still begin the final day 180 runs from an invincible two-nil series lead.
An airless stadium greeted the Australians, and a pitch as plumb as the one the Chappells and Marsh recalled from six years before. Many of their rivals were also common to that contest— Lloyd, Murray, Fredericks, Rowe—and amid the symmetry Ian Chappell drew comfort from a conviction: sides never chased 300 successfully.
His resources, though, were thin. He asked Thomson if he’d considered Lillee-like cutters, but understood the expressman’s reluctance. Bright’s tweak was insufficient to worry batsmen well-set, and Chappell pondered his own wrist spin. It had bothered a West Indian tail on a similar pitch at VFL Park two months earlier.
It would just be a matter of plugging away. After twenty minutes, the Australians turned lucky: Bright snuck beneath Rowe’s back-stroke. Next over, Fredericks dragged Lillee on. Richards threatened destruction, but Pascoe’s disciplined line frustrated Lloyd into an indiscreet cut. With 100 runs to protect, Chappell gambled on Richards’ impatience and introduced himself in Bright’s stead.
‘I was disappointed to have only picked up one,’ Bright says. ‘But Ian’s leg spinners had a bit more bounce and were more dangerous on that wicket on the last day. I’d found out that, for all the talk about Trinidad spinning, the important thing is that it doesn’t bounce and it’s the one keeping low which worries batsmen. Ian also reckoned that the West Indians were tending just to play me out, but might take more risks against him.’ Richards needed no excuse to take risks. At times that year, in fact, they’d seemed a fatal attraction. At once he struck Chappell high towards long on. Bright judged the catch to a nicety.
Lillee’s back had begun to ache during the match and, as his spell continued after lunch, Chappell dreaded him breaking down. He needed just a few more overs but, as he sauntered toward Lillee to ask, could see his mate was history. The dust was everywhere,’ Chappell remembers. ‘Getting in your throat, in your hair, and it was fucking hot and I was thinking: “Shit, I’m going to have to take Dennis off soon. Who do I go to then? Everyone else is just cannon fodder”.’
He asked anyway. Could Lillee continue? Lillee’s mouth opened, but Chappell heard nothing. ‘He couldn’t even speak,’ Chappell says. ‘Nothing came out of his mouth. He signalled that he was okay to go on instead.’ With a final fling, Lillee produced a lifter that King steered to Laird at short leg: 6–222.
Laird was standing over the stumps four runs later to accept Marsh’s throw as Murray called Roberts for a bye on the keeper’s fumble. The local hero’s misjudgement was greeted with horror, then bottles, but the Australians decided to try and return to their positions. It might be impossible to return if they left. Bright returned to long on and Trevor Chappell volunteered for fine leg.
‘I was okay actually,’ Bright recalls. ‘Because I was under the stand’s shadow, and the guys throwing bottles from behind the mesh were clearing the top of my head. But eventually a little West Indian came up and said I’d be better off clearing out because things could get ugly and they might start on me.’ While his players gathered with the umpires in the centre, their captain ran for the West Indian dressing-room. There was no way we were going to lose that match to mob rule,’ he says.
Chappell implored Lloyd to appeal to fans. The West Indian had reasoned successfully with his Georgetown home crowd in a Test against New Zealand in 1972, but now was not so keen. Chappell turned to Murray. If the local would tell his own people on the public address system that he’d been fairly dismissed, they might be placated. ‘Yeah, I was out,’ said Murray. ‘I’ll do it.’
Murray’s words worked. Only twenty-five minutes were wasted bottle-sweeping. Ample time remained, in fact, for the West Indians to bridge the 73-run gap, and Lillee was prone and semi-conscious on McErlane’s treatment table when play resumed. Holding sampled Chappell’s spin confidently. Roberts pushed stolidly down Pascoe’s line.
Forty-one runs ticked, and Holding hoisted Chappell over mid wicket for six as the spinner’s toss tempted. The Australian threw the ball higher. ‘I was trying to score at every opportunity because runs were not easy to get,’ says Holding. ‘In the air it looked a full toss, but it was one of those balls that dip more quickly than you expect.’ It dropped, spun and scuttled past Holding’s bat. Three balls later and Laird caught Croft’s nervous nudge.
McErlane’s crazed cries roused Lillee as Pascoe beat a path through Padmore. With a session to spare, but only 25 runs, Australia had levelled. The tourists unbottled rum to dilute their pineapple juice. A rock flew through the adjacent local dressing-room window, showering Lloyd’s kit with glass. In the next two weeks, the potency of rum and rocks combined would be underscored.