‘I’d never seen a man as big as this on a cricket field and his size, combined with his pace, frightened the hell out of me. The length of the pitch seemed to shrink to bloody near nothing as Big Bird ran into bowl. By the time the ball left his huge hand, he seemed to be breathing down your neck.’ As twenty-four-year-old Allan Border faced Joel Garner at the Gabba on 1 December 1979, he glimpsed also the future shaped in Kerry Packer’s forge. Cricket, so often a reminiscent game, had hit the 1980s a month early. Its new world order would endure.
For Clive Lloyd’s West Indians, the summer of 1979–80 was the first in a patterned procession of triumphs: the World Cup champions duffed the Australians up in two of three Tests and seized the World Series Cup. With Roberts, Holding, Garner and Croft fit and available simultaneously, they spun not: despite playing their three Tests on lifeless surfaces in Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide, Lloyd tolerated only a dozen overs slower than medium pace. But neither did they toil: the Australians received 82 balls an hour, from which they scored an average 37. Within the year, the West Indians would be granting as few as 75 balls an hour on tour in England.
Touring Australia four years earlier, Lloyd’s West Indians had managed 94 balls an hour, from which home batsmen had scored 45. Eighteen months had elapsed since Alvin Kallicharran’s side at Sabina Park had lobbed 103 balls an hour at Bob Simpson’s Australians. But, loitering with intent, the West Indies were now drumming a new, and contagious, cricket rhythm.
Viv Richards’ command—absent much of 1978–79—returned in full measure in 1979–80, reflected by a first-class average of 98 and one-day average of 97. Two-thirds of the former and almost half the latter accrued in boundaries, as Richards nursed groin and back injuries.
After his county upbringing, World Series Cricket had been a perfect finishing school for Gordon Greenidge. His recognition in 1979–80 as a cornerstone of West Indian success ‘made all the struggles of the past seem worthwhile, and confirmed the belief that I was now not merely a Test cricketer of some ability, but a world-class cricketer.’ The free-style middle-order batting that followed Richards—mixing left-handers Kallicharran and Lloyd with right-handers Lawrence Rowe and Collis King—now had the bulwark of Roberts to follow. And Lloyd’s span as captain grew a cubit: he would average more than 51 as Test captain, compared to 38 as Test player.
Packer pay had been banked with thanks. Privileged professional status would prolong careers. Michael Holding’s 192 Test wickets after 1977 cost 24, the same as his first 57, but he was a changed cricketer. He married in 1980. His first child was born the following year. ‘I did not take my money and spend it wildly,’ he says. ‘But I purchased things in a very short time that it would take most West Indians a lifetime to earn, and that I could not have afforded on $200 a Test match.’
Test cricket, all the same, still came as something of a tonic. To Joel Garner, the fragility of the WSC West Indians in 1978–79 had been deeper than mere misfortune. ‘There was a general feeling,’ he wrote, ‘something indefinable, that you couldn’t even speak about for fear that you would … have applied a pin to the balloon of our pretended confidence. For me the feeling had something to do with ambition and national pride. I had become more realistic, more cynical … I missed playing for the West Indies.’
He had headed for England in 1979 to ‘hunt for a lost feeling I once had for the game’. Cricket’s division and its reconciliation brought him to a conclusion: ‘I told myself that if I was to continue playing the game, then it would have to be a separate part of my life. I would have to control it … instead of it controlling me.’ Joel Garner’s cricket alter ego would blot out the sun in the 1980s: his post-WSC record of 234 wickets at 20 each places him at the very front rank of West Indian fast bowlers. To use the quiz show phrase, the West Indians had obtained money and box.
Ian Chappell left the game in 1979–80 as Sheffield Shield cricketer of the year and, just as the shield itself was marginalised in Australia’s new cricket structure, changes in which he’d been a prime mover had destined him to be the last of his line.
Under his brother, Australia entered the 1980s with a cricket of personality rather than of policy. Individual performances would shape its fortunes. Greg Chappell, at a peak of his powers, bookend-ed that first summer of reconciliation with Test centuries. Lillee, bag of tricks stocked in WSC, took 11 English wickets with cutters at the MCG on a pitch that might in previous days have tamed him. Elaborately prepared by his two years Supertesting, Laird made a plucky Test debut at the Gabba with 92 and 75. Hughes made an unbeaten 130 there to book his place for the season. With 115 against England in Perth a week later, Border did the same.
The ball-in-glove affinity of Lillee and Marsh had been enriched by the wicket-keeper’s suggestive semaphoring for particular deliveries. When David Gower interrupted the procedure one day at the SCG, he recognised the ‘up the nostrils’ gesture: ‘When he realised I had spotted him, we both broke into broad smiles. I don’t think the bowler obliged on that occasion but … the bouncer was never far away when you were facing those guys.’ The collective ego, acumen and self-confidence could be so overpowering that, as England was taken by aggressive storm in the First Test at the WACA, Brearley felt his team ‘lose touch with its combative powers’.
The seasonal structure, moreover, had turned Australia’s cricket team into a capsule detached from the rest of the home season. The quintet of Greg Chappell, Lillee, Marsh, Ian Chappell and Gary Cosier had played eight Sheffield Shield matches each in 1975–76. Greg Chappell, Lillee, Marsh, Hughes and Border in 1979–80 played eight between them.
As the ACB concentrated on the needs of that circle, there was frustration for those at the periphery. One-off World Series Cup trials that Walters, Yallop, Walker, Laughlin, Hookes, Whatmore and Darling were granted had reason but little rhyme. In their match on 11 December, Laughlin and Walters proved the most successful batsmen while Walker conceded only three runs an over, but none were recalled. Laughlin remembers a round of golf with Ian Botham, Ken Barrington and Australian selector Alan Davidson a few weeks later at which he almost broached the subject. ‘I thought Davo might let something slip, but he didn’t,’ he says. ‘All I heard was that Greg wanted to keep the Test side together in one-day games. I was disappointed because I feel I could really have developed a role in one-day cricket.’
For WSC’s participants, it was an unforeseen cost of revolution. As Shayne Quick observes: ‘Australian cricket players readily accepted the principles of capitalism into their arena … but it can only be speculated whether or not they fully realised the product maximisation involved … It is doubtful that they did.’
It was not a cricket world in which Ian Chappell fitted. Never again would a captain be told—as Ian Chappell had been before the 1972 tour by selector Neil Harvey—that he had been given ‘a team of goers’. The Australian team in which he played in the Third Test against the West Indies at Adelaide was actually the oldest since 1952. His last bow the following week at the MCG in the Third Test against England could have been the scene for some romantic reflection—a Chappell partnership seeing Australia to victory against the ‘oldest enemy’—but Greg had a cab waiting outside to spirit him to the evening flight for Brisbane.
Greg Chappell felt a lot in common with John Cornell whom he piquantly met at Sydney airport a year later. When Cornell complained he was about to leave his family at home again for another screenwriting session abroad, Chappell lamented: ‘If you were an Australian cricketer, you’d be seeing a damn sight less of them.’
Greg Chappell and Dennis Lillee’s records pre- and post-WSC show an appealing symmetry: 4097 runs at 53 and 171 wickets at 23 before; 3013 runs at 55 and 184 wickets at 24 after. But every Australian cricketer whom WSC had brushed was changed in some way.
From being the base of Australia’s middle order before 1977, for instance, Rod Marsh became the top of its tail from 1979. ‘Marshy got a few up the nostrils in WSC,’ says Ian Chappell. ‘I used to say: “You’ve a red ball up one, a white up the other. All you need’s a blue ball and you’ll have the set”.’
Marsh posted his tenth first-class hundred against Essex in 1977. In another seven years’ striving he made only two more. The resultant search for an all-rounder to stiffen Australia’s batting would have a marked effect on subsequent team balance.
Cricket’s new whiff of danger was felt to suit some more than others. Laird, twenty-nine as 1979 ended, had all his twenty-one Tests ahead. Davis, twenty-six, would not add to his fifteen. Even WSC’s successes paid a price. When Ray Bright took just seven first-class wickets at 64 in 1979–80, Greg Chappell felt it a delayed reaction to two years’ ‘intimidatory batting’.
‘A lot of spinners would probably have wilted in WSC, but Brighty stood up to it well,’ notes Chappell. ‘WSC, though, probably changed his game a bit, got him bowling a bit more defensively and eventually cost him a bit of his bite. He’d had as tough a task as any young spinner could’ve had, bowling against the top twenty or thirty batsmen in the world day in, day out. And that eventually took its toll mentally.’
David Hookes’ tour of Pakistan in mid-February 1980 similarly suggested the limits of his WSC ‘master class’. His half-dozen innings on spin-friendly surfaces brought an embarrassing 10 runs, his one Test a mortifying pair. The only disappointment I have from WSC is that maybe my cricket education didn’t proceed as it should have,’ says Hookes. ‘I faced a lot of quality fast bowlers, but I never really learned how to play spin. It was a setback for me not going to India in 1979. I saw guys like Border, Hughes and Rick Darling come back having learned an enormous amount about playing slow bowlers, experience I didn’t get the benefit of.’ Two and a half years would elapse before his next Test, and his remained a career unfulfilled.
If WSC had a spontaneous sequel, it was 1 February 1981, when Greg Chappell instructed brother Trevor to deliver his infamous MCG underarm to deny New Zealand an unlikely World Series Cup Final tie. It was a tactic the captain had first considered three years earlier, after Wayne Daniel’s twelfth-hour six at VFL Park.
And if WSC had a private echo, it could be regarded as Ian Chappell’s divorce from Kay—his wife of fourteen years—at the same time. The second Mrs Ian Chappell would be the former Ms Barbara Loois, the ex-WSC tour co-ordinator.
Had he not been overwhelmed by the occasion of a World Cup farewell for Andrew Hilditch in May 1979, Allan Border might never have got round to proposing to his wife Jane. And while the faster lane of Test cricket took adjustment, Border would recognise WSC as a ‘huge kickalong’ for his game: ‘I’d be silly to say that, although I wasn’t involved in it personally, WSC wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to my career.’
Border, though, was a singular man in Australian cricket. Young cricketers with whom he had propped Australia through the 1977–79 Test summers became a lost patrol. Fifteen never played another Test.
In the five years it took Hilditch to rewin his Test place, the slaps of selectors stung severely. It was not until 1981, when he spent his honeymoon (after marrying Bob Simpson’s daughter Kim) leading Forfarshire to the Scottish county league title, that he rediscovered his taste for cricket and resolved to press on with South Australia. Even then, cricket was never quite the same. Hilditch recalls:
I realised that it was the guys who made a scene who got back in the side quickest. Much later, I was dropped from the South Australian side and it was so ridiculous that I thought I had to go and see the selectors, and say just how stupid it was. I got back in the team a couple of games later but I still felt: ‘This is just not the way it should be. You’re supposed to take these things like a man and quietly do your job.’ If I was a selector I would admire the guy who just put things behind him and proved himself by performance. But it never worked out that way.
Graham Yallop would work his way back into Tests on Australia’s 1980 Pakistan tour, but had the bitter experience at the subsequent Lord’s Centenary Test to be informed—by a journalist at the celebratory dinner—that in his absence he had been sacked as Victoria’s captain. He stalked wordlessly from the room.
Most tangibly, however, Australia’s Test captaincy would straddle a rift between the proud, prejudiced WSC circle of the Chappells, Lillee and Marsh, and Kim Hughes. WSC alumni never forgave Hughes his identification with the Australian Cricket Board during the seasons of split. Marsh’s rebel streak was apparently never forgotten by the ACB.
In Greg Chappell’s absences over the next four years, ill-concealed argument raged over the respective captaincy claims of Hughes and Marsh. At the ACB’s board meeting of 24 March 1982, Marsh was the change of a single mind from the Australian leadership, but the representatives of his own association voted aginst him. ‘For them he was tarred with the same brush as Ian Chappell … of revolution and extremism,’ Mike Brearley wrote. ‘This was a major mistake; he might well have proved a more imaginative Test captain than Greg.’
Hughes’ eventual inheritance of the captaincy was, without Greg Chappell, Marsh and Lillee, not so much a poisoned chalice as an empty one. It was telling comment on cricket’s peace that, by 1985, Hughes and Yallop were leading an Australian team out of ACB bounds in South Africa’s ‘National Panasonic Test Series’. As he considered joining the team, Hughes reflected: ‘I remember sitting down and thinking that throughout my whole cricket career I seemed to have been opposing people. Because of my stand against WSC, there were axes to grind and the situation just went from bad to worse … gradually it had eaten away at my confidence. In the end I had no one who I trusted.’
Those who would, with Border, shape Australian cricket in the 1980s, were a next generation in gestation during the WSC years. Sheffield Shield debutants in 1977–78 included Geoff Lawson, Geoff Marsh and David Boon. Simon O’Donnell and Ian Healy were participating in the national under-16 competition at Rockhampton around the New Year in 1979. Australia’s longest-serving Test umpire Tony Crafter adjudged the Hilditch ‘handled the ball’ during a maiden Test appointment at Perth three months later.
It was a global trend. Larry Gomes’ emergence was as Viv Richards’ stand-in against Australia in April 1978. He was then a key member of the team Kallicharran led to India in November, Malcolm Marshall’s first tour. A seventeen-year-old Richie Richardson made his first England tour in 1979 with an Antiguan schools side.
India’s Kapil Dev, having hinted at his abilities against a full-strength Pakistan, proved them against half-strength West Indian and Australian teams. Tony Greig’s fall hastened Ian Botham’s English rise, while Graham Gooch and David Gower flowered against Pakistan’s innocents abroad in 1978 without the rivalries of Amiss or Woolmer. Knott’s commitments finally cleared room for his thirty-seven-year-old understudy Bob Taylor. One Test in seven years became a career of fifty-seven. ‘Of all the good and bad repercussions of the “Packer Revolution”,’ Chris Martin-Jenkins wrote, ‘the happiest was that this perfect craftsman and ideal sportsman suddenly acquired a status which his exceptional ability warranted.’
Of the first crop of WSC’s internationals, only Imran and Zaheer were destined to play more than a handful of Tests, as somewhat modified versions of their former selves. Zaheer—stance squared for composure against pace—would become one of his country’s most sadistic scorers at home. His Test record after 1977 of 3062 Test runs at 53 dwarfs a relatively modest 1583 Test runs at 34 before WSC.
Greig ended WSC a shadow of the player who had begun. He was destined in 1979–80 to find a corner in a crowded commentary box as he learned the insurance broking trade. While Greig’s cricketing decline had been limited to his last two years, his intimacy with cricket’s ‘rival promoter’ made retirement judgements harsher. The presence of the fallen idol with the feet of clay,’ wrote his former champion Jim Swanton, ‘had become an embarrassment to all.’
The English aftermath of WSC was the reverse of the Australian trend. Bob Willis’s rise to England’s captaincy in 1982 owed much to his stated allegiance. Underwood, Knott, Woolmer and Amiss had by this time severed their international cricket ties by joining the SAB England XI in South Africa in 1982.
The WSC repatriates watched instead as changes they had hastened permeated the game. When interviewed by Patrick Murphy for his The Spinner’s Turn in 1983, all noted first-class cricket’s brawnier feel as slow bowlers fell into disuse. Underwood believed that batsmen now tried to hit him harder: The high standard of fast bowling means they think: “We’d better get after the spinner now that the quicks are resting”.’ Amiss missed the challenge spinners posed: To play against a spinner is a pleasure, because in the last ten years the game’s been about getting away from the ball to avoid being hit. When the spinners are on, it’s a quieter game. No one’s trying to knock off your head.’ Knott remembered the way batsmen had of yore shouldered arms: ‘Very few balls come to me behind the stumps now without the batsman trying to play a shot. They’re all looking to run it down to third man, or go for the big drive.’
Amiss was denied another Test, despite a further forty first-class centuries, but his legacy as an innovator accompanied him at his finest hour. It passed almost unremarked that his first well-wisher on registering his one-hundredth hundred at Edgbaston in July 1986 was a wicket-keeper, Graeme Fowler, wearing a helmet.
Cricket’s 1980s elite would follow WSC’s footprints. They would wear helmets, whose development was spurred by WSC’s original rash of head injuries. They would bat longer for their runs and face proportionally fewer deliveries. And on shorter, more congested tours as the limited-overs international became a genre in its own right, they would increasingly take one day at a time. Australian cricketers, in particular, would give up their nights as a result of WSC’s signal week of success at VFL Park in January 1978.
WSC, of course, can claim no authorship for the one-day form. It merely worked its will upon it, through field restrictions, tougher prosecution of wides and repackaging as a technicolour blur. One-day international cricket went forth from WSC and multiplied.
Australia had been involved in sixteen one-day internationals in seven years before WSC, and hosted just three. Australia’s first— the first anywhere—at the MCG had drawn 46,000 on a Tuesday in January 1971, but the experiment had not been repeated for another four years.
While the success of the 1975 World Cup was then minuted, further exploration of the format was not a priority. The ACB scheduled no one-day internationals between December 1975 and January 1979. And coloured clothing for the advent of colour television was beyond imagining. As ACB secretary Alan Barnes said when sounded out about sprinkling additional colour in the game for the sake of the cameras: ‘Pardon me, but I’ve always thought people watched cricket for the play, not the decor.’
That state of affairs existed, it must be said, with thorough player blessing. Cricket containment went against Australian grain. When Australia met England in three Prudential games at the end of its 1972 tour, Ian Chappell thought seriously of golf instead. He went along with the gag only when deputy Keith Stackpole proved similarly uninterested.
Like county cricketers in the early days of the Gillette Cup in 1963, the Australians rarely mourned one-day defeat. Ian Chappell, moreover, resisted any programmed approach after second place in the 1975 World Cup buoyed his belief. ‘I don’t believe in altering your approach radically for these games. Perhaps teams could prepare themselves more intensely for the fielding aspect, but that’s all … I’ve always felt that one-day cricket has its place and I think we all quite enjoy it.’
Two years later one-day cricket had a very big place and Chappell was straining to love it. WSC staged fourteen one-day matches in its first season and, when 60,000 attended the four night-time novelties, almost trebled that ration in New Zealand, Australia and the West Indies the following season. Those who neglected one-day cricket were clearly going to be poorer for it. The Australians missed out on $10,000 surrendering the International Cup final in 1977–78, and $35,000 losing the best-of-five International Cup finals in 1978–79.
Clive Lloyd’s West Indians revelled in the format. ‘There have probably been greater Test teams than this West Indian side, for they lack high quality spinners,’ wrote Brearley in 1979. ‘But I cannot imagine that, in the history of the game, there has been a side better equipped for one-day cricket. In fact their closest rivals were probably the winners of the 1975 World Cup!’
Australians, however, remained agnostic as the form grew more stereotyped and rehearsed. Wisden recorded of the 1979–80 World Series Cup: ‘Greg Chappell made it clear he disliked this defensive form of cricket. He attempted to win his matches without resorting to negative bowling or spreading his fielders round the boundary.’ Lillee reflected the ambivalence of his countrymen when he wrote afterwards: ‘I know it sounds un-Australian, and I almost find the idea offensive, but in limited-over cricket we must learn to think negatively.’
The different fitness demands of one-day cricket were recognised when Lillee’s fitness guide Frank Pyke became an ACB consultant, and Cronulla physiotherapist Errol Alcott began accompanying teams from the 1984 West Indies tour. Probably until the 1987 World Cup, however, patriotic one-day defeat was an Australian trait.
Indeed as ‘different’ as WSC appeared, the changes it wrought were more of style than substance. Colouring and illuminating cricketers were striking alterations to their entertainment package, but compared to rule changes for lbws and no-balls had relatively minor impact on the game’s ritual.
WSC was less an initiator of change—reliance on fast bowling, one-day cricket, and even frequency of international competition were already increasing—than an expediter. WSC’s participants were mature cricketers who, right to its conclusion, resisted too great a degree of difference from what they had known before. Bob Woolmer left Australia in February 1979, for example, worried that Packer seemed to want World players fitter the following season. ‘We were set certain targets to achieve before the following year in weight reduction, mobility, stamina, wind and speed,’ he wrote. ‘So perhaps it was fortunate we never had to achieve them.’
In some respects, in fact, WSC’s hard-sell disserved its personnel. The lexicon John Arlott opened with ‘circus’ was enlarged to denigrate those ‘pirates’ and ‘pet monkeys’ in their ‘Packerball’ and ‘pyjama cricket’.
How thoroughly cricket was ‘professionalised’ is debateable. There were assuredly radical short-term changes in cricket pay and conditions. In 1973, English Test cricketers received £150 a game. At the start of 1977, in spite of record wage inflation of up to 28 per cent, they were receiving £210.
The arrival of Cornhill Insurance as a sponsor and the need to head off further defections during 1977 saw the Test fee grow almost fivefold to £1000. By 1985 it was £1500. County wage bills, levered by the minimum wage negotiated by the Cricketers’ Association, mushroomed threefold to £2 million over the same span.
While the focus also fell on pay in Australia, conditions there were as fundamental to WSC’s rise. Australian players signed at a time when their match fees were on sharp incline and in spite of a tour fee for England (thanks to Benson and Hedges) four times as great as they had been paid two years earlier. Within three years, tobacco companies would be pouring $10 million into Australian sport.
The ACB, though, had dallied too long to remedy past grievance. Administrators had little understanding of players and, indeed, vice versa. The ACB’s current chairman Alan Crompton recalls a conversation with Bruce Laird while managing Australia’s 1982 New Zealand tour, when the player was surprised to learn that administrators were mostly unpaid. ‘He’d gone through the whole of the WSC period thinking that administrators were fully professional. It emphasised to me how bad communications had been between the board and players in 1977.’
‘The Boss’ put them in good hotels. He welcomed their wives and let them pick their own teams. For all the talk of parity with other professional sports, the sums actually paid were derisory: as Rod Marsh earned $35,000 in 1977, his golfing brother Graham earned $US275,000.
Prior to the WSC Australians’ tour of the West Indies in January 1979, they actually had their first pay dispute with WSC. They wanted less. When Lynton Taylor recognised that anticipated tour revenues would not satisfactorily cover salaries at the agreed contractual daily Australian rate, Chappell’s team agreed to a pay cut reducing their aggregate salaries for the tour by $300,000.
It was Packer who dragged Taylor and Chappell into his office and told the Australian captain: ‘Listen son, this organisation won’t go broke over money like that. It will go broke if it starts dishonouring contracts over what it costs to buy a B-grade movie.’ He told Taylor: ‘Pay them their money.’ The Chappells, Packer knew, were a far cheaper family than The Sullivans.
The gravest fear WSC raised in cricket board meetings was that of ‘player power’. A genuine chill followed Justice Slade’s High Court ratification of cricketers’ free trade, and it recurred in the peace pact of June 1979. ‘Much of the power of the international boards is with the cricketers,’ wrote Trevor Bailey. ‘Just how much will be seen in Australia when the England, West Indian and Australian teams appreciate the extent and start exploiting the new situation.’
Clive Lloyd’s West Indians certainly wielded power. The WICBC’s financial plight in April 1978 following the player’s ‘strike’ had underscored its dependence on the success of their top cricketers.
The corrupting potential in that arrangement seemed in evidence when Lloyd’s team beat a petulant path through New Zealand in March 1980, complaining of umpires, facilities, hotels, and even of having to carry their own luggage. Colin Croft’s shoulder charge on umpire Fred Goodall, and Holding’s chorus-line stump kicking made tin-bat tossing look tame. The tourists ‘sat-in’ their dressing-room at tea on the third day of the Second Test for twelve minutes, then four actually booked to fly home during the final day of the Third Test. By that stage, many New Zealanders would have been happy to see them go. Disciplinary action was apparently stifled, however, by the WICBC’s need for a profitable England tour.
Indian cricketers started a professional association in 1978, while Pakistan’s Test players did the same in 1981, but ‘player power’ in international cricket really hinged on the existence of rival employers. WSC’s impact has only been replicated since by the ‘rebel tours’ of South Africa.
Post-WSC English and Australian players still depended on the generosity of a largely unchanged administration. While the former had the relative advantage of a gingering Cricketers’ Association, the latter reverted to being un-unionised salaried employees who ‘took it or left it’.
In Australia, moreover, the upward salary influence of WSC had become the downward commercial one of PBL. Although Packer conferred bonus salaries on his loyal subjects, he had always been an unlikely patron for aggrieved workers. And, while a $10,000 loan from him in September 1977 had helped the Chappells set up an exploratory Professional Cricketers’ Association of Australia, its tale is one leading nowhere.
The brothers saw the PCAA protecting and preserving rights they appeared to have won when peace was agreed. Ian Redpath was made an ‘acceptable’ president when the PCAA registered on 17 January 1979 under the NSW Companies Act—coincidentally the day WSC staged its first match in pastels—and the Newcastle lawyer-cricketer Mick Hill later co-opted as an executive director.
But the Chappells were in the West Indies while truce terms were agreed and, in the climate of cricket reformation and the desperation merely to play, the PCAA struggled to gather members. Its territory was also annexed when the ACB broadened its two-year-old subcommittee to include elected members of Sheffield Shield teams as well as captains, and appointed Bob Merriman (an experienced industrial relations bargainer) as a further conduit for player-administrator communication. Merriman was well liked in his role, especially by Border, who knew him as manager on his first Australian tour in 1979 and later on his first Ashes tour as captain in 1985.
The limits of Packer’s largesse were also discovered. When Hill and accountant Kim Butler visited Packer and Lynton Taylor at the SCG early in 1979–80 to propose a tax-efficient scheme for the players’ salary bonuses—in which a merchant bank would buy PBL’s player contracts and distribute monies as capital rather than income—they received a robust response to the bank’s request for Packer’s personal guarantee.
‘Change your merchant bank, son,’ Packer advised.
As it happened, it was a CPH merchant bank, Pan Pacific Securities. ‘You own the merchant bank,’ Hill replied.
Packer was unmoved. ‘Son, you’ve got more courage than sense,’ he said. ‘I haven’t signed a guarantee since I was sixteen. I’m not starting now.’
As ACB and PBL interests converged, Packer even became a bizarre establishment ally acting against ‘rival promoters’. That Packer and player interests had diverged completely was obvious in 1985–87, when PBL put its money where the board’s mouth was in resisting ‘rebel tour’ organiser Bruce Francis.
With official opposition and unofficial indifference, the PCAA stood a chance only if well funded. It wasn’t. Although supported at its peak by three-quarters of Australia’s first-class cricketers, its base proved too small. Industrial relations historian Braham Dabscheck concludes: ‘Given the small size, wide geographic distribution of its membership and low income, the PCAA lacked the wherewithal … necessary to operate as a viable institution. It found itself a victim of the tyranny of distance.’ After an unsuccessful attempt by Geoff Lawson to revive it, the PCAA was wound up in 1988. Although Packer was apparently happy to write off the loan, Ian Chappell found the $10,000 by selling a photo of his 1974–75 Ashes team.
There is, of course, no need for anything as formal as a union or guild where the good intent of parties is absolute. And arguments about what players are paid invariably reduce cricket to sterilities from which the game is meant to be a relief. But by 1985, David Gower’s unionised Englishmen were earning £1500 a Test and £500 a one-day match, against the $2200 and $700 being drawn by Allan Border’s un-unionised but contractually bound Australians. And the dollar would depreciate 40 per cent between February 1985 and August 1986.
Popular perception is also that the better players were paid, the worse they behaved. The arguments are familiar, subjective, and often circular.
Players under WSC’s flag were certainly more demonstrative. The VIP treatment it accorded, and the manner in which distant Test crowd worship gave way to active adulation from younger one-day crowds, was irrefutably reassuring and self-inflating. For Lillee, WSC was a transition from being told he was a hero in 1975 to knowing he was a hero in 1980. Greg Chappell told Adrian McGregor of his colleague: ‘From a shy, gullible bloke when I first met him, he developed an unbelievably supreme ego. It’s not a criticism. Most of us were the same.’
Actual WSC indiscretions, though, were rare. Players answered to a boss of a rather puritan sporting streak. ‘There’ll be no swear words,’ he said at WSC’s inception. ‘These are professionals and they’ll behave as professionals—or they’re out.’ Packer would, for instance, personally chide Greig for allowing Mike Procter’s son to co-drive the drinks buggy at VFL Park.
While Ian Chappell committed probably the most serious offence of the WSC years with his haymaker at Vic Insanally at Bourda, Alan Knott remembered the period as one of the quietest stages of the cricketer’s career. ‘If you said well played when he got 50 or 100 he just wouldn’t answer,’ he wrote. ‘The Aussies seemed to have this plan under the second stage of his captaincy. I used to say hello in the middle to Rod Marsh, for example, but in one match he didn’t want to answer, obviously because he had been told not to.’
Television’s increased keyholing and eavesdropping in cricket caused Richie Benaud one of his few misgivings in his summary of the lot of the post-Packer cricketer. ‘Because of the glare of publicity from newspapers and television he cannot get away with anything,’ Benaud wrote. ‘An incident in which a player is involved today leads to him being called a larrikin. Years ago he was a personality. Bad language today means you’re a loud-mouthed “yobbo”. Years ago you were a character adding to the charm of the game.’ Indeed, none of cricket’s moral guardians has ever been heard celebrating how improved television coverage has enabled the policing of the game’s etiquette.
There is, though, little heard in favour of Kerry Packer’s influence on cricket. Writing in 1979, Andrew Caro fantasised of a future in which he would attend a Lord’s Taverners dinner on 11 June 1993 honouring Sir Kerry Packer for his contribution to cricket. It stayed a fantasy.
Packer, however, proved less a cricket revolutionary than a remarkable resurfacer. His influence there lingers in even his simplest insistences, like his loathing for ‘batsmen’s backsides’. To watch today BBC footage of Bob Massie’s 16 wickets at Lord’s in 1972—filmed from behind the batsman—is to know the meaning of frustration. Brian Morelli, on the other hand, recalls the confusion of his young son at his first live cricket match at ‘all the walking about’ between overs: he had never noticed a change of ends on television.
WSC was also an education for cricket administrators, or at least should have been. Cricket’s dependence on its broadcasters and sponsors has irrevocably altered the nature of cricket’s revenue base. We remain wedded to crowd size as the prime pointer to cricket’s financial health, but the sport’s solvency today is more deeply rooted in the value of television rights and commercial support.
In 1977, the ACB was a strong financial institution, but its health was fragile. It had one profit centre (ticket receipts) derived from a single product (Test cricket), one growing but still small revenue stream (its Benson and Hedges sponsorship) and a host of loss-making operations (Sheffield Shield, club and junior cricket). It did not ultimately control its grounds, so its assets were predominantly intangible: a loyal clientele drawn mostly by the folklore of Test tradition, but increasingly by a particular generation of cricketers. Its ‘monopoly’ was unlegislated, depending wholly on high ‘barriers to entry’ for competitors. Once these were surmounted, its prosperity was in jeopardy.
The ACB and its brethren never grasped their rival’s size and, to be fair, sport administrators have rarely appreciated sport’s trifling costs in corporate terms. As Lamar Hunt’s father warned him when World Championship Tennis began in 1967: ‘If you’re not careful Lamar, you’ll go broke in a hundred years.’
Authorities failed also to appreciate WSC’s different cost structure when integrated with CPH’s broadcasting interests. But, as Justice Slade noted after hearing establishment testimony in the High Court that referred to ‘legislation’ and ‘authorised cricket’, there was a view that cricket existed somehow as an inviolable ‘sovereign state’.
Packer received a similar reception in golf. The establishment Australian Golf Union was infuriated by his disrespect when he barred them from receptions at the Australian Open. Packer would walk away when the AGU demanded a bigger cut of gates. Cricket’s telegenia, in contrast, made him persevere and he worked some undeniably brilliant business.
Where Hunt’s WCT had only three slightly profitable years in its first twenty, for instance, Packer had his organisation in the black within three years. He had almost persuaded consumers that his ‘Pepsi’ tasted the same as ACB ‘Coke’. With the pressure he exerted on the ACB, he actually won more than bargained for in 1976. Where Packer began only in pursuit of Test match telecast rights, he subsequently wrung changes in the ‘monopoly market’ that customised it for television.
In retrospect, Packer’s personal attention to WSC is staggering. The cricket and golf balls (and lotto balls) he was juggling occasionally collided. WSC’s initial signings were occurring as The Young Doctors and The Sullivans broke Australia’s TV drama mould. John Crilly shared his Melbourne office with an ambitious group of journalists shaping Sixty Minutes. The floor beneath WSC’s publicity centre housed CPH’s ‘think-tank’, where engineering boffin Les Free worked on Packer’s plans for Australia’s domestic communications satellite.
CPH’s Australian Playboy launch occurred at the Old Melbourne Inn during the Third Supertest in January 1979. Its promotional poster featured a bunny girl with bat. And as she spent $6 million overhauling Australian Women’s Weekly, Ita Buttrose met her second husband at a WSC dinner.
Television’s marriage with cricket has not been blissful. There have been obvious developments, where their interests have diverged and the former has prevailed. As Packer said in June 1977 when it was suggested to him that his interest in the game was ‘half-philanthropic’: That makes me sound more generous than I am.’
It was a period in which all sports were adjusting to television’s intrusions. That year, for example, the American National Football League was agreeing to special protection of quarterbacks to improve the game’s salesworthiness. Television time-outs’ would arrive to accommodate commercials. Umpires, henceforth, answered to floor managers.
As Roger Angell remarked in October 1979 when baseball schedules were disastrously rewritten to allow a level of post-season play for each network: ‘Keeping bad ideas out of baseball is like protecting democracies in Latin America; juntas and reschedulers are always hovering in the shadows, waiting for the next crisis or the next election, and when at last their shiny … new regime is given a trial term in office one somehow knows it is forever.’
CPH’s decision that month, as it began work for the ACB, not to telecast Sheffield Shield matches was rigid, rationalistic commerce soiling what is still probably the best domestic competition in the world. It threatened to be the thin end of a very big wedge.
The group has profited mightily from its involvement with Australian cricket, paying a pin’s fee as television rights prices worldwide have grown exponentially. PBL’s promotion of the game has looked increasingly jaded and tatty, and there has been an ethnocentric arrogance to Australian cricket—not unlike that which prevailed at Lord’s in 1977—in demanding ‘its’ summers of international cricket in Australia. As Indra Vikram Singh wrote last year: This may have brought Australian cricket some extra bucks but it also turned a blind eye to the existence of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as Test-playing nations whose seasons conflict with Australia’s.’ The same potential conflict of seasons now applies with South Africa.
All the same, cricket has proceeded since in relative tranquillity, not to mention sleepiness. In their cost-consciousness in 1980, for instance, baseball’s commissioners hired a bare-fisted General Electric executive to strangle player salaries. He precipitated a fifty-day strike in 1981.
With the help of such ‘innovations’ as an entirely nocturnal World Series to accommodate multiplying cable television systems, television revenues had certainly soared to reach $US1.4 billion by the end of the decade. But the cost was further lock-outs and strikes (by even umpires) and an increasingly alienated ‘old-fashioned’ fan.
For all the complaints possible, there are many large mercies in our game’s divergence from that path. There’s been no Australian cricket ‘strike’. No team has ‘thrown’ a game. Tests, uninventable today, do far more than merely survive. It may be cricket’s good fortune to have natural advertising breaks: the quaint ritual of drinks has actually been consolidated, rather than corroded, by television’s agenda. Kerry Packer is recalled as consoling the Australian team one evening after a narrow one-day defeat by telling them that they had topped the ratings.
That was a great game of cricket,’ Packer said. ‘And great television.’ The second still depends to a great extent on the first.
While it still seems fresh in the memory, WSC is history. Desmond Haynes, Kepler Wessels and Javed Miandad are the sole playing survivors. Sixteen years after the First Supertest, Mike Procter manages South Africa, David Holford the West Indies, while Majid Khan, Garth Le Roux, Dennis Amiss, Andy Roberts and Roy Fredericks are Test selectors. Everyone seems to commentate, while coaching appointments stretch from Bob Woolmer at Warwickshire to Haroon Rashid at United Bank and Rod Marsh at the Australian Institute of Sport. Among its principals, one has died (Brian Treasure), one has entered the House of Lord’s (Robert Alexander, QC), one has become an ambassador (Rudi Webster).
As with Bagenal Harvey’s Cavaliers in 1968, the TCCB pocketed ideas dry-run elsewhere. It introduced field restriction circles, dabbled in night cricket, has knitted its own variety of coloured clothing and even sold television rights to satellite broadcasters.
Martin Kent now finds himself telling young Queensland players of ‘the old days’ in the same way as he was once told of Hall, Griffith, Trueman and Statham. They never got to face Holding, Roberts, Garner, Croft, Daniel,’ he says. ‘And they want to know how we rate them. I reckon that team would have to be one of their best ever. I think Marshall at his peak would have got a game, but these guys were in their prime and trying like hell to keep their places.’
A book on WSC could just as easily be a text on television economics, or marketing, or sociology, even anthropology. Cricket was altered, for better and worse, in ways that would not have occurred under its previous institutional structures. Australia now has the first generation of Test cricketers weened on post-WSC product. Justin Langer’s first recollection of cricket, for example, is watching uncle Rob play WSC at Gloucester Park, so it may only be in the next decade we achieve full measure of its consequence.
What stirred this book’s writer was simply that for two seasons, the best players in the world played some remarkable, path-breaking cricket whose 56,126 runs and 2364 wickets, for reasons best known to the International Cricket Council, are not first-class. A skeleton of scores are to be found in the relevant Wisdens between pages 1001 and 1008 (1979) and pages 1095 and 1107 (1980) in less space than is devoted to county second Xl averages. The business name World Series Cricket Pty Ltd, similarly, was struck off in November 1992, but it would be folly to consider its remains being so conveniently interred. Cricket faces a multitude of challenges as the next century approaches, and to treat WSC as though it never happened seems a wanton waste of its lessons.