It’s fifteen years since I was involved in researching The Cricket War, at which time fifteen years had elapsed since the events it described. Yet the writing, and even the phenomenon of World Series Cricket, still feels disarmingly recent, perhaps because what seemed so uncompromisingly and vividly new then has become its own form of tradition. The cult of personality that so willingly enfolded the players of 1977 is still with us. The television formula of imposing narrative on the game and applying state-of-the-art broadcasting technology to elucidate the action is little altered: even the narrator-in-chief, Richie, and his longest serving lieutenant, Bill Lawry, remain.
Kerry Packer, of course, has gone to his reward—or, as he suspected, nowhere. But he wasn’t easily replaced. His son James, who was learning cricket at the time in a household through which the world’s most famous practitioners passed as a matter of course and right, has taken up the chairman’s remote control. Yet Kerry’s outsized reputation seems to keep the Nine Network captive of the twentieth century, those unmistakeable features looming spectrally from Gerald Stone’s recent book-length obituary Who Killed Channel Nine?
In cricket, meanwhile, his name has perhaps never been more often invoked. Administrators have kept their eyes on the skies ever since, anxious that another media entrepreneur with a yen for sport should descend and make off with the best talent. The nearest equivalent were the ‘rebel tours’ of South Africa between 1982 and 1989, which plundered players from England, Australia, the West Indies and Sri Lanka, although these offered no head-to-head competition with the established game on its own soil. Although Rupert Murdoch cast a long shadow over Australian cricket in the aftermath of his formation of rugby’s Super League, he was content merely to spook everyone in cooee. Now, in the form of the Texan billionaire Allen Stanford and Subhash Chandra of Zee Telefilms, we are watching the formations of new professional tours. Even the reaction of the authorities is tempered by the lessons of World Series Cricket, Packer having proved that cricket is a premium media franchise. The churchmouse-poor West Indies Cricket Board feels it might gain from making space for a savvy businessman; the filthy-rich Board of Control for Cricket in India believes it has too much to lose from the division of its lucrative market.
Stanford and Chandra, moreover, have proceeded in unconscious emulation of Packer by basing their enterprises on the game’s new Twenty20 variant, just as Packer thirty years ago homed in on 50-over cricket, hitherto underexploited, as the growth end of the market. The International Cricket Council has also learned its lesson. Where the establishment in 1977 stood back in consternation and let Packer make use of the limited-overs template they had pressed, the ICC has this time staked out its turf with the recent World Twenty20 Championship in South Africa. But we can expect more of the same, explained with airy invocations of Packer, who made the unthinkable thinkable: that men would play for money rather than merely for national pride.
Sometimes it is argued that the establishment should have seen Packer coming; that World Series Cricket was inevitable. The statement is essentially weightless. The end of the world is inevitable. That does not mean we must begin planning for it. One’s death is unavoidable. But from this it might be inferred that one should live for the present—and this is what cricket’s authorities chiefly did. In the 1970s, world cricket was a group of autarkic city states, whose overriding end was raising sufficient revenues to cover their operating costs, and whose honorary administrators were strangers to strategic planning. It was a system little changed in a hundred years, and systems enduring so long might as well carve their by-laws into clay tablets for all the likelihood of their voluntary revision. Since The Cricket War, I have been involved in writing the official history of Cricket Australia, previously the Australian Cricket Board. It is striking just how precisely the external impression of the organisation tallies with its internal workings: its ink-dense minutes are like reading those of a big cricket club, absorbed in minutiae, building by accretion, taking it one season at a time, assuming that there’d always be players, confident there’d always be fans.
It’s truer to say that World Series Cricket originated in an enduring tension. In its pioneering days, Australian cricket was a players’ game. The original tours of England were entrepreneurial expeditions, returning home laden with honours and financial spoils. The players, with the commercial and moral support of the powerful Melbourne Cricket Club, were mainly their own masters. That changed with the foundation of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket in May 1905. The eighteen months of wrangling that ensued subdued the players and marginalised the club, capturing the proceeds of Ashes competition for the game—or, at least, the game as it was constituted by the state associations whose members composed the board. With the Big Six dispute of 1912, when Australian cricket’s half-dozen leading exponents stood out of a tour of England because the Board had denied them their choice of manager, the players were permanently shut from the game’s organisation. I well remember Ian Chappell’s words when I was talking to him about The Cricket War. ‘There’s three events that matter in the history of Australian cricket: 1912, Bodyline and World Series Cricket.’ I would qualify that judgement only by remarking that 1912 was a final efflorescence of player power: the Board had really cornered their cricketers in 1906.
It adds some piquancy to the events of 1977 if you recall that the roles were reversed seventy-one years earlier. In 1906, the fourteen best cricketers in New South Wales quietly signed with the Melbourne Cricket Club to participate in a Test series against a visiting team from England. When this alliance was revealed, the new Board moved quickly to establish their authority: the NSW Cricket Association banned the players, the Victorian Cricket Association moved to destabilise the club’s tenure at Jolimont, and the conversion of the South Australian Cricket Association to the cause of a national cricket government left the allies isolated. Packer turned the tables, exploiting the discontent of the players at the power and privileges of which the Board had stripped them all those decades before.
The time was also ripe socially: after Vietnam, after Whitlam, an era of trade union militance and of high inflation eroding the value of slow-growing rewards. In the aftermath of the blood feuds surrounding the Board’s foundation, the players had become an obedient, complaisant lot. But by the 1970s, they were developing a renewed taste for contestation, personified by Ian Chappell, while the members of his unshaven, unkempt XI had acquired an anti-authoritarian aura that extended beyond the cricket field. Bandido moustaches, salty repartee, snappy threads, winning ways: they were a far cry from the short-back-and-sides sportsmen of the 1960s, even though Chappell and Doug Walters had themselves emerged from that time. The abiding age and experience gap between Australian cricketers and their administrators widened so starkly in the 1970s that it could almost have been measured in parsecs.
Writing The Cricket War was an unusual personal experience, because I was constantly comparing my findings with my own juvenile recollections. In 1977, I was eleven years old, had played my first few junior seasons in Geelong and was uncompromisingly crazy for cricket. Suddenly not merely the players but the game itself and all it stood for were up for grabs. I had attended the Centenary Test, basked in the warm glow of that century of tradition; now, it seemed, these things had meant nothing to the players involved. I wasn’t so militant as my erstwhile colleague Mark Ray, who returned from England that year with a T-shirt reading ‘Death to the Circus’. But I was certainly affronted: nothing is so shockable as a youthful prude.
All the same, what I recall mainly is the excitement. I attended World Series games as well as Tests, watched both on television, saw David Hookes absorb his fearful blow from Andy Roberts, was stirred by Bob Simpson’s Cincinattus-like return to the colours, and fretted that Lillee and Thomson might never again bowl in harness. At an age where too much cricket wasn’t enough, I had a lot to thank Kerry Packer for. That spirit shaped The Cricket War. At the time of its research, there remained a good deal of residual antagonism towards the World Series sans-cullottes, and I sensed that a reconsideration was overdue: a retelling of the story without the censorious tone of the contemporaneous accounts. The book became, I suspect, part of a generational reconsideration underway, which culminated perhaps on news of Packer’s death on Boxing Day 2005, when the players in a Melbourne Test formed two solemn lines during a minute’s silence, and tributes poured forth from all quarters. Where the senior administrators in Australia in 1977 had been incapable even of enunciating his name— preferring to call him simply ‘the private promotor’—Cricket Australia chairman Creagh O’Connor extolled his Bradmanesque stature. ‘That cricket is today taken for granted as a natural part of the Australian way of life is in no small measure due to his influence,’ he said. ‘The so-called “Packer Revolution” in the 1970s has left a lasting legacy in the way the game is played, administered and presented to the public via the influential Channel Nine telecast.’ This legacy continues to yield unexpected dividends, and will be debated for some time to come. Meanwhile, this is how it happened, those thirty years ago.
Gideon Haigh
Melbourne 2007