FOUR
GREG CHAPPELL
‘Ian was a better captain than I was. I did a workmanlike job, but he did a very skilful job.’
To understand Greg Chappell, and the unswerving dedication and passion he brought to his cricket, whether it be his batting or his captaincy, it is necessary to learn about the quite extraordinary childhood that produced Australia’s best batsman bar Sir Donald Bradman.
From as early as he can remember, Greg Chappell was destined to play cricket at the highest level. His maternal grandfather, Vic Richardson, was a former captain of Australia; his elder brother Ian was also to lead his country; and his younger brother Trevor became a Test cricketer, too. Yet while his mother, Jeanne, provided not only unwavering support for the sporting ambitions of her three sons and that all-important high-class cricketing gene, it was his father Martin whose determination and drive to do all that he could for his sons’ cricket careers made the biggest practical contribution.
Martin had played to a good standard himself, for Vic Richardson’s club, Sturt, in Adelaide, although the Second World War cost him the best years of his own career (he was 21 in 1940, when he enlisted) and was never selected to play state cricket, although twice making the squad, in the 1950–51 and 1951–52 seasons. He did, though, represent South Australia at baseball and in his youth had been a regular at cricket practices run by Vic Richardson in a net erected in the former Test captain’s backyard for his own son, Doug, and his mates. No doubt the presence at the house of Vic’s daughter was an added incentive for Martin to attend these sessions!
Ian Chappell was almost five years old by the time that Greg arrived, on 7 August 1948, and by then Martin Chappell had also installed a similar backyard cricket pitch to aid the early cricketing development of his eldest son. The space at the back of their Glenelg home was just wide enough for a full 22-yard-long and properly prepared pitch, and space for the bowler to run in off three paces. It was a paradise of ‘fantasy matches’ for all the Chappell boys, although it was Greg who really used the facility to hone a technique that most judges believe to be one of the purest the game has seen. But it is also the cricketing temperament and matchless concentration levels, which were formed in that backyard, that helped to produce Greg Chappell the deep cricket thinker, a man in thrall to the game’s boundless variety.
As Adrian McGregor writes in his authorised biography of Chappell, published in 1985, that all-enveloping love of cricket was already ingrained in him at the age of four years and two months, as the family’s recollections of events in the backyard on one sunny October day in 1952 make clear.
Greg, a small, slight boy with two prominent front teeth, curly brown hair and large, serious blue eyes, donned cap, pads, gloves and protective box for one of his first cricket Tests. The bowler was his grandfather, Vic Richardson, who at 58 was well beyond his halcyon days as captain of Australia. Vic pegged a few down to his diminutive grandson and when he bowled him, Greg dutifully departed from the crease, carrying his red-handled Dunlop-Crocket bat, cutdown handle and blade, into the laundry room.
There he methodically took off his cap, pads, gloves and box, replaced them and came out as a new player. Vic watched, amused by this performance, but by the third fall of wicket he exasperatedly tried to explain to his grandson that each long walk was not necessary. But to Greg the two facets of the game, the reality and the romance, were inseparable, and the Test being played in his head was as important as the balls Pop, his famous grandfather, was dollying up the pitch.
As he got older, Greg’s games in the backyard became increasingly grown-up, especially as brother Ian was rapidly developing into a young cricketer of note. To have Ian as a playmate was obviously an added advantage for Greg’s own improvement, but father Martin’s input into what was exhaustive, concentrated practise, coaching and training all rolled into one was also exceptional. His own disappointment of never representing his state at cricket was translated into a desire to ensure his own sons would have every opportunity to make the very most of their own abilities. Outside of work, almost his every waking hour was dedicated to them, teaching them the basics of defence and attack and how they are linked in terms of technique, and putting up chicken wire around the backyard to protect surrounding buildings from the hard ball that he insisted they always use for practice and play.
Crucially, however, Martin Chappell was also never one of those fathers who think they are the best and only coach their son needs. When Ian, Greg and Trevor all turned five, they were sent for three-hour coaching lessons every Sunday morning to Lynn Fuller, a former South Australian player who had a turf wicket in his garden and coached promising boys in the district. The result of all this instruction, and play, was – as McGregor again notes – remarkable.
Greg put all that advice and his innate ability to the test in the backyard, first against Ian and then with Trevor. Some of the most bitterly fought Tests between Australia and England occurred between just two youthful players under hot, cloudless skies at Number 4 Leak Avenue cricket ground. In one day Greg and Ian could complete a full Test series, two innings each and five Tests.
No quarter was shown or given and dismissals, especially leg before and caught behind decisions, were constant sources of confrontation. Behind the stumps the side fence was the keeper and slips cordon. The fence appealed if the ball was edged between its two cross beams and not wide of one panel of boards. Above that was over the timber catching cordon’s heads, below did not carry. The Chappell backyard was also dotted with fruit trees, an almond at square leg, another at mid-on, a lemon at deep silly mid-off, a line of peaches along the on-side boundary. Martin tied old wire mesh gates to protect their trunks, which in turn became fieldsmen, and – on the full to a fruit tree – was out.
Other local boys would often join in for all-day matches in the holidays, but Greg would also practise by himself, throwing a golf ball against the laundry-room wall and playing the rebound, if Ian and Trevor were not around. Such dedication, allied, of course, to his enormous natural talent, meant that Greg Chappell grew up as a cricketing prodigy, with his subsequent entry into first-class cricket made all the more expected because of elder brother Ian’s earlier exploits. Yet the smoothness of his elevation from schoolboy cricket to state cricket, and then into Test cricket, was still remarkable. On the morning of his state debut, for South Australia against Victoria at the Adelaide Oval on 4 November 1966, the 18 year old asked his father to bowl at him on the backyard pitch on which he had learned his cricket. Despite going into the match with a sore throat and a stiff neck, he made 53 and 62 not out.
Though in many ways the polar opposite of the confrontational Ian in character, there was a determination and huge mental strength that shone through in everything Greg did, on and off the field. As Allan Border, later a disciple of Chappell’s at Queensland, noted in his own later autobiography:
He was quite reserved and conducted himself much the same off the field as on it. Cricket to Greg was a very serious business and a few of the guys who didn’t really hit it off with him probably resented that he wasn’t ‘one of the boys’. I didn’t see it that way. He was a master batsman and a cool, calculating captain and tactician. He was not a captain who psyched the team up openly, but if you made elementary mistakes he’d go and stand at the door and say, ‘That was shithouse today,’ and give you a bit of a dressing down. He was an aloof character, who everyone looked up to. He just stared at you and you thought, ‘Well, I’m expected to do my job.’ That was it.
But Chappell the player came before Chappell the captain – indeed, he clearly used his stature as a batsman to reinforce his captaincy style. During his second Sheffield Shield season, in 1967–68, he acted upon a piece of advice from Sir Donald Bradman to change slightly the way he gripped the bat, thus improving his off-side play without impairing his imperious and favoured on-side strokes. He made his Test debut in December 1970, in the second Test of that winter’s Ashes series at Perth, and scored 108 after coming in at 107 for 5 and helping Ian Redpath to put on 219 for the sixth wicket. He was only the sixth Australian to score a Test debut hundred, and it was clear to all that a new batting star had arrived.
It was in the year and a half that followed, before Australia’s 1972 Ashes tour to England, that Chappell fine-tuned the mental side to his batting that was to take him into true world-class. And it was this intellectual ability to analyse and then act upon his conclusions, without compromise, which ultimately led to Chappell’s further success as a captain. Captaincy experience at first-class level came with his move from South Australia to Queensland in the 1973–74 season. Two years later, he succeeded brother Ian as Australia’s captain and also inherited a team that had grown significantly in stature since the elder Chappell had himself inherited the crown for the last Test of the 1970–71 Ashes, which England had won by a 2–0 margin. ‘The side was running itself,’ says Chappell, who was 27 and into his peak years as a world-class batsman when he was given the job. ‘Even if Billy the Goose had taken over, he would have had to try hard to bugger it up to ruin Ian’s good work quickly.’
Bob Willis, his opponent in the 1982–83 Ashes, says: ‘Greg was fortunate to get an early taste of international captaincy when Ian stood down. He was a man very clearly from a tough cricketing family. But it made a difference to have Lillee and Thomson bowling for you – a little bit like when Mike Brearley had Ian Botham and myself. Any captain is only as good as his bowling side in Test match cricket. But Greg was not as acerbic as Ian, but probably not as good a student of the game as Ian either.’
Chappell’s temperament, and a fascination with cricket that bordered on the obsessional, meant he was well suited to the Test game’s slow-burning nature. As captain, moreover, he was instantly at ease with the responsibility and he also had Ian still in his side. He had obviously learned much from watching his brother being in charge, and now he could turn occasionally to him for advice, too, if he needed it.
For a time, however, even this most cricket-immersed man had to learn that captaincy of your country is not something that comes easily; like his batting, it had to be worked at, and Chappell was more than prepared to do that. For instance, in his first Test in charge – against the West Indies at Brisbane in 1975–76 – he started by deploying five slips, a gully, a bat-pad fielder at short leg, a fine leg and a third man, and it was only after a couple of balls that he realised he did not have a cover. ‘There were times that Ian must have bitten his tongue and thought, “Well, he’s got to find out for himself,”’ said Greg. ‘There was nothing monumental, just a few little errors here and there.’ In his first Test as captain, however, Chappell did what no other cricketer had done before or since: he scored a century in each innings and Australia won the game to set up their historic 5–1 thrashing of Clive Lloyd’s team.
More team and personal success followed in the 1976–77 season, including a 45-run win in the magnificent one-off Centenary Test against England at Melbourne in March 1977, but if Greg Chappell was contemplating a sunny and extended period as Australia’s captain – and premier batsman – then he was sorely mistaken.
The Kerry Packer affair provided the controversial backdrop to the 1977 Ashes series in England, with Mike Brearley eventually winning the battle of two immaculate cricket brains. Chappell, as his country’s official captain, was obviously in an invidious position when it came to the schism between Packer and the Australian Cricket Board (ACB), and his chances of retaining the Ashes were also clearly compromised by the revolution in the game that had come crashing down around his ears.
What made life most difficult for him, cricket-wise, in that series was the fact that four of the Australian squad had not been signed up by Packer: Kim Hughes, Craig Serjeant, Geoff Dymock and Gary Cosier. That did not exactly help team harmony, while Dennis Lillee’s absence from the tour with injury was a severe blow. Chappell had also wanted the selectors to give him another experienced batsman to balance a line-up he felt was too full of younger, stroke-making players, but he was ignored.
Targeted at number three by England’s bowlers, moreover, Chappell’s own run-scoring tailed off after he had made 66 and 24 in the drawn first Test at Lord’s, followed by 44 and a defiant but unavailing 112 in a second Test at Old Trafford, which England won by nine wickets. England made sure of the Ashes by triumphing, too, in the next two matches, first at Trent Bridge, where Ian Botham took 5 for 74 on his Test debut – starting with the wicket of Chappell, bowled off an inside edge attempting to square cut – and Geoff Boycott, back after a self-imposed exile of 30 Tests, and Alan Knott scored epic hundreds after a slump to 82 for 5 in reply to Australia’s 243. Boycott then hit 191, on-driving Chappell for four to complete his 100th first-class century in front of his adoring Yorkshire public, as the Ashes were clinched by an innings victory at Headingley.
After the fifth and final Test was drawn, at the Oval, Chappell said gracefully: ‘We’ve been beaten by a better side and we’re quite happy to admit it. It doesn’t do any harm to see the other side of the fence. It puts the game into true perspective.’
But he was also bitterly disappointed to be the first Australian captain to lose the Ashes when presiding over a whole series since Ian Johnson in 1954–55. It hurt, and yet he was to have to wait more than five long years for his revenge.
Brearley’s take on his 1977 opponent? ‘He was a good captain, but I don’t think a brilliant one. By the end of the series, he’d lost some of his edge and he was no longer snapping at people. It was as if he got a little bit demoralised and had lost that absolute, hands-on vitality which you need as captain. You need the enthusiasm, the dynamism, the involvement and the engagement to be captain, and I think he’d lost that a bit. But I would also say that he was a good thinker about the game, an interesting man and a terrific player.’
The crying shame of the Packer years – and subsequent banning from official Test cricket until December 1979 – for Greg Chappell the Australian captain, however, was not so much that he had to endure this wait for official reinstatement but that in those lost two years he was also denied the chance to test out his captaincy skills in relative adversity. Yes, he captained Australia again, and he regained the Ashes in 1982–83, but history might have judged him even more kindly had he been allowed the opportunity to grow ‘his’ Australian team unchecked from 1975 through to the early 1980s, as his brother had done at the start of the decade.
In World Series Cricket, as the Packer matches were called, Chappell also gladly stood down from the captaincy of the Australian side in favour of Ian. ‘In my opinion, he’s the better captain and I’m just as happy to take a back seat,’ he said. In a captaincy context, Chappell’s psychological subservience to his brother’s leadership skills perhaps explains why his best days as a captain were still to come. He only fully emerged from his brother’s shadow, as a captain, after Ian’s retirement.
The WSC Tests, meanwhile, were not for the faint-hearted: most of the best, and fastest, bowlers in world cricket at the time were playing either for the West Indians or for the World XI. And, for the main, on fast and bouncy pitches. It was no wonder that batting helmets became widely used, with Chappell among the converts. In all the so-called Super Tests, Chappell averaged 60. Of those who played regularly, only Viv Richards (86) and Barry Richards (77) averaged more. ‘World Series Cricket was the toughest cricket I played,’ Chappell said. ‘I didn’t realise it to that point, but I had got away with perhaps using 80 per cent of my talent. I’d never been put under the microscope more than I was in that period of my career.’
When Chappell again assumed the official captaincy, he did so for the strange, split 1979–80 season in which Australia played three Tests against both England and the West Indies, alternately. The Ashes were not at stake in the England series, which was just as well for Brearley’s team as they were well beaten by a 3–0 margin. Chappell, however, believes that this result was no more a true reflection of the strengths of the respective teams than his 3–0 loss to Brearley in the 1977 Ashes. Yet Australia also lost their three-match rubber against the West Indies 2–0, and two weeks after the long home season ended he was in Pakistan leading Australia on a three-Test tour. Chappell felt he owed it to the ACB, and himself, to lead the team throughout its first post-Packer year, but it was an exhausting schedule that began to take its toll. ‘I never imagined how the job could have changed so much in just a couple of years,’ Chappell said. ‘I was captain of Australia before WSC and I returned after. It was a totally different scenario, a different job altogether in the sense of the demands off the field.’
As I see it, Chappell’s cricket career began in one era and ended in quite another, and that was not just about Packer and the revolution he sparked. One-day international cricket did not even exist when he came into first-class cricket and then into the Test match arena. By the time of the first World Cup final in 1975, in which Australia lost to the West Indies in an epic 60-overs per side match at Lord’s, he was an established international cricketer with three Ashes campaigns behind him and a fourth about to follow in that same 1975 English summer.
He never rated one-day international cricket, nor limited-overs cricket of any kind. To him it was too defensive, too boring. Moreover, as he got older and suffered with various health problems and ailments, he found himself resenting the way one-day internationals crowded into the schedules, not just challenging the primacy of Test cricket – the pure game that rewarded best those who could really play – but taking away energies that should, in his mind, have been better saved up to meet the demands of the five-day game. Chappell was even to say, during his later years as Australian captain: ‘I got to the stage where I didn’t want to captain Australia in one-day cricket’ – itself an astonishing statement from someone so in love with a game that had dominated his life, and at times almost his every waking thought. It was also a statement that, on 1 February 1981, was particularly shot through with irony, because that was the day that Chappell made the captaincy decision that, even a quarter-century and more on, still resonates.
Chappell was annoyed in the field at the MCG by his Australia team’s inability to finish off a New Zealand side in the third contest of a five match one-day series final which stood at 1–1, and he was also desperate to secure the win that would give him the chance of clinching a 3–1 scoreline in the following match at Sydney – and thus earn him and many of his players an extra day off. It had been a long, tiring season and there was still a final Test match against India to be played, in a three-game series in which Australia led 1–0. Greg had scored 204 in the opening Test against the Indians, despite feeling ill the night before the game with a stomach virus, and had earlier in the season led Australia to a 2–0 Test series win against New Zealand. In the match he had scored 90 himself, in Australia’s 235, before bowling a full allocation of ten overs and picking up three wickets with his medium pacers. Slipshod Aussie fielding, and Bruce Edgar’s unbeaten hundred, had, however, kept the New Zealanders in the hunt and eventually, in front of 52,000 people, the visitors required 15 more runs from the final over, with four wickets in hand.
Greg’s younger brother Trevor was called up to bowl and – despite being hit for four with his first ball – responded by taking the wickets of Richard Hadlee and Ian Smith with his second and fifth balls. Smith, however, had struck twos from the third and fourth deliveries, and so seven runs were now needed from just one remaining ball. The best New Zealand could hope for, barring a no ball or a wide, was a last-ball six and a tie. Brian McKechnie, the next man in, took guard and – after a short conversation with his brother – Greg instructed Trevor to inform the umpire that he was changing his bowling action and would be sending down the last ball underarm. A shocked McKechnie blocked it, threw down his bat in disgust and all hell broke loose.
What Chappell did was within the rules but not the spirit of the game. Asked later to explain his motivation, Chappell replied: ‘I thought, “This is not going to be well received,” and I expected a lot of people would say, “Tut, tut, not cricket,” but quite honestly I couldn’t give a rat’s tail. I was quite prepared for a rap over the knuckles if it saved us from the extra game.’
The controversy that followed threatened to engulf Chappell, let alone rage on around him for days. In the cold light of hindsight, however, it is possible to see that his action that day was as much created by his disdain for the reality of one-day cricket, as he saw it, and the ACB’s own foolishness in not outlawing the underarm delivery as had already been done by England’s administrators. On the following day, he strove to quell the escalating controversy (New Zealand’s Prime Minister had called it ‘cowardice’ and veteran Australian commentator Richie Benaud ‘gutless’) with an apologetic statement, written in consultation with the ACB, in which he concluded: ‘I regret the decision [to do it]. It is something I would not do again.’
Within days, however, the tide of Australian public opinion had come down significantly on his side and, in the next international at Sydney, in which the New Zealand team and its captain, Geoff Howarth, also made it clear they bore no grudge, Chappell hit an implacable 87 as Australia duly wrapped up their 3–1 series win. Later, much later, Chappell denied that a little bit of his love for cricket had died during that traumatic week. He said merely that it had confirmed his belief at that time that many people closely associated with the game had not fully understood how it had changed. ‘I tried to tell the administrators that it was a symptom of what the game had become,’ he said. ‘I told them more such incidents would occur if they didn’t relieve the captain of the pressure he was under.’
Needing a break from the game, for the sake of his wife and young family as much as for himself, Chappell withdrew from the 1981 Ashes tour of England. The subsequent Australian defeat, and the berating of Hughes, his stand-in as captain, actually increased Chappell’s own reputation as a captain. He had always referred to himself as a lesser captain than his elder brother, saying, ‘Ian was a better captain than I was. I did a workmanlike job, but he did a very skilful job.’ But, in the 1981–82 season, when handed back the captaincy, Chappell felt that the quality of his leadership, in series against Pakistan and the West Indies, was as good as it got. Interestingly, both Rod Marsh and Dennis Lillee, two of his closest friends as well as long-time teammates, believe that the unprecedented poor run of batting form that he endured in the middle of that season – seven ducks in 16 innings from mid-December until the end of January – made him readier to try to understand lesser mortals than himself. ‘Almost overnight he became a more understanding captain,’ said Lillee.
Chappell had spoken to the Australian selectors about giving up the captaincy at the lowest point of his own form, but neither they nor his senior players would hear of it. And so, at the end of his bleakest year in cricket, which had also included a broken knuckle sustained in the innings of 61 against the West Indies at Adelaide that had pulled him out of his slump, Chappell prepared to lead Australia back to New Zealand.
The tour was a public relations triumph and Australia also came back from a second Test defeat at Auckland to square the three-match series with a victory at Christchurch in which Chappell hit a peerless 176. He averaged almost 80 in the series and had proved to himself that he was still good enough to carry on. ‘He averaged 50 in his career, during a very tough period for batsmen, when the West Indies bowlers especially were dominant,’ says Kim Hughes. ‘Today he’d average 70 or 80. Possibly only Sachin Tendulkar of today’s generation would be anywhere near him as a player.’ For Chappell the captain, meanwhile, the 1982–83 Ashes were now his next target.
Once again, though, in the early Australian summer of that next season, Chappell again chose to stay at home with his family while Hughes led the side to Pakistan, where the Australians were beaten 3–0. Hughes had said publicly that he wanted to keep the job for the upcoming England visit and thus have a crack at avenging his 1981 humiliation, but it was clear to all that Chappell was still the man to captain his country in that season’s main event. The 1982–83 Ashes was also Chappell’s shot at redemption for the 1977 loss and he poured into that series all his formidable experience, both as a leader and as a batsman, still, at the age of 34, capable of world-class performances.
He began the series, typically, with a hundred in the opening match at Perth – his 21st in Tests – but the drawn game also left him with two major headaches. First, Terry Alderman dislocated his shoulder rugby-tackling a spectator who had run on to the field, and then Lillee, his other first-choice new-ball bowler for that match, broke down with a knee injury and was out for the rest of the series. Now pairing a rampant Geoff Lawson with Carl Rackemann, with Jeff Thomson coming into the side as a potent third seamer, Chappell led Australia to victory in the second Test at Brisbane. Rodney Hogg was then preferred to Rackemann at Adelaide, where Chappell scored another century in an eight-wicket win. England pulled back to 2–1 at Melbourne – just – with their famous three-run victory, but a drawn final match at Sydney ensured that the Ashes were back in Australian hands.
Perhaps Chappell’s greatest achievement, as a successful Ashes captain at last, was in his tactical neutering of Ian Botham, the hero of 1981. He had the greatest respect for Botham’s match-winning skills but insisted that his team adopt a highly disciplined approach to containing him both when batting and bowling. ‘Though his bowling might appear occasionally wayward, he could always give you an absolute jaffa,’ said Chappell. ‘Similarly, I told my bowlers to give him nothing but line and length. No trying to bounce him out. We reduced him to a normal human being.’
Fulfilled as a leader, Chappell followed up his Ashes-winning celebrations by announcing his retirement from the Australian captaincy, although he did do it for one more Test, in Sri Lanka at the end of that 1982–83 season, when Hughes – now his full-time successor – withdrew from the short trip for family reasons. He then played on under Hughes for one more season, becoming Australia’s leading run-scorer in his final Test, against Pakistan at Sydney in January 1984, in which his 182 also made Chappell the first and only player to date to end, as well as start, his Test career with a century. The boy from the Adelaide backyard had indeed fulfilled so many of his dreams.