headed by the infamous Greig. Furthermore, they lost the case with costs, some quarter of a million pounds. As a Guardian leader put it, ‘Mr Kerry Packer may be a bounder and a cad. But he is a legal bounder and a High-Court-sanctified cad.’
To rub salt in establishment wounds, Richie Benaud, who emerged as the brains behind Packer’s scheme, announced that it would not be played under MCC laws, which he had the temerity to call mere ‘rules’, and preparations gleefully began for World Series Cricket (WSC). Furthermore, it was evident that some counties were more concerned to retain the crowd-pulling power of their overseas players than to uphold TCCB dignity. Sussex expressed relief that they were not to be deprived of the services of Greig, Snow and Imran Khan, the Pakistani star. Gloucestershire’s treasurer likewise declared himself ‘ticked pink’ that Mike Procter and Zaheer Abbas would be staying. The Hampshire captain, R. M. C. Gilliat, of Charterhouse and Oxford University, said it was ‘good news for Hampshire cricket’. There was, of course, much huffing and puffing from choleric upholders of tradition, but as the TCCB made no move to appeal against the judgment there was little they could do but seethe.
Loyalist indignation was further aroused when Sussex declined to follow England’s lead, and renewed Greig’s captaincy for the 1978 season. (Nottinghamshire proposed and Lancashire seconded a motion to expel Sussex from the championship.) Kent followed a more politically correct line when they removed Asif Iqbal as captain, but they were careful not to try to dispense with his services as a player. All but the fiercest accepted that the counties had little choice but to honour existing contracts with the ‘rebels’ (though it was assumed that it would be a different story a year later: the judgment had said nothing about renewing contracts). Warwickshire took a similar line. Stiff upper lips were de rigueur and crossed fingers were hidden under board-room tables.
Two things saved the bacon, if not entirely the face, of officialdom. First, World Series Cricket was not the immediate runaway success Packer had predicted, for although it attracted television audiences of a sort, and floodlit matches were a great novelty, the jazzed-up proceedings did not seem to stir up any great concern for who won or lost. Second, the assault on the citadel had led to some rallying round amongst lovers of the authorised version. The TCCB landed £1 million sponsorship from Cornhill Insurance for the Test matches. Fees went up from £3,000 to £5,000 (plus winning bonuses) for tours and from £200 to £1,000 for each home match. Players were thus given pause before they rushed to sign for Packer, and some English players of a certain age or temperament saw this as an opportunity to thin the ranks of overseas players on the county scene, which they now dominated. Personal ambitions and old feuds came into play.
World Series Cricket put a further twist in the ravelled skein of Geoffrey Boycott’s fortunes. Not everyone was as pleased as Wisden with the choice of Mike Brearley, the Middlesex captain, to replace the alien Greig. Sceptics who thought his batting below standard also pointed out that he had not spoken out against the Packer ‘circus’, and hinted darkly that the only reason he hadn’t actually joined them was because he wasn’t good enough to be made an offer: Boycott, by contrast, had been amongst the first to be invited but had ostentatiously refused. Instead he had offered his services to England in her hour of need, and had scored his hundredth century on his home ground, as England took advantage of Australia’s greater disarray to put it across them in that summer’s Tests.
The Cricketers’ Association had members on both sides of the argument – which essentially was whether Packer’s intervention was likely to benefit all cricketers or would merely further widen the gap between the stars’ pay and that of the rest. At the time the basic pay of the 150 or so capped English players averaged about £2,600 a season, rising to perhaps £3,000 with bonuses. Test players averaged nearer £5,000, which was the normal minimum for overseas stars, some of whom commanded £10,000 or more, and the immediate effect of World Series Cricket was to increase the disparities. Boycott further developed his role as champion of the loyalist cause in Pakistan in the winter of 1977–8. When the Pakistan Board of Control lost their nerve and proposed to select three Packer players, Boycott, as acting captain, led a dressing-room revolt.
This, without helping intra-ICC relations, was a setback to the rebels’ hopes of breaking up the fragile alliance. Greig vented his spleen in the Sydney Sun, claiming that Boycott had had a special reason to fear the return of the Pakistan rebels – the pace of Imran Khan. Greig was suspended by the TCCB for breaking his contract and Sussex dolefully dismissed him as captain and ‘allowed him to go’ during the year. As ICC’s united front began to crumble under pressure from West Indies and Pakistan, neither of whom could afford to adopt high moral principles, discussions began with WSC, who were going to greater and greater lengths to try to drum up interest, notably fast bowling of such ferocity that helmets ceased to be regarded as wimpish. ‘Roller-ball cricket’, traditionalists called it.
Neither side was yet ready to concede, but cynics were already predicting that money would have the last word. When John Arlott, president of the Cricketers’ Association, reported in August that ICC had made a ‘considerable advance towards accommodation’ with Packer, the writing was already on the wall. Kent announced that they would re-sign their Packer players for 1979 on the grounds that if they didn’t other counties would. And when Warwickshire announced shortly afterwards that, in view of a letter from the other players, they did not propose to renew Dennis Amiss’s contract, it caused a great furore amongst the members, for Amiss had had his best season ever for the club: ‘Why should we suffer when Kent don’t intend to?’ the dissidents asked. But when they asked for a special meeting, arranged for late September, Amiss himself asked for it to be called off, advised, apparently, by the Cricketers’ Association, who were confident that a settlement would be reached during the winter.
Little more needs to be said about this ignoble episode in the affairs of the noble game as the saga lurched towards the inevitable surrender by the ICC. English disapproval of Packer was alloyed somewhat at the outset by the fact that his impact was greatest in Australia, whose Test teams dwindled into insignificance as a result. Conversely, though the Australian Board made war-like noises, the Australian public made it clear that, while not everyone liked the frenetic WSC approach, they certainly were not going to pay to see their reserves trampled on by the Poms. The English public, meanwhile, became relaxed enough in their unaccustomed supremacy over the old enemy to indulge in a nostalgic North v. South, Gentlemen v. Players debate about the claims of Boycott and Brearley to the captaincy. One side followed the lead of John Woodcock of The Times, who backed the Middlesex captain despite an average of under 20 in his previous twelve Test matches – ‘because England are at ease under Brearley and play the better for being so’. A diametrically opposed minority view was expressed by Albert Hunt, a Bradford contributor to New Society: the north-country ‘professional’ Boycott, having swallowed his pride and gone out to tour Australia under Brearley, had been unchivalrously denied the opportunity to practise at a crucial stage in the tour by the Cambridge ‘amateurs’ Brearley and the manager, Doug Insole.
This unique reversal of roles may indeed have affected Boycott’s performances. So also may his dismissal as Yorkshire’s captain two days after the death of his beloved mother and a couple of weeks before the tour began. Boycott himself even blamed his personal troubles for his deplorable outburst against one of the umpires, whom he called a cheat when he gave him out. Anyway Boycott was glad to get the tour over and returned home, intent on pressing hard for a ban on Packer players at the Cricketers’ Association meeting in April 1979. This was expected to be a stormy affair, but it turned out to be an anti-climax, for the members were advised to take no decisions but to await developments. By the end of the month it was all over: the Australian Board had done a deal, conceding Packer’s exclusive television rights, and the wind went out of loyalist sails with a rush.
From A Social History of English Cricket, 1999
