Back to the future: The Kerry Packer revolution

GIDEON HAIGH: In some ways, the Packer revolution seems like ancient history, in others its ramifications are still being felt

1977 is a year that can be read both backwards and forwards. ‘God Save the Queen’ played all over the country: for patriots in the Queen’s Jubilee; for punks by the Sex Pistols. The French retired the guillotine; Americans launched the Apple II. Elvis and Groucho Marx died; Psy and John Oliver were born.

Nothing in cricket could have been quite so traditional as the Centenary Test, a birthday party for the game’s Anglo-Australian axis hosted in March on the site of the inaugural 11-a-side fixture involving English and Australian teams. But events behind the scenes there would ensure that cricket was a game divided by the time the anniversary recurred. 

More than coincidences of timing relate the events too. Though underappreciated at the time, the kulturkampf unleashed by Kerry Packer paid tribute to the strong hold over national imaginations that traditional cricket had built over generations, as well as to the guts and panache of the Australian teams of the 1970s.

Packer did not embark with the express intention of building a new cricket; he coveted the old cricket, or at least the exclusive broadcast rights to it in Australia for his Channel Nine stations. His interest had been pricked by advice from two middle men, comedian John Cornell and his friend Austin Robertson, that there was disgruntlement among Australian players about their financial lot. But the revolution was precipitated by the forces of reaction: by the Australian Cricket Board which would not deal with Packer; by the Test & County Cricket Board and International Cricket Conference which sought to ban his signatories.

They had their reasons. To accommodate a commercial baron stood at odds with their culture of honorary stewardship; to pay and promote hand-picked stars was to acquiesce in a celebrity worship that was anathema to them. But perhaps the chief source of fury, at least at first, was the sense of betrayal that administrators felt at players essentially two-timing them while backs had been turned at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. England’s captain Tony Greig finished the Centenary Test a darling of the establishment; within two months he was a pariah. In the history of cricket only matchfixers have fallen from grace so precipitously. A month after his final Test, Greig was in the High Court, as Packer successfully fought the ban on his men.

When Packer’s plan first became public it was hardly a plan at all, but a scheme for Nine to screen six ‘Tests’ and six one-day matches between Australian and Rest of the World XIs in 1977/78. It had 35 cricket names, but no name itself. Despite his having been in the know, Richie Benaud’s response in Sydney’s Daily Mirror was surprisingly tempered. He talked merely of the shift in cricket’s existing power dynamics: “It [Australian cricket] may be better or worse for this new venture but the structure will never quite be the same where amateur administrators and semi-professional players were the key to Australian cricket domination.”

^{Tony Greig was heavily involved}

Players had signed up on very limited information, influenced by the involvements of Greig, the Chappells and Dennis Lillee, their generations’ most charismatic members. Cricketers in those days were disarmingly approachable: there were no huge coaching and security entourages; agents as we would understand them were unknown. Not one signatory seems to have sought independent advice or to have dickered over their offers – generous by the standards of 1977 but hardly extravagant. 

Afterwards, some felt boxed in. Jeff Thomson and Alvin Kallicharran returned to the establishment fold. But by the time it commenced on December 2 1977, what was now parading as World Series Cricket was bigger than even Cornell and Robertson had first foreseen. It had colonised non-cricket venues, rolled out drop-in pitches, dangled unprecedented winner-take-all prize money, pumped out exciting commercials and jazzy merchandise. The six ‘Supertests’ now also involved a West Indian team; there were 13 one-day matches in the ‘International Cup’, 17 games in rural centres in the ‘Country Cup’. WSC never stopped recruiting: by the time it concluded, the original complement of players had virtually doubled.

Participants found it the most intense cricket of their careers, such was the concentration of talent, the no-holds-barred competition, the incessancy of the fast bowling, the media scrutiny and innovation cycle.  There had been only 44 limited-overs internationals in seven years before WSC; under Packer, players would grow accustomed to an almost ceaseless cycle of such matches, sometimes on consecutive days.

Night cricket, using floodlights at Victorian Football League Park, was the ultimate outgrowing of contouring cricket to television, otherwise reflected in the number of cameras, the profusion of replays, the eavesdropping of microphones, the presentation of scores and statistics, and the inclusiveness of commentary. Cricket had always been able to take an audience for granted; WSC could not, and sought it out. Some thought it undignified for Benaud to explain a leg-break or for Tony Cozier to croon ‘Blue Moon’ when a cameraman at a night match trained his gaze skywards, but David Hill, Nine’s sports vice-president, would try anything to fulfil his boss’s objective of “translating the excitement and tension of a cricket match onto viewers’ screens”. 

Of course, it did not work – initially anyway. What’s remembered as vividly as any aspect of the first season of WSC are VFL Park’s often empty concrete terraces. In official cricket in 1977/78, meanwhile, Australia successfully hosted India in five Tests with no one-day internationals – the last summer of its kind, and as great a contrast as possible. WSC saw shoots of promise from its first night matches. But the idea that big money made for better cricket was not only freely ridiculed in the media; it simply did not connect with the Australian public.

Packer’s solution was what Oscar Wilde called the last refuge of a scoundrel. ‘C’mon Aussie C’mon’, the original cricket marketing theme tune and still perhaps the best, tapped into the same down-dressing nationalism that had made the Australian teams of the 1970s popular.  It reminded local fans that they had not long ago been cheering the WSC’s stars; all that had changed was their constellation. WSC’s gaining access to the Sydney Cricket Ground for its second season also served to bridge that gap between professionalism and public.

^{Dennis Lillee was in favour of Packer's innovation}

What’s remembered of the fabled day/night match between the Australians and the West Indians under the SCG’s newly erected light towers on November 28 1978 is, again, not Lillee’s 4 for 13 or even Greg Chappell’s 5 for 19, but the jubilant throng of around 50,000 for whom Packer legendarily threw open the turnstiles when they did not click fast enough. “One thing was certain,” recalled Alan Lee of The Times. “Packer had struck gold and found something that would arouse the envy of traditional cricket authorities.”

An Ashes summer has never been so consistently overshadowed than that season in Australia. From the Noble Stand at the SCG, even England’s captain Mike Brearley watched WSC’s inaugural match in coloured clothing – another 50-over showdown between the a wattle-yellow Australians and the coral-pink West Indians on January 17 1979.  Suddenly, it seemed, Packer omnipotent reigned. At last WSC outgrew its domestic battleground by staging five more Supertests and 10 limited-overs internationals in the Caribbean. Packer, it seemed, was offering a genuine alternative to the established game throughout the world. One wonders what a further year might have looked like.

As it was, a peace was agreed, hasty and unequal: Packer not only won the broadcast rights he had sought, which Nine retains, but the marketing rights, which his organisation would hold for another fifteen years. The 1979 World Cup was raised by the West Indies – essentially the team battle-hardened by Clive Lloyd for Packer over the preceding two years, set for a decade’s domination.

Cricket had been given a lesson in entrepreneurial determination and financial resources. Cricketers had obtained a sense of their market value as individual performers. The public had developed a taste for the game as a leisure consumer product designed for their lifestyles and tastes. The television audience now rivalled the live crowd as a world to conquer, because they could be pitched advertisements that networks could sell.

The story recurs now as rather a blur, only impressions and vignettes standing out. Hookesy having his jaw broken; Wayne Daniel hitting that six; Viv Richards making that hundred at….somewhere; Greg Chappell doing the same.

There was so much cricket: 56,126 runs and 2,364 wickets worth, which Wisden squeezed into less space than the Almanack dedicated to county 2nd XI averages.

Ironically, given that this revolution was televised, the surviving footage is fragmentary. Half a dozen of its players, and Packer himself, have passed on. In that sense, 1977 stands firmly in the past. But when commercial rights to a T20 attraction in India underpinned by private capital are being sold for $US2.5bn, and similar leagues tout for investors all over the world, the past looks awfully like the future.

This article was published in the September 2017 edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game

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