A month after his final Test, Greig was in the High Court, as Packer successfully fought the ban on his men. In the history of cricket only matchfixers have fallen from grace so precipitously. 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.Įngland’s captain Tony Greig finished the Centenary Test a darling of the establishment within two months he was a pariah.
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. Giant posters during the inaugural Packer World Seriesīut 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. 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. 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. 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. More than coincidences of timing relate the events too. But events behind the scenes there would ensure that cricket was a game divided by the time the anniversary recurred. 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. Elvis and Groucho Marx died Psy and John Oliver were born. The French retired the guillotine Americans launched the Apple II. ‘God Save the Queen’ played all over the country: for patriots in the Queen’s Jubilee for punks by the Sex Pistols.
1977 is a year that can be read both backwards and forwards.