this stage, the ACB was winning the battle. Large crowds had turned out to support the traditional and closely fought Test series against India, which Australia won 3–2. Deprived of its best players, the ACB recalled the 41-year-old former captain Bobby Simpson to lead its team of youngsters. Simpson had been retired from the game for ten years but was hugely popular with Australian cricket lovers, who took to the notion that was peddled in the press of this ageing character being recalled to stand up for the proper form of cricket, which was coming under attack from the raucous and thoroughly uncouth WSC.
This image came under fire when Simpson then took his team to the Caribbean in March 1978. West Indies selected all their Packer players and Australia, armed only with Jeff Thomson, took a hammering, although they did manage to win one of the four Tests. Simpson averaged only 22 in the series and was subsequently replaced by Graham Yallop.
The ACB appeared to be winning the early salvos on the home front, at least, in their battle with WSC, but victory would depend on the other cricket boards around the world taking a similarly strong stance. England refused to select its Packer ‘rebels’ – Tony Greig, Dennis Amiss, Alan Knott, John Snow, Derek Underwood and Bob Woolmer – but the defeat in the High Court meant that they were available to play county cricket. Elsewhere, the WSC situation was widely viewed as being an Australian domestic problem and it soon became clear that no other countries were willing to ban their Packer players. Indeed, the impecunious West Indies board negotiated a WSC tour of the Caribbean for the spring of 1979, and when Packer signed up more young Australians for the second season, which was also to include a senior WSC tour featuring largely recently retired international cricketers, the ACB’s position was looking increasingly hopeless.
I was in Melbourne playing club cricket during the second season of WSC and watched a one-day match at VFL Park. Clive Lloyd, captain of the West Indian team, remembered me from a county game the previous summer and invited me into their dressing room to meet Michael Holding, Viv Richards and Andy Roberts. None of them, I can confirm, was best pleased with their outfits. My impression of the live event was that it failed to meet expectation – even of a then 18-year-old cricket fanatic. The floodlighting was poor, the playing area was the wrong shape, and the players were understandably suspicious of the quality of the drop-in pitch. There were very few spectators and the whole thing seemed rather gloomy. However, on television it came across entirely differently, and was very exciting. The floodlights, white balls and coloured clothing all shone on television, and the pitch microphones picked up every word – and there were plenty. WSC traded on being brash and brutal. Gradually sceptical television viewers began to enjoy this new way to watch the best cricketers in the world in a way that had never been possible before. I was changing my mind and began to think it was really thrilling.
The big breakthrough for WSC came in November 1978. Packer persuaded the premier of New South Wales, Neville Wran, to overturn the ban on his using the iconic Sydney Cricket Ground, and 44,377 people turned up to watch the floodlit match between WSC Australia and WSC West Indies. It was a huge success which coincided with the official Australian team losing the First Test to England. That series was to end in a 5–1 defeat for Yallop’s men and, as any Australian will tell you, they hate losing. The Supertest final between WSC Australia and WSC World XI was also played at the SCG and attracted a further forty thousand spectators over three days. Just a week later, half that number turned out to watch the Sixth Test between Australia and England. The tide was turning against the ACB, which was also recording alarming financial losses.
So it was with great interest that I attended the annual meeting of the Professional Cricketers’ Association at Edgbaston the following April. John Arlott presided over the conference, which coincided with negotiations between the various parties in Australia nearing a critical phase. Greig spoke, and was roundly criticised – publicly at least – but the majority of professionals in the room also hoped that WSC would lead to improved salaries for county cricketers. That was certainly the thrust of Greig’s argument.
The announcement of a deal came on 30 May 1979. Not only had Channel Nine won the exclusive rights to broadcast Australian cricket for ten years, but also to promote and market the game. There was a feeling in England that the ACB had sold out – the TCCB had lost a very expensive High Court case, after all – but a solution had to be found. Australia’s Packer players were not reselected until the following domestic season, when Greg Chappell was restored as the national captain, and as a sign of a return to normality, Mike Brearley led an England team to Australia to play three Tests. However, it being a shortened series, the TCCB refused to allow the Ashes to be contested – which was just as well, as Australia won every Test – and by refusing to permit its team to wear coloured clothes in the day/night internationals, the English board made itself look positively outdated and reactionary. This delighted the Australians, ensuring that the old rivalry received a much-needed injection of hostility, and after three tumultuous and turbulent years, normal service was resumed.
For a sport that is supposed to abide firmly to a strong moral code of gentlemanly behaviour, cricket has some undeniably dubious origins. By the end of the seventeenth century, gambling was inextricably linked to the sport and there are even suggestions that the emergence of county-based cricket came as a result of gamblers forming their own teams. There are reports of a ‘great match’ held in Sussex in 1697 being played for a stake of fifty guineas per side. But cricket was not the only sport to attract gamblers, and there is no suggestion of matches in the dim and distant past being ‘thrown’ or tampered with in any way in return for a pay-off. This was certainly well before there was any spot-fixing or any of the other corrupt activities that have become the scourge of the modern game.
It was in the 1990s that the cricketing rumour mill went into overdrive with claims that international matches were being fixed by players. Perhaps it was purely coincidental that this was also the time of numerous ball-tampering allegations, but it is definitely true to say that cricket’s reputation for being a clean and ethical sport was at its lowest ebb. Subsequent investigations and inquiries have confirmed the existence of corruption, fuelled by the massive illegal bookmaking industry in India and Dubai, in particular. The South Africa captain, Hansie Cronje, and his Indian counterpart, Mohammad Azharuddin, became the first high-profile international cricketers to be banned for match-fixing. When the extent of Cronje’s involvement unravelled during the subsequent inquiry in Cape Town in 2000, led by Judge King, it became clear that cricket faced a huge problem, and that the integrity of the sport was at stake.
The first claims of match-fixing originated in county cricket. Don Topley, an Essex player, created a storm when he announced that two matches played over a weekend in 1991 between Essex and Lancashire were fixed. The deal, he claimed, was for Essex to lose the Sunday League game in return for Lancashire allowing Essex, who were in the race for the County Championship title, to win the corresponding Championship match. Topley confessed to deliberately bowling poorly in the Sunday League match when he made his allegations in 1994. There was an investigation by the TCCB and, five years later, by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and the Metropolitan Police, who found insufficient evidence to press charges despite two new witnesses supporting Topley. The inquiry by the ECB was described by some as perfunctory, and it did not appear that many on the county circuit took Topley’s claims seriously.
Australian cricket was rocked by the news that two of its favourites, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, had both been given cash payments by an Indian bookmaker known only as John. Warne received A$5,000 and Waugh A$4,000 in exchange for what the players insist was nothing more than weather and pitch information before matches on their tour of Sri Lanka in 1994–5. An Australian journalist was tipped off that at least one Australian player was being paid by a bookmaker, and the officials were informed. Waugh and Warne admitted their involvement in unsigned handwritten statements, and the ACB chairman, Alan Crompton, fined the players. However, this was kept secret even from fellow members of the board who might have pressed for suspensions to be imposed. Another factor was that Waugh and Warne had both accused Salim Malik, the captain of Pakistan, of attempting to bribe them to lose matches and this information would have damaged their credibility as witnesses in the event of an inquiry.
But the scandal broke immediately before the Adelaide Test between Australia and England in December 1998 when Malcolm Conn, the