The Cricket War by Gideon Haigh

Author:Gideon Haigh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

The misfortunes of Bob Simpson’s team began, literally, on the runway. Landing in New York after a San Francisco stopover, manager Fred Bennett discovered that direct flight to St John’s in Antigua was impossible because of a pilots’ strike at Caribbean carrier BWIA. Squeezing aboard the only available transport, a chartered nineteen-seat Primair Heron, the Australians fidgeted for half an hour on the tarmac while the pilot tried to start the aircraft with jumper leads.

Five hundred steel bandsmen helped the airsick Australians attune to the local vibrations, as did their tour opener against the Leeward Islands. There were no practice wickets, an unusable centre wicket and an impossible outfield. Simpson then noticed that local boy Jim Allen was ingenuously wearing his World Series Cricket outfit. Coalitions of environment and allegiance would haunt his team for the next three months.

Having abided the International Cricket Conference embargo under protest, the West Indies Cricket Board of Control had welcomed the High Court mandate of free selection. Public sympathy, it had discovered, was firmly with WSC. As the schools blended, though, there was genuine debate about which played the superior cricket. Strangely, considering they had dominated the elite WSC, Lloyd’s team had as much to prove as Simpson’s youngsters. After all, England had embarrassed a mostly WSC Australian team, while Simpson’s combination had a fine series victory to their credit. Tony Cozier recalls:

The English press was in such a state of confusion that they were actually writing that Australia was better now that Chappell and his players were out of it. And, because people were going to such extremes to rubbish WSC, there would have been strong reaction if Simpson did even reasonably well. Lloyd’s team wanted to win as convincingly as they could to settle the argument.

Relations between the WICBC and its WSC players were strained. The board was embarrassed that it was powerless to prevent WSC signatories wearing their Packer kit. Snarled communications showed from the first one-day international: Collis King was picked though still in Australia, Alvin Kallicharran omitted when thought to be in Australia but actually in Guyana. It happened that no one shone in the game more brightly than a spunky twenty-two-year-old Bajan called Desmond Haynes, whose breakneck 148 contained a century in boundaries. His eagle eye had Wilkins calling him ‘just about the most beautiful piece of batting merchandise not signed by Kerry Packer’.

The Australians also clapped bats for the first time on the now-feted Joel Garner and the less-heralded Guyanese fast bowler Colin Everton Hunte Croft, each of whom took three cheap wickets. Garner they’d seen from afar in Australia, but Croft was something else again: a crazy contraption of arms unwinding from the extremities of the popping crease and following through with a homicidal glare. Two sixes from Cosier in a brave 84 saved some face, but the game proved a mismatch.

As the beaten Australians warmed up for the First Test at Port-of-Spain with a game against Trinidad, a third factor got on Simpson’s nerves. Four

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