Almanac Cricket: An appreciation of Ian Chappell – Part 2

 

We left the story, dear reader, with the increasing discontent with players’ pay after the gruelling tour of India and South Africa in 1969-70. [Read Part 1 here.]

 

But Ian must have been doing reasonably OK in terms of the finances – many of the players in this era had part-time jobs of course. Because the next time I was in his immediate vicinity was one morning before play was to begin during the Test match with Pakistan at Adelaide Oval in December 1972, and my mate Bernie and I, aged fourteen, were outside the oval waiting for the spectator gates to open when a rumbling bright red flash motored through the players’ entrance. It was Ian in a Valiant Charger – pretty sure it was a Charger rather than the other muscle car of the day, the Holden Monaro. He cut a pretty impressive figure and had by now been the Australian captain for nearly two years. He’d played a big hand in revitalising the Test team after the long, difficult summer of 1970-71 against England. I still remember the tedium of Boycott and John Edrich batting for hour after hour against a blunt Australian bowling line-up. (At least until Dennis Lillee was selected for the first time late in the series). In this match against Pakistan he would make his biggest Test score – a swashbuckling, as they used to say, 196.

The other player to have an outstanding Test in this game was Ashley Mallett. Funnily enough he was the other player Bernie and I saw drive into the ground that morning. But the tall and angular Rowdy trundled through the gate in an old FC Holden, his long right arm poking out above the driver’s door, and no doubt his knees squeezed under the steering column. He didn’t cut as impressive a figure as his captain, but he took his best Test figures, 8/59 in the second innings, to win the match.

At this stage, from memory, Mallett was in the process of qualifying to be a journalist (something you’d think twice about in the current climate) and he would miss the following tour to the West Indies, kicking off in February 1973. This tour, which seems to have been forgotten to some degree – is there a book out there? – would be a triumph for an Australian side with what appeared to be a none-too-threatening front line attack of Max Walker, the under-appreciated Jeff Hammond, Terry Jenner and Kerry O’Keefe. Dennis Lillee broke down with the stress fractures that threatened to end his career early in the tour and played just the first Test before coming home and beginning the brutal process of recovery. His next appearance for Australia would be more than eighteen months away.

Walker and co carried on, backed up with contributions from just about whoever else could roll their arm over, including in the last Test (speaking of forgotten), John Benaud with figures of 2/12. Ian topped the batting aggregates and averages, with 542 runs at 77.43, and it would be the last Australian series win in the West Indies until 1995.

There were series to come against New Zealand, including the Test in Wellington where he and Greg both scored a century in each innings – one of Greg’s a double – and chalked up 646 runs between them. Brothers. In one game. A record that you’d think will never be broken. There would follow the famous series at home against England and then the West Indies, both with Lillee and Thomson dominant, the fixtures against the Windies in particular contributing to the reshaping of Test cricket for near enough the next twenty years. Disturbed by the defeat in Australia, Clive Lloyd initiated an approach where quartets of West Indian fast bowlers, made up of some of the greatest and some of the fiercest in cricket history, would bring Babylon Fire, to quote the documentary film, to the opposition.

So for a little over a decade, from the age of ten, when I first started playing with the Junior Colts at Elizabeth District Cricket Club, the game, and Ian Chappell in particular, loomed large. The South Australian state side as detailed earlier was strong, and a number of times we had four representatives in the Test XI, something that surely has not occurred since. The national selectors could choose from the Chappell brothers, (at least until Greg moved up to Queensland and assumed their captaincy in 1973), the spin twins Mallett and Terry Jenner, pace bowlers Neil Hawke, Eric ‘Fritzy’ Freeman and Jeff Hammond, and wicketkeeper Barry Jarman.

One of these occasions was against India in the Sydney Test of 1967-68, when Ian, Jarman, Hawke and Freeman all played. With Hawke and Freeman opening the bowling, a rare triple was achieved – that season they also opened the attack for Port Adelaide, their club in Adelaide District cricket, for SA’s Shield side, and now for Australia. Incidentally, they were both top class footballers, and both were full forwards, too. Fritzy, playing for the Port Magpies topped the SA goalkicking in 1967 with 81 goals, while Hawke, who started his footy career with Port Adelaide but soon sought opportunities out west, topped the WAFL goalkicking with a hundred plus sausage rolls in 1959.

In relation to this opening the bowling occurrence, I can only think of it happening again possibly with the case of Jeff Thomson and Len Pascoe, though I’d imagine there are other examples in the earlier days of Australian cricket. Thommo and Pascoe, who when asked once why he was so aggro and bounced batsmen so much, replied “a tiger never changes its spots”, played for Bankstown in the Sydney Grade competition. Legend has it the hospital near the Bankstown ground had a designated “Thomson-Pascoe Ward” on the weekends.

So apart from cricket, on a broader level South Aussie was a pretty good place to be through the late 60s and into the 70s. Here, I’ll take you on a brief tour. As well as cricketers occupying themselves in the winter, what else was happening in terms of footy? The SANFL was reasonably strong – Jack Oatey’s Sturt, full of talented and skillful players, won five premierships on the trot from 1966-70. Their place at the top was then taken by North Adelaide, with the great Barrie Robran, who we sadly lost recently, running the show. The state side was, now and then, fairly competitive against the Vics, after beating them at the MCG for the first time in 37 years back in 1963, and in 1972 when North Adelaide defeated Carlton, it was the only time the various Victorian Premiers had lost in the end of year “Championship of Australia” which was held over eight post-seasons through this period.

My mob, the Central District Bulldogs, part of the SANFL only since 1964, made the finals for the first time in 1971. Their coach was Dennis Jones, who played at centre half-back in Norm Smith’s Melbourne premiership side of 1959, during their run of five flags in six seasons. Jones came across as a pretty mild-mannered and intelligent man and, apart from proving to be a wonderful coach, the bonus was his nephew Gary Jones followed him from Melbourne to Elizabeth. Gary, of formidable size and possessing a strong pair of hands, would rarely venture from the goal square and take grab after grab. This simple and effective approach was good enough to see him kick more than 90 goals in 1971.

Victorian coaches were in vogue at this stage – in 1970 half the league’s clubs were in the hands of Vics who had all enjoyed success in the earlier prime of their playing careers over the border and, apart from Jones, the other four took up in Adelaide as playing coaches. There was the colourful Murray Weideman from Collingwood at West Adelaide, John Birt from Essendon at West Torrens, Richmond ruckman Mike Patterson at North, and Noel Teasdale, who shared the 1965 Brownlow with the great Ian Stewart while with North Melbourne, at Woodville.

Politically and socially it was a period of significant change. Don Dunstan and the Labor party, after decades of conservative rule going back to the late 1930s, set about dragging South Australia into the latter part of the twentieth century. His was a progressive government full of ideas with ministers straining at the leash to implement them after so long in opposition, mirroring the situation upon Gough Whitlam’s later election in 1972. Don had the ear of Gough, and this combination of power, influence and the man’s charisma led to a rare glamour in the political sphere which was a whole new thing in SA. It was quite a leap from the old double-breasted wool flannel suits of the 1950s to Don’s safari suit outfit.

In a number of other areas at various points through this period there was something of a boom going on. The motor vehicle industry, much of it based in the state, with the GMH plant at Elizabeth particularly crucial to that satellite town’s economy, was peaking. Holden, for example, was in the process of churning out 450,000 HQs, its biggest ever seller from 1971 to 1974. However the world oil crisis of ’74 contributed to ending that golden run and Elizabeth eventually experienced a long-term decline.

The Australian wine industry was beginning to expand into the huge scene we know today. Nothing in the early 70s could match the sophistication of a cheeseboard, the kind that Les Patterson sometimes sat on as part of his official duties as a cultural attaché, matched with a bottle of claret. The vast majority of the country’s plonk, as we called it at the time, was produced in South Australia, and this was the case right up until the early 1990s.

One other welcome development was the rebirth of the Australian film industry. The SA Film Corporation was a big player in this flowering of cinema, and 1974, ’75 and ’76 saw the production and release of three landmark works it was closely involved with – “Sunday Too Far Away”, “Storm Boy”, and “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. At school we now had an Australian voice to add to our repertoire of lunchtime re-enactments of scenes from films featuring the edgy realism of the new American independent cinema. Jack Thompson’s Foley joined Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea from “Five Easy Pieces” and Al Pacino’s Serpico in the exaggerated recitals of bits of dialogue that my friend Robert and I and some others would snarl dramatically into each other’s faces. Kids, huh. Anyway, Robert later did drama at Uni. Me, not so much. Performing was only something done in the presence of friends in whom I had some level of trust….that’s why bands are often a bit of gang first, I suppose.

But Ian Chappell was no such shrinking violet, as they say in the classics. Confident, often abrasive, with his natural attacking approach, from the early days of his captaincy he forged an uncompromising outfit around the core of himself and Greg, Rod Marsh, Dennis Lillee, Doug Walters and Keith Stackpole. Ian Redpath, returning to the team as an opener, Ross Edwards, Ashley Mallett, Max Walker and Thommo would soon flesh out what must have been one of the most powerful sides in Australian cricketing history. His team would recover from the very ordinary summer of England’s 1970-71 tour in their next ‘Test’ matches, the following summer’s unofficial games against a Rest of the World side put together to replace the cancelled South African tour, when they had the best of a series they somehow lost 2-1. The aforementioned genius of Gary Sobers with 254 at the MCG was responsible for one of the World XI’s wins, and the Sydney fixture suffered a fifth day washout with Australia very much on top and pretty certain of a result.

But they were on their way. Ian would not lose an official series as captain, a position he held for 30 matches, more than any other Australian captain up to that point, and for the next five years his team bestrode the cricketing world, at times shoving and elbowing opponents aside a little along the journey, but playing exciting cricket and providing heroes aplenty for all the cricket mad kids of the era. He was an inspiration, and instrumental in dragging cricket into a new era. To quote Richie Benaud, who wrote Ian’s testimonial upon him being named one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year in 1976, he “will be remembered as much for his bid to improve the players’ lot as he will for his run-getting and captaincy”. That’s a pretty useful trifecta.

 

To read Part 1 of this series click here.

 

To return to our Footy Almanac home page click HERE.

 

Our writers are independent contributors. The opinions expressed in their articles are their own. They are not the views, nor do they reflect the views, of Malarkey Publications.

 

Do you enjoy the Almanac concept?

And want to ensure it continues in its current form, and better? To help things keep ticking over please consider making your own contribution.

 

Become an Almanac (annual) member – click HERE.