Almanac Cricket: An appreciation of Ian Chappell (Part 1)

 

 

AN APPRECIATION OF IAN CHAPPELL – PART 1

 

Ian Chappell stood to the side of the batting crease at Adelaide Oval with his cream strides around his ankles. He was giving his protector a properly thorough adjustment, taking his time while doing so, rather than just the cursory habitual fiddle he gave it before most balls he faced. This unusual spectacle surely drew a variety of reactions from the crowd scattered about the oval that day.

 

It was the last Sheffield Shield match of the 1979-1980 season and Ian’s last appearance for South Australia, in a career that spanned 19 years. I would have been there as a win would result in SA taking the Shield again, four years after he inspired a similar achievement in his previous first class season, dragging the team from bottom place to the top, before the disruption and disarray and enforced absence brought on by World Series Cricket. My reaction, sitting there on the grass slope opposite the magnificent old grandstands that ran along the oval’s western flank, was to smile with some level of admiration for the possible symbolism in his state of (un)dress and the fiddling about.

 

Earlier in his innings, in response to a piece of ‘advice’ from a member in the crowd (I mean, why?) – he scored 112 and 32 in the eventual loss to the Vics, South Australia cleaned up by Jimmy Higgs in its second innings – Ian barked across the serenity of a sunny early autumn day, clearly audible, ‘Go and get fucked!’ So, yes…a variety of reactions, from the wrinkle-nosed distaste I’d imagined amongst the fuddie duddies in the Members’ area, to a kind of awe, in my head at least, regarding his chutzpah and a lack of concern for the accepted niceties. He gave the appearance of someone who had had a gutful, and of course after his, by now, well documented battles with the ACB and the SACA and particularly Sir Donald Bradman over the years there was good enough reason.

 

Maybe he was just tired – the previous three or four years in the cricket world were surely among the most tumultuous the sport had seen. There had been an extraordinary mix of rapid change, a barrage of media attention, from some quarters savage criticism, and no doubt the mental fatigue of playing the toughest cricket of the breakaway players’ careers.

 

So the 1979-1980 Sheffield Shield campaign finished disappointingly, even though he top-scored in the first innings, just as he had top-scored in the second of his first Shield game for SA, again against Victoria at the Adelaide Oval. In February 1962, aged eighteen, he made 59 out of 153 as the batting collapsed around him.

 

His captain in that initial appearance, and for years to come, was Les Favell. Les was a bold and positive leader and an attacking opening bat, who apparently would sing ‘Happy Birthday to me’ as a bowler he fancied ran in to deliver. He played Shield cricket until he was just past 40, continuing to employ the shots that made up the title of his memoir, ‘By Hook or by Cut’, the two shots without which a young Greg Chappell cheekily said Les wouldn’t have made a run. His Test career was stop-start, 19 appearances over seven years (too many hook shots some may have said at the time) but his last four Tests were the first four of possibly the greatest series ever played, against the Windies in 1960-1961. Including, naturally, the tied epic in Brisbane. He was one of only 22 cricketers involved in a moment of cricketing immortality. Les was much loved and died terribly young, only 57, with cancer.

 

Ian always credited Les with encouraging in him the desire to attack and entertain, and through this period of Ian’s time with SA, from 1962 through to 1980, such an approach to playing the game clearly worked. Les captained two Shield wins in the ’60s, (having the contributions of cricketing genius Gary Sobers for a few seasons didn’t hurt), and Ian two more in the ’70s. In fact, Ian is the sole common thread through this relatively golden era of SA cricket, of four wins and five runners-up finishes over 19 seasons. In the 45 years since, there have been three wins, one of them two years after his retirement and one just last season. That’s one Shield in just over 40 intervening years. I think we can see a pattern developing here.

 

I first saw Ian Chappell in the flesh on the first day of the Fourth Test at Adelaide against the West Indies during the 1968-1969 tour. My mother took me; we saw the Windies bat, with Basil Butcher and the aforementioned Gary Sobers making scores and I was happy to see my other cricketing hero as a boy, Graham McKenzie bowl. (I wanted to bowl like him, a muscular, lion-hearted and smooth moving quick, and bat like Ian, who in this series averaged a whisker under 90 for the first four Tests before a bit of a dud match for him in Sydney in the Fifth). Ian stood at first slip and snaffled a couple of catches, natch.

 

Ian has said in interviews that his father Martin, when he took his son to Adelaide Oval to watch Test cricket in the 1950s, told him to ‘Watch Miller’. Watch his approach, his movements, how he made things happen. Sense his gravitas. My mother also watched Keith Miller, in a very different place and for different reasons, to a point, but his charisma was indisputable.

 

Mum saw Miller during the 1953 and 1956 Australian tours of England. She was a young Lancastrian, where there was no shortage of high class sport being played all through the year: cricket at Old Trafford, there were some of the world’s biggest football clubs in the vicinity’s main cities Liverpool and Manchester, and also rugby league’s Wigan and St. Helens. So she, often teamed up with her cousin Bill, attended whenever she had the chance and loved it. Her first love was cricket though, and she passed her enthusiasm for the game onto me, and I reckon if she was a young woman today she would be wanting to play.

 

Keith Miller was the heart-throb of those touring teams, a tall, dashing figure and one of the greatest all-rounders. Stories of his carefree attitude to the game, his distaste for discipline, of turning up for example to a day’s play against a county side in a warm-up match in a disheveled dinner jacket, were abundant and Mum delighted in them. Like his English equivalent, in terms of being both a dasher and party animal, his friend Denis Compton, Miller spent the first half of his twenties seeing action in the war. He was a flier, at one stage piloting Mosquitoes in raids over Europe. Later asked about the pressures of playing Test cricket, he replied ‘Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse’.

 

So as Mum, soon to leave England and migrate to Australia, watched Miller as a twenty-one year old at Old Trafford, Ian watched him, also enthralled, as an eleven year old at the Adelaide Oval. Ian went on, as he freely said later, to idolise Miller, whose approach to the game was intertwined with his own.

 

The first time I was in Ian Chappell’s orbit from a distance of less than say, a hundred metres, watching from the old Cresswell Stand at the Adelaide Oval, was at some sort of pre-season kids clinic or meet and greet function just before the 1969-1970 season. The Sheffield Shield players were there, I got Ian and brother Greg’s autographs, and memorably the great West Indian off-spinner Lance Gibbs also signed my little home made autograph book. I remember his beautiful black skin and dazzling smile, and his long bony fingers. With these fingers, when he finished playing Test cricket seven years later, he had bowled the most balls of anyone at that level and had just broken Fred Trueman’s long standing record of 307 wickets. Those hands also appeared in photographs in the local press I’m pretty certain, with close-ups highlighting the callouses on his spinning finger caused by bowling thousands of deliveries year after year.

 

Gibbs had been recruited to play for SA that season, I’m assuming, because of Ashley Mallett’s absence on the tour of India and South Africa, which the Test players would have embarked upon shortly after this clinic. The Australians, captained by Bill Lawry (Ian, soon to be anointed by Lawry as the world’s best batsman, was his deputy) were away from late October 1969 to late March 1970. Nine Test matches and six three-day matches over five months in two countries. To describe it as gruelling wasn’t half of it.

 

The tour of India has been commonly described as a triumph on the field, and a disaster off it. Australia won the five Test series 3-1, and Ian, along with Keith Stackpole, Graham McKenzie and Mallett, starred. Australia would not win another series in India for 35 years. There were crowd disturbances at three of the Tests – a stand burned in Bombay (as it was called then), stones and bottles thrown elsewhere, the Australian players helping escort the losing captain ‘Tiger’ Pataudi off the field at series’ end. In addition Bill Lawry, while one of this country’s great opening bats, proved to have a tenuous grasp of diplomatic skills in such a difficult situation, something which he later admitted, and this did little to smooth over the many complications.

 

Legend has it that Humphrey Bogart and director John Huston consumed only copious amounts of whiskey in terms of hydration requirements during the filming, in the deepest, darkest jungle, of ‘The African Queen’ in 1950. They must have mixed it with something? Another legend has it that a well known Australian leg spinner later aimed to subsist on tinned baked beans (who was the poor sod who roomed with him?) during a tour of India. The facts of the Indian tour of late 1969 show that a number of the Australians came down with a variety of gastro-intestinal problems and struggled physically for periods of their time in a country which in many aspects was still desperately poor. The India of today is a much different proposition, with clear signs of prosperity in the big cities. Not so much then, when food security was a constant concern and the terrible famine in neighbouring Bangladesh, for example was only a few years away.

 

Something else which would have done little to humour the tourists was mentioned in an interview Ian gave a few years ago. Apparently there was a rumour circulating amongst the players that should any of them die during the tour then their wives would receive a lump sum, there were various figures talked about, of something around $1,000 from the ACB. That’s roughly $15,000 in today’s aussie battlers, as Norman Gunston used to call the currency. This sounds comically outrageous five-plus decades later, but considering what happened on the tour of India and Pakistan led by Richie Benaud ten years earlier, it was no laughing matter. South Australian tourist Gavin Stevens, a batter aged 27, suffered a severe case of hepatitis, so much so that acquaintances struggled to recognise him on his return home. He never played first class cricket again.

 

So, after India, to South Africa, and a horrible drubbing. Listening to this humiliation on a crystal set under the sheets at night was a painful undertaking. Ian struggled throughout and made a top score of 34 in eight innings, while Barry Richards and Pollock (G.) thrashed the Australians’ buggered bowlers and the two quickies Mike Proctor and Pollock (P.) ripped through the batting. That was it for this powerful South African outfit. Due to the enduring brutality of the apartheid regime, and specifically the Basil D’Oliviera affair, their country would no longer be involved in any officially sanctioned international cricket. This remained the case for more than 20 years.

 

At some point during the 4-0 mauling, the ACB, in conjunction with the South African Board – who were happy with ticket sales for the Tests – floated the possibility of a Fifth Test. Apparently Lawry (reasonably politely) and Ian (not so politely) suggested the players wouldn’t be interested unless there was some suitable financial reward for extending the tour. The offer from a completely out of touch ACB was considered derisory, adding no doubt to the players already dim view of the Board, and they returned home as planned. Keith Miller, involved with the media by this stage, writing for newspapers, and I remember him on ABC radio at times, supported the players’ decision. And so were further scattered the seeds of discontent regarding players’ pay, leading to the great schism seven years later.

 

Read more from Reject Phil 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.