Almanac Cricket (Obsession): When the bug was caught…

 

 

 

 

 

by Chris O’Callaghan

 

 

“Jolly cricket”, I cried as I hurled my school bag into the corner, furious that I couldn’t watch the late afternoon Sesame Street …

I was seven years old …

It was 1974/75 and my dad probably wondered whether or not he could ever kindle a cricket passion in me ….

It’s hard to believe now, looking back at highlights of that Brisbane Test match on YouTube and various other ABC documentaries at the time, how anyone couldn’t have been hooked. Lillee returned from a back injury and Thommo bowling with heat – genuine heat.

None of us can forget the famous sandshoe crusher to Tony Greig nor Greig’s arrogance in signalling boundaries as he compiled a first innings century…. Of course, to me, I didn’t live it live, but retrospectively. As for Ashley Mallett’s scorching gully catches, and the mystique of Tangles Walker …

I can vaguely remember during the off-season the controversy of a pitch being dug up at Headingly in 1975 and that Ian Chappell made a 192 … I think I must have watched some first sessions live with my dad as it was beamed on rather hazy satellite to ABC television for that 8pm start.

But by the following summer I was all up for cricket. Twin centuries in Greg Chappell’s first Test match as captain in Brisbane caught my attention

Of course, the advent of colour television in March 1975 added enormously to the spectacle on a 22 inch Rank Arena Screen…

It helped that the Perth Test match was played on a deck as hard as rock. I was gobsmacked as the left handed West Indian Opener, Roy Fredricks smoted his way to a ton in 71 balls and the Supercat Clive Lloyd made 149 as they amassed a mammoth total of 585, and Andy Roberts tore the heart out of the Australian batting line up with 7/54 in the second innings. Yet it was the Windies one glimmer of victorious delight as they crumbled to a 5-1 series defeat …..

Subsequently, that Sydney Test with Greg Chappell making an undefeated 182, and Thommo tearing through the Windies line up with 6/50 and taking a phenomenal catch down at deep fine leg/backward square leg after a huge run which ended with, I think it was a cartwheel, left me mesmerised….. I’m not sure how much, fifty seasons on, I remember from sitting transfixed in front of the TV, and how much of it was due to a copy of Ken Piesse’s series overview, Chappell’s Champions with the ground-breaking gold class photography of Patrick Eagar has enshrined fond memories of my first real summer of passion.

Dennis Lillee, was then and even now watching YouTube highlights, had a theatricality really only matched since by Shane Warne. Both of them could be very naughty too. But watching him bowl balloons. Come in off a three pace run up and the aluminium bat eventually …. I just could not look away.

Then came Packer and World Series Cricket – banned in my home because they were deemed mercenaries.

But my dad took me along to the MCG for Day 1 of the Test match of that series against India. As with all of us, there’s nothing quite like the crowd noise in that amphitheatre, impossible to anticipate until you are actually there. I remember that my dad and I sat in the outer, probably around at Bay 9 or 10. A bit of a mistake with Thommo bowling flat chat – at that stage having resisted the lure of a WSC future. Side on, I saw nothing of the first two wickets other than the frantic physical action, and two batsmen trudging away off the field before Mohinder Armanath and the delightfully named, Gundappa Viswanath, restored respectability ….

I’m not sure who I met first …. But my dad took me to a Victorian XI v Indian tour game at Kardinia Park in Geelong, and he encouraged me to go and talk to Armanath – a quiet and then young man – whom I asked to show me how he held the ball …. I felt a surge of delight. We had also gone into Ian Redpath’s Geelong antique store but I was too starstruck and dumbfounded to talk to him at all … All these helped to make me truly passionate.

Then my dad and I caught the train from Traralgon to Melbourne – as we must have done the previous trip – although I’m not sure for the first day of the 1979-80 Australia v West Indies Test match. And oh lawdy how quick the Windies bowled. Roberts. Holding. Croft, Garner. No-one else needed to bowl. My dad loved Victorians – keen to provoke strong state parochialism in his lad. Julian Wiener top scored with 40, Greg Chappell was next top score with 19 and we were rolled for 156. Late in the day, Rodney Hogg clocked Viv Richards on the head with a bouncer, before Viv belligerently smashed the next ball over the deep square leg fence under the old scoreboard at the city end ….

It was a late arrival back at Traralgon …. After 11pm. The station master turned the lights off immediately as we arrived ….. Someone had let a car tyre down. My dad changed it in the dark but with me dutifully holding the torch which always sat in the dairy farmer’s glovebox, aged 12 …..

I can only remember one more MCG Test match day with my dad – that bitterly cold day against the Poms when Warney snared his 700^th Test wicket…

They are my earliest memories of what’s become a life-long passion …

However, family comes first at Christmas time. So it’s usually Day 3 onwards of the Boxing Day Test match for me ….

Hopefully, some embers are glowing of your earliest cricket memories…..

Aren’t these Ashes Test matches great – after two played?

 

 

Read more cricket writing from various Almanac contributors, including reports of each day’s play across the Ashes Series  HERE.

 

 

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