World Series Cricket: How Packer Rewrote the Game

World Series Cricket was a privately owned cricket competition, run in Australia across two summers from December 1977, that broke the game open and put it back together in a different shape. Kerry Packer wanted Test cricket for Channel Nine. The Australian Cricket Board would not sell it to him. So he contracted most of the best cricketers on earth, hired venues that had never held a cricket match, invented most of the presentation that modern cricket now takes for granted, and forced the board into a settlement inside two years.

Almost everything that looks normal about cricket today came out of those two summers. Night matches. Coloured clothing. White balls. Black sightscreens. Helmets as standard equipment. Cameras at both ends. Drop-in pitches, without which neither the MCG nor Perth Stadium could stage cricket and football in the same year. Players being paid enough to make cricket a career rather than a summer job. World Series Cricket produced all of it, and it produced it because the operation had no traditions to protect and a television schedule to fill.

This page runs through what actually happened: the rights bid, the secret signings, the leak, the London court case that decided the whole thing, the two seasons, the night at the Sydney Cricket Ground that settled the argument, and the deal in May 1979 that ended the war and handed Packer what he had asked for in 1976.

The rights bid that started it

Kerry Packer took control of Channel Nine in 1974 and needed programming. Cricket occupied months of the Australian summer, was cheap to produce and had a guaranteed audience.

In 1976 Packer bid A$1.5 million for three years of exclusive Australian television rights to Test cricket — a figure roughly eight times what the existing arrangement was worth. The Australian Cricket Board turned him down and renewed instead with the ABC on a three-year deal worth a fraction of the amount, in the region of $210,000.

From the board's side the decision had a logic: the ABC had carried cricket for decades, reached the whole country including regional Australia, and would not interrupt play with advertisements. From Packer's side it looked like a closed shop protecting itself at the expense of the sport's income and, more to the point, at the expense of the players.

He concluded that if the product could not be bought, the people who made it could be.

The secret signings

Recruiting began in early 1977 and was run largely through Ian Chappell, who had recently given up the Australian Test captaincy and had spent years arguing publicly that Australian cricketers were paid appallingly. The scale of the gap is the whole explanation. Test players in Australia at the time received match payments that did not amount to a living, and most held other jobs. Packer offered contracts reported at around A$25,000 for roughly twelve weeks of cricket, guaranteed, with more for senior players.

Chappell recruited Australians. Tony Greig, then England's captain, signed and then recruited internationally, which is why the operation was able to field a competitive West Indian side and a World XI rather than just an Australian exhibition.

By the time the Centenary Test was played at the MCG in March 1977 — a one-off match marking a hundred years since the first Test on the same ground, and a genuinely warm occasion — around two dozen players had already committed to a competition nobody in the crowd knew existed.

The leak

The story broke on 9 May 1977, while the Australian squad was in England. Thirteen of the seventeen touring players had already signed. The reaction was immediate and largely furious.

Greig was stripped of the England captaincy but kept his place in the side, which satisfied nobody. Australian players faced open hostility. The cricket authorities, meeting through the ICC, moved to bar contracted players from Test and county cricket, which was intended to force them to choose and expected to break the thing before it began.

1. 11976, the bid is refusedPacker offers A$1.5 million for three years of Test rights and the Australian Cricket Board renews with the ABC instead.
2. 2Early 1977, secret recruitingIan Chappell signs Australians and Tony Greig recruits internationally, on contracts worth far more than players earn from official cricket.
3. 39 May 1977, the story breaksThirty-five signings become public while the Australian side is touring England, and the authorities move to ban the players.
4. 4Late 1977, the London court caseGreig, Procter and Snow sue the Test and County Cricket Board, and the court rules the bans an unlawful restraint on players earning a living.
5. 5December 1977, the first seasonWorld Series Cricket opens at VFL Park in Melbourne, plays Supertests at non-cricket venues and struggles for crowds.
6. 628 November 1978, the SCG under lightsA floodlit one-day match at the Sydney Cricket Ground draws 44,374, and the commercial argument is settled in one night.
7. 730 May 1979, the settlementThe board announces a truce, Channel Nine gets exclusive rights, and PBL Marketing gets a ten-year agreement to market Australian cricket.

The main sequence from the rejected rights bid to the settlement. Dates are the commonly accepted ones from published accounts and contemporary reporting.

The court case that decided everything

The ban was the authorities' strongest weapon and it lasted about seven weeks in a London courtroom.

Packer funded an action brought in the names of three contracted players — Tony Greig, the South African all-rounder Mike Procter and the England fast bowler John Snow — against the Test and County Cricket Board and the ICC. The hearing opened in late September 1977.

Justice Christopher Slade found for the players. The reasoning was straightforward and had nothing to do with cricket: professional sportsmen need to earn a living, and a governing body cannot bar them from their trade simply because a rival arrangement threatens its own interests. The bans were an unreasonable restraint of trade. The authorities were left carrying the costs, which for the English board was a serious financial blow at a time when it had little spare money.

That judgment is the single most consequential event in the whole story. It meant contracted players could not be excluded from official cricket, which removed the threat that had been expected to end the competition, and it established a principle that has been relied on by athletes in disputes with governing bodies ever since.

Building a competition with no grounds

Winning in court did not give Packer anywhere to play. The state associations controlled the traditional venues, and they would not let him near them.

So World Series Cricket built its own circuit out of whatever was available. VFL Park at Waverley in Melbourne, an Australian rules stadium a long way from the city with a big car park and no cricket square. Gloucester Park in Perth, a harness racing track. Football Park in Adelaide. The Sydney Showground, next door to the SCG but on the other side of a fence that mattered enormously.

None of them had a pitch. That problem was handed to the curator John Maley, who grew cricket strips in trays under controlled conditions away from the venues and had them transported and craned into place. It was not a wholly new idea, but nobody had done it under this kind of pressure or at this scale, and it worked well enough for five-day matches between the fastest bowlers alive.

The technique outlived the competition by a long way. The MCG has used drop-in pitches since the 1990s because it has to turn a cricket ground into a football ground inside a few weeks, and Perth Stadium and Adelaide Oval work on similar principles. Australian cricket's ability to share stadiums with other codes rests on a technology invented because Packer had nowhere to play.

Who was actually in the squads

The three sides were not scratch teams. The World Series Australian XI was close to the strongest Australia could have picked, built around Ian and Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh, Doug Walters, Ross Edwards, Max Walker and a group of younger players including David Hookes. Jeff Thomson's position was complicated by an existing commercial contract and he did not appear in the first season.

The West Indian squad was the side that would go on to dominate world cricket for the next fifteen years, among them Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Gordon Greenidge and Deryck Murray. That group learned a great deal about relentless fast bowling in these two summers and took it straight into official Test cricket.

The World XI drew on England, South Africa and Pakistan. Tony Greig, Alan Knott, Derek Underwood, John Snow, Dennis Amiss and Bob Woolmer came from England. South Africa, then excluded from international cricket entirely, supplied Mike Procter, Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock, Eddie Barlow, Clive Rice and Garth Le Roux — for several of them these were the only matches of that standard they ever played. Pakistan supplied Imran Khan, Asif Iqbal, Majid Khan, Mushtaq Mohammad and Zaheer Abbas.

The absence of India is the notable gap. Indian players largely did not sign, which is one reason the official Australian summer of 1977-78 could stage a credible India series while the best players in the world were at Waverley.

The money, in 1977 dollars

The contract figure that did the recruiting was around A$25,000 for about twelve weeks. To understand why that broke the game open, it has to be set against what official cricket paid.

Australian Test cricketers of the mid-1970s received match payments that would not support a household across a year. Most had jobs — schoolteaching, insurance, selling sporting goods — and took unpaid or grudgingly granted leave to tour. A player at the peak of an international career could still be worse off financially than a colleague of the same age who had never played first-class cricket. In England the position was similar until the Cornhill sponsorship lifted a Test fee from around £210 a match to about £1,000, a change that was itself a direct response to the Packer signings.

Once players had been shown what the game could pay, the number never went back down. That, rather than any of the presentation changes, is the reform that mattered most, and it runs through to the collectively bargained revenue-share arrangements that govern Australian cricket pay today.

Season one, 1977-78

World Series Cricket opened on 2 December 1977 at VFL Park with a Supertest between the Australian and West Indian sides.

The format was two-part: five-day Supertests, which could not be called Tests, and a one-day International Cup. Six Supertests were played in Australia that season, three against the West Indians and three against a World XI. The cricket was hard. The West Indian pace attack of the period was the most frightening in the game's history and it was bowling at Australians on unfamiliar drop-in surfaces with no restrictions worth mentioning on short-pitched bowling.

Crowds were poor. VFL Park held a great deal more than turned up, the venues were awkward to reach, and the official game was running a genuinely popular India series at the same time under Bob Simpson, who had come out of retirement at 41 to captain a side of players who had not signed. That summer produced two Australian teams, neither complete, and the Australia Test captains list carries both.

The Hookes jaw and the arrival of the helmet

On 16 December 1977 the West Indian fast bowler Andy Roberts hit the young South Australian David Hookes in the face with a bouncer and broke his jaw.

The incident did two things. It ended any suggestion that the matches were exhibitions, because nobody bowls like that in an exhibition. And it accelerated the adoption of protective headgear. The England batter Dennis Amiss began wearing a modified motorcycle helmet, which looked absurd and was widely mocked, and within a few years a purpose-built cricket helmet was standard equipment at every level of the game in Australia, including junior cricket.

Helmets are now compulsory in much of Australian club and representative cricket. The line from a broken jaw at Football Park to a mandatory piece of kit in under-13s is short and direct.

• 1977-78 in Australia37.5%
• 1978-79 in Australia31.3%
• 1979 in the West Indies31.3%

Sixteen five-day Supertests were staged in total across the competition's life. These matches are not recognised as Tests and the statistics from them do not appear in official career records.

Show the numbers

Supertests played, by season

Item	Value
1977-78 in Australia	6
1978-79 in Australia	5
1979 in the West Indies	5

Season two, and the night that settled it

The second season changed the operation's position completely, because Packer got a real ground.

New South Wales premier Neville Wran backed the case for World Series Cricket to use the Sydney Cricket Ground, and the state government funded the installation of floodlights there. Whatever the politics of that decision, it gave the competition a proper venue in a major city with lights.

On 28 November 1978 a floodlit one-day match was played at the SCG between the World Series Australian and West Indian sides. A crowd of 44,374 came — close to capacity, and more than the competition had drawn in whole weeks the previous summer.

That was the end of the argument. Not the legal argument, which was already settled, and not the commercial one about who owned the rights, but the deeper question of whether the public wanted what Packer was selling. They plainly did. Cricket administrators around the world watched an Australian crowd fill a Test ground on a Tuesday night in November, and every one of them understood what it meant.

The look and sound of it

The presentation innovations were driven by television and by floodlights, not by any wish to offend traditionalists, though they did that too.

A red ball is close to invisible under lights on colour television, so the one-day matches used a white one. White clothing against a white ball is worse, so the sides wore colours — gold for Australia, pink and then maroon for the West Indians, blue for the World XI. A white sightscreen behind a white ball is useless, so the sightscreens were painted black. Fielding restrictions were drawn as circles on the outfield to stop captains pushing everyone to the boundary.

The coverage changed just as much. Nine put cameras at both ends, so viewers stopped watching half the overs from behind the bowler and half from square. Stump microphones went in. Slow-motion replays were used properly. The advertising campaign was built around a jingle, "C'mon Aussie C'mon", that became a hit record in its own right and is still recognised by Australians who were not born when it was written.

Every element of that list is now simply what cricket looks like, including at the Big Bash and in the format the BBL uses.

The Cavaliers and the country tour

The second season also fielded a secondary side, the Cavaliers, captained by the South African Eddie Barlow and containing retired names like Rohan Kanhai alongside young players including Kepler Wessels.

The Cavaliers travelled roughly 20,000 kilometres through regional Australia, from Cairns in far north Queensland down to Devonport in Tasmania, playing in country centres that had never seen international cricketers. It was a deliberate attempt to build support outside the capital cities and to make the operation look like something other than a television project. It also gave a generation of country cricket clubs a story they still tell.

The logistics were considerable for a competition that was simultaneously fighting a public relations war and losing money. Grounds in regional Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania had no facilities for a touring side of that standard, pitches were whatever the local club had prepared, and the schedule was built around road travel across enormous distances. It was closer to a nineteenth-century Australian tour than to anything the official game was doing, which was probably part of the appeal.

The West Indies tour of 1979

Between the second Australian season and the settlement, World Series Cricket took a full programme to the Caribbean: five Supertests and twelve one-day matches, finishing on 10 April 1979. The tour drew large crowds, which mattered, because it demonstrated that the competition could operate outside Australia and was not simply a domestic dispute with a television station attached.

What it cost the official game

The damage to the establishment side was financial before it was anything else. Official Test cricket in Australia in 1977-78 and 1978-79 was being played by depleted sides, and the public noticed. Crowds fell, membership renewals fell, and the state associations that depended on gate receipts and on their share of international revenue found themselves running deficits they had no reserves to absorb.

Academic work on the period puts the losses at the New South Wales and Victorian associations at more than half a million dollars between them, which in the money of the day was severe. Those two associations are the largest in Australian cricket, run the biggest grounds and carry the largest fixed costs, so a two-season revenue collapse hit them hardest. The Sheffield Shield competition they funded went on being played to small crowds throughout, as it always had, but the international income that paid for it had stopped arriving.

That is the context for the settlement. The board did not negotiate from a position of principle preserved; it negotiated because it could not afford another summer.

The settlement, 30 May 1979

By early 1979 both sides were bleeding. World Series Cricket had spent heavily on venues, lights, contracts and marketing. The Australian Cricket Board and its state associations were in worse shape: attendances and revenue at official matches had fallen badly, and the New South Wales and Victorian associations between them had run up losses reported at more than half a million dollars, which was a great deal of money for cricket in 1979.

Packer opened negotiations in March. On 30 May 1979 the board chairman Bob Parish announced the truce.

The terms gave Packer what he had bid for in 1976 and considerably more. Channel Nine received exclusive Australian television rights to cricket. PBL Marketing, a company in the Packer group, received a ten-year agreement to market and promote Australian cricket, which meant a private company would control the commercial presentation of the national summer sport for a decade.

Date	Event
1976	Packer bids A$1.5 million for three years of Test rights and is refused
Early 1977	Secret signings run through Ian Chappell and Tony Greig
March 1977	Centenary Test at the MCG, with about two dozen players already contracted
9 May 1977	The signings become public while Australia are touring England
Late 1977	The London court case runs about seven weeks and is decided for the players
2 December 1977	First World Series Cricket match, VFL Park, Melbourne
16 December 1977	Andy Roberts breaks David Hookes's jaw
28 November 1978	First floodlit match at the Sydney Cricket Ground, crowd 44,374
10 April 1979	The West Indies tour ends
30 May 1979	The settlement is announced and the competition is wound up
1979-80	Contracted players return, and a triangular one-day series is introduced

The international reaction was poor. The English board and the ICC had funded the legal fight and lost heavily doing it, and they regarded the Australian settlement as a private deal that left them with the bill. That resentment lasted years.

What happened to the players

Contracted players returned to official cricket for the 1979-80 Australian season. England and the West Indies both toured, and a triangular one-day series was introduced, which is where the summer's now-familiar shape of Tests interleaved with a limited-overs competition comes from.

The reintegration was not clean. Players who had stayed with the official game through two seasons — some of whom had played Test cricket only because the better players were unavailable — were dropped when the contracted men came back, and a number never played for Australia again. The dressing room was divided for years afterwards, and the captaincy problems of the early 1980s ran directly out of it, as the history of Australian cricket sets out.

The statistical cost was permanent. None of the Supertest or World Series one-day matches count. Runs, wickets and catches from what many participants regarded as the hardest cricket of their lives simply do not appear on their records, which understates a whole cohort of Australian and West Indian careers at their peak.

• 35Players signed at launch
• 18Australians among them
• 16Supertests played
• 44374SCG crowd, 28 November 1978

Signings are the figure at the point the story broke in May 1977 and grew afterwards. Supertests are the total across both Australian seasons and the West Indies tour. The attendance is the reported crowd for the first floodlit match at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

What it changed permanently

Pay is the first thing. Australian cricketers went from being effectively part-time to being professionals, and the pay structure of Australian cricket has been negotiated on that basis ever since, including through the revenue-share model that governs cricket in Australia today.

Scheduling is the second. Broadcasters, not administrators, now shape the calendar. That is why the Boxing Day Test is fixed, why day-night Tests exist, and why the Big Bash occupies the school holidays.

Presentation is the third, and it is total. Everything about how cricket looks and sounds on Australian television — the camera positions, the stump microphones, the graphics, the coloured kit — descends from what Nine built in 1977.

The fourth is the governance principle established in court: a governing body cannot bar a player from earning a living merely to protect its own position. That has been tested repeatedly since, in cricket and well outside it.

The line to the Big Bash and the IPL

The Big Bash League is World Series Cricket's clearest descendant. City-based teams rather than states, matches scheduled around a broadcast slot, coloured clothing, a white ball, floodlights, families rather than members as the target audience, and a competition designed backwards from the television product. Every one of those choices was tested in Australia between 1977 and 1979.

The Indian Premier League took the same model and added money on a scale Packer never had, and every franchise league since has copied the template. The Sheffield Shield survives alongside it as the older structure, largely unwatched but still the pipeline that produces Test players — which is roughly the arrangement the 1979 settlement created and nobody has seriously changed since.

How to read the whole thing

There are two standard accounts of World Series Cricket and both are partly right.

One says Packer wrecked the game for a television schedule, split the Australian side, devalued two years of Test cricket and extracted a decade of marketing control from an organisation he had helped bankrupt. All of that is accurate.

The other says cricket was run by amateurs for their own convenience, that the men who filled the grounds were paid nothing, that the presentation was decades out of date, and that no amount of polite negotiation was ever going to change it. That is accurate too.

What is not in dispute is the scale of the change. Two Australian summers rewrote how the sport is played, paid for, watched and sold everywhere it is played. For the surrounding context, the baggy green cap history covers the tradition Australian cricket rebuilt afterwards, how to watch cricket in Australia covers where the broadcast rights sit now, and the Australia hub links the rest of the section. The players index has the careers.