World Series Cricket: The Two Rebel Seasons

On 2 December 1977 a cricket match began at VFL Park in Melbourne between two teams that officially did not exist. The venue was a football stadium in the outer eastern suburbs. The pitch had been grown somewhere else and lowered into a hole in the middle of the ground. The players included several of the best cricketers alive, none of whom could be described on air as representing Australia or the West Indies, because the words were legally unavailable.

Two hundred kilometres of media attention away, in Brisbane, Australia were playing India in a Test match that the Australian Cricket Board still controlled, with a side stripped of almost everyone who had won the Ashes eighteen months earlier. That first weekend was the clearest picture of what the split had done: two competitions, neither of them complete, each hoping the other would run out of money first.

World Series Cricket lasted two Australian summers and one Caribbean tour. It changed how cricket is paid for, played under lights, dressed, televised and insured against injury, and almost everything modern audiences take for granted in the one-day game was either invented or normalised inside it.

The list Ian Chappell drew up

The recruitment ran through a small group and it ran fast. Kerry Packer's cricket operation was assembled with the Western Australian businessmen John Cornell and Austin Robertson, who between them managed Paul Hogan and Dennis Lillee; Ian Chappell, recently retired as Australia's captain, supplied the names worth signing; and Tony Greig, then England's captain, signed and then went recruiting on Packer's behalf in England, South Africa and the Caribbean.

By the Centenary Test at the MCG in March 1977, something like two dozen players had already committed. When the Australian squad arrived in England that May for the Ashes tour, thirteen of the seventeen had signed contracts nobody in authority knew about. The secret held until 9 May 1977, when the plan leaked to Australian journalists and the story broke mid-tour.

The reaction from the establishment was immediate and total. The International Cricket Conference and the national boards moved to ban anyone who played in the competition from Test and, in England, from county cricket. Greig was stripped of the England captaincy. What the authorities had not fully considered was whether a ban of that kind was lawful.

Seven weeks in the High Court

It was not. Greig, along with Mike Procter and John Snow, sued the Test and County Cricket Board in the High Court in London. The hearing opened on 26 September 1977 and ran for seven weeks before Mr Justice Slade.

The judgment went against the game's administrators on the central point. Professional cricketers earn a living from cricket; a blanket ban on players who had signed a private contract was an unreasonable restraint of trade, and the loyalty the boards were appealing to could not be stretched that far. The plaintiffs won, the cricket authorities paid the costs, and Packer's players kept their county contracts.

That verdict is the reason the breakaway survived its first winter. Without it, the competition would have been a short exhibition tour played by men who had thrown away their careers. With it, Packer had a legally protected pool of the best players in the world and the board had a season to fill without them. The commercial and governance consequences of that imbalance are set out separately in the account of the Kerry Packer era.

Nowhere to play, so they grew pitches in a shed

Winning in court did not get anyone a cricket ground. State associations controlled the major venues and refused them, so the first season was played at VFL Park in Melbourne, Football Park in Adelaide, the Moore Park Showground in Sydney and Gloucester Park in Perth — a trotting track.

None of those had a cricket square. The solution came from the curator John Maley, who grew turf pitches in hothouses in trays, transported them, and craned them into prepared cavities in the middle of football ovals. It worked well enough that batters and bowlers complained about the surfaces roughly as much as they complain about any others, and the technique long outlived the competition that produced it. Drop-in pitches are now standard at multi-purpose stadiums, including the MCG, where the football calendar makes growing a Test square in place impossible. The knock-on effects at particular venues are described in the guide to Australia's major cricket grounds.

December 1977, and the empty terraces

The first season was, on the field, extremely good cricket, and commercially close to a disaster.

Six Supertests were played between the WSC Australians, the WSC West Indians and a WSC World XI, alongside a one-day series. VFL Park could hold something approaching eighty thousand people. It did not need to. Crowds through December and January were thin, the venues were unfamiliar and awkward to reach, and the official Test summer had unexpectedly delivered a genuinely gripping India series that Bob Simpson's makeshift Australian side won 3–2.

The financial damage ran in both directions. The board's own accounts suffered badly — the New South Wales and Victorian associations recorded combined losses across the WSC years running past half a million dollars — while Packer was spending on a scale that only made sense as an investment in television.

Hookes's jaw and the arrival of the helmet

The cricket resolved one question quickly. If the Supertests were an exhibition, nobody told the fast bowlers.

At Sydney on 16 December 1977, David Hookes was hit by a bouncer from Andy Roberts and had his jaw broken. It was the moment the competition acquired credibility, and the moment protective headgear stopped being a joke. Dennis Amiss appeared in a modified motorcycle helmet. Within a few months the idea had crossed into official cricket: in March 1978, at Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Graham Yallop became the first batter to wear a helmet in a Test match, and was jeered for it.

Two seasons of the best fast bowlers in the world bowling at each other with money on the line did more to standardise the helmet than any regulation could have. The bowlers involved, and where they sit in the longer Australian line, are assessed in the ranking of Australia's greatest fast bowlers; the West Indian side of that equation belongs to the history of West Indies cricket.

The night of 28 November 1978

The second season fixed the attendance problem, and it did so by changing the product rather than the marketing.

Politics opened the door: the New South Wales premier Neville Wran intervened to make the Sydney Cricket Ground available, and the state government funded the installation of floodlights. On 28 November 1978 the WSC Australians played the WSC West Indians in a limited-overs match under those lights, and 44,374 people came. A near-full SCG on a Tuesday night settled the argument about whether the public wanted night cricket.

The rest of the second season followed the same instinct. Perth and Adelaide were dropped from the itinerary and the schedule concentrated on Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, where the audiences and the television market were. Recruitment had also continued throughout, and by the second summer more than fifty players were under contract, roughly double the number who had started it.

By the end of that season the comparison had reversed. The Supertest final at the SCG drew something in the order of forty thousand across three days; the sixth official Australia–England Test at the same ground managed twenty-two thousand across four. Whatever the board had won in the first summer, it had lost in the second.

The apparatus that made night cricket possible is now so ordinary that it is worth listing what was new. A white ball, because a red one is invisible under floodlights against a dark background. Black sightscreens instead of white. Coloured clothing, so that two sides in white pyjamas could be told apart on television. Field restrictions and a heavier emphasis on the one-day format, which the board had treated as a sideshow. The evolution of Australia's domestic limited-overs competition out of that period is covered in the One-Day Cup history.

The season also had a soundtrack. "C'mon Aussie C'mon" was written as a sixty-second jingle by staff at the Sydney agency Mojo to promote the second summer, name-checking Lillee, Rod Marsh and the Chappells; released as a single, it went to number one in Australia for two weeks in February 1979. Very little else in cricket's history has been advertised into popularity quite so directly.

Country towns and the Cavaliers

The part of the operation least remembered is the one that did most for the competition's legitimacy outside the cities. A second-string side, the Cavaliers, toured regional Australia over roughly twenty thousand kilometres, from Cairns in far north Queensland to Devonport in Tasmania, captained by Eddie Barlow and stocked with recently retired players including Rohan Kanhai, David Holford and Ian Redpath.

For a great many towns it was the best cricket they had ever hosted. It also served as a scouting operation: the young South African-born left-hander Kepler Wessels made runs on that tour, including an unbeaten 92 at Maitland in New South Wales, and went on to play Test cricket for Australia and later captain South Africa.

The Caribbean, then the truce

The competition's last act was a full tour of the West Indies in March and April 1979: five Supertests and a dozen one-day matches, played in front of the sort of crowds Melbourne had failed to produce. The final Supertest, at Antigua on 10 April 1979, was drawn, leaving the series level at one match each.

While the players were still in the Caribbean, the war ended without them. On 30 May 1979 the board's chairman, Bob Parish, announced a settlement. Packer's Channel Nine received exclusive television rights to Australian cricket on a ten-year agreement, and a Packer company, PBL Marketing, was given the contract to promote and market the game.

The board had capitulated on the two things it had originally refused to sell. English administrators and the ICC were furious, and the WSC players — who had no part in the negotiation — discovered that peace came with a penalty: they were left out of the 1979 World Cup squad and the subsequent tour of India, both of which went badly under Kim Hughes. Only in 1979-80, with Greg Chappell restored as captain, did Australia field a side drawn from both camps.

What survived

Almost all of it.

Introduced or normalised by WSC	Where it ended up
Floodlit cricket	Standard worldwide, and eventually day-night Test cricket
Coloured clothing and a white ball	Every limited-overs match played today
Helmets as routine equipment	Mandatory in professional cricket
Drop-in pitches	Used at multi-purpose stadiums including the MCG
Television-driven scheduling	The organising principle of the modern calendar
One-day cricket as a headline product	The "World Series Cup" name survived into the mid-1990s
Players paid as full professionals	Collective bargaining and revenue-share agreements

What did not survive was the amateur assumption underneath the old arrangement: that men who played cricket for a living should be grateful for the opportunity. Two rebel seasons ended that permanently, and the governance model built afterwards is described in the outline of how Cricket Australia is structured. The longer national story either side of the split runs through the history of Australian cricket and the rest of the cricket in Australia section, while the Ashes summers the dispute disrupted are covered in the Ashes.

Sources and method

This account rests on contemporary reporting of the 1977 signings and the 1977 High Court proceedings in London, on the published judgment's central finding on restraint of trade, on Cricket Australia's own historical material and the terms of the May 1979 settlement as announced at the time, on the National Film and Sound Archive's record of the "C'mon Aussie C'mon" campaign, and on academic work examining the financial effect of the split on Australia's state associations. Attendance and match figures are given as reported for the specific occasions named. Player totals from Supertests are not treated as first-class or Test records here, because the game's governing bodies do not recognise them as such, and no figures on this page are computed from our own datasets.