The 100th Summer: 76-77 Season Pakistan New Zealand Centenary Test by Greg Chappell
Toorak, Vic: Garry Sparke & Associates, 1977 ISBN 0959709894
I am one of those Australian men who was introduced to cricket in the 1970s. Our current crop of Australian cricketers can never in my eyes live up to my boyhood idols of Chappell, Lillee and Marsh. While I well remember my first day of watching live Test cricket at the MCG in 1981, it is the Centenary Test that first sticks in my mind as a complete match that I followed and took in via (black and white) television.
Greg Chappell has in this book written his account of that Test and the preceding series against Pakistan in Australia and New Zealand in New Zealand. It is a workmanlike description of the play, with less off-pitch description than I was hoping for.
The 76-77 season was one of re-calibration for the Australian side: the (in Chappell's opinion) premature retirement of his brother and Ian Redpath, along with Ashley Mallett and Terry Jenner calling it quits, meant that a lot of skill and experience left the team at the same time. And although Pakistan had their usual internal squabbles before the tour began, with threats of walkouts by half the team, when they did arrive on Australian soil they presented a formidable outfit with experienced players such as Mushtaq Mohammad, Majid Khan, Zaheer Abbas and Asif Iqbal, leavened with the youthful talent of Imran Khan and Javed Miandad.
The three Test series was a hard-fought one-all result, with Pakistan fighting hard and cannily on unfamiliar pitches, and Australia suffering most particularly in the bowling department after Jeff Thompson smashed his shoulder when he collided with Alan Turner in the first Test of the summer.
After the ignominy of defeat in the Third and last Test of the series in Sydney, Chappell took the team to New Zealand determined to do better. The general level of fielding and particularly catching was below standard against Pakistan, so Chappell worked his team hard in the lead up to the Tests. Max Walker came into the side to replace Thommo, but once again the bowling was the worry. Alan Hurst was in the touring party but didn't impress in the games before the Tests, so wasn't picked in the team. Gary Gilmour was in the side, even though his record in the lead up games was not much better than Hurst's, and he proved to be a weak link in what was otherwise a successful attack for this series (despite his schtick these days, Kerry O'Keeffe was a good attacking option for Chappell throughout this summer, as well as being a handy contributor with the bat).
The ups-and-downs of the extraordinary Centenary Test are well documented by Chappell - I won't go into them here as I don't think there is much in the book that isn't already well-known.
Now to the things that aren't in the book, particularly the elephant in the room..... the fifth-last paragraph of the book begins "[s]hortly before the start of play [in the Centenary Test] Dennis had called me aside in the room. I had a fair idea of what he wanted to tell me".... but no, it was not to tell Chappell he'd signed up with World Series Cricket, but to say his back injury had recurred. I'm supposing that because this book was published at the time, Chappell was reluctant to go into detail about the biggest cricket story of the decade, but there's a certain amount of irony in the fact that he spends a couple of pages earlier in the book discussing an agreement with the Australian Cricket Board around sponsorships that allowed cricketers to maximise their income-earning potential. If you pick up this book thinking you'll get any insight into the behind-the-scenes action to do with WSC, you will be disappointed.
Chappell has a reputation for being uncompromising when it comes to playing the game, but I feel that he comes across in this book as someone who understood how difficult it was to play at the highest level, and his descriptions of how a player may have got through a difficult period in a match adds much more to the fall of play than the numbers on the scorecard may suggest (the scorecards and averages are included in this book, as is a name index).
I'll sign off with a quote that shows even the greats don't always get it right. "In only their second Test together, [Ian] Davis and [Alan] Turner were showing an understanding that held out the promise of a combination which could provide a valuable contribution to Australian cricket fortunes in the future." Turner was out of the side by the end of the summer, never to return.
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