Packer World Series created modern one-day game

Kerry Packer

LONDON, (Reuters) – Floodlights, fireworks and a  spectacular Sydney sunset heralded both a triumph for Kerry  Packer and his rebel World Series Cricket (WSC) and the birth of  the modern one-day game.
November 28, 1978, was the day the Australian media mogul  gambled and won with his audacious ploy to stage a day-night  one-day match illuminated by six freshly erected floodlight  towers at the Sydney Cricket Ground and featuring a white ball  and coloured clothing.

Kerry Packer
Kerry Packer

A boisterous crowd estimated at 50,000 packed the famous  ground to witness the WSC Australia side defeat West Indies.  Many more watched the game on television aided by a host of the  eye-catching technical innovations already introduced by  Packer’s Channel Nine.
Man-of-the-match Dennis Lillee smiled at the assembled  reporters afterwards. “When Mr Packer started WSC, the  Australian Cricket Board said: ‘We’ll let the people be the  judges’,” Lillee said. “It looks like they have.”
The great fast bowler had signed for Packer in the previous  year in the justifiable belief that he and his colleagues were  being paid a pittance for their efforts even though test cricket  was booming in Australia.
West Indies, victors over Australia in the first World Cup  final in 1975, also signed en masse as did a group of leading  England, Pakistan and South African players.
Their collective faith in the new venture, though, was  shaken when the fans failed to turn up for the so-called  five-day SuperTests in the 1977-78 season, preferring to watch  the official Australia side play India in a consistently  gripping series.

COMMERCIAL REALITIES
One-day night cricket in the second and final season  transformed the fortunes and profile of World Series Cricket,  although Packer remained first and foremost a money man. In  1979, the Australian Cricket Board sued for peace and gave him  the television rights he had sought in the first place and the  rebel circuit was dissolved.
Cold commercial realities had also been behind the decision  to launch the first official one-day competition in England on  May 1, 1963, with a match between Lancashire and Leicestershire  at Old Trafford in the new Gillette Cup.
The traditionalists shuddered and the Wisden Cricketers  Almanac could not bring itself to acknowledge the competition by  name, calling it instead the Knockout Cup.
Nobody, though, could realistically object to the injection  of new money into a domestic game in crisis as attendances  plummeted in the county championship.
The new format also appealed to the restless imagination of  England and Sussex captain Ted Dexter. Dexter realised more  quickly than most that limited-overs cricket demanded a fresh  approach and he was ruthless enough to place every fielder on  the boundary in the closing stages of the first final against  Worcestershire at Lord’s.
Sussex duly won by 14 runs before a packed house and the  leading sportswriter of the day, Peter Wilson of the Daily  Express, commented: “If there has ever been a triumphant  sporting experiment, the knockout cricket cup for the Gillette  Cup was that experiment.”
One-day cricket had come to stay but it was still seven  years before an international limited-overs match was staged and  then only because rain forced the abandonment of the third test  between Australia and England scheduled to start on Dec. 31,  1970.

PACKER LEGACY
Australian Board of Control chairman Don Bradman announced  that a one-day match of 40 eight-ball overs would be staged as  well as an extra test and a crowd of 46,006 turned up to watch a  home side victory. It escaped nobody’s attention that the  attendance exceeded the five-day aggregate for the first test in  Brisbane.
A World Cup was inevitable and it was the game’s great good  fortune that the 1975 tournament featured some of the finest  players ever and a final between eventual champions West Indies  and Australia still regarded as the best of them all.
Only 18 one-day internationals in total had been played  before the World Cup but in the following decade the one-day  game exploded in popularity.
The Indian board, in particular, embraced one-day cricket  after their team’s unexpected victory over West Indies in the  1983 final.
India and Pakistan were awarded the 1987 tournament after  promising to double the prize money and within a decade India  had become the richest and most politically powerful country in  world cricket. Television money poured in and various one-day  tournaments blossomed in the Middle East.
There was a price to pay. Test cricket became very much a  poor relation in India and the proliferation of one-day cricket  fuelled the illegal gambling industry on the subcontinent where  punters can bet on every delivery. That in turn undoubtedly  contributed to the corruption scandals which besmirched the game  in 2000 and again a decade later.
Packer, who died in 2005 at the age of 68, made a great deal  of money out of televising cricket over a quarter of a century.
His legacy, though, far exceeds his personal pecuniary  ambitions. The modern one-day game, which will be on display at  the 10th World Cup on the Indian subcontinent this month, is  essentially the version developed in the two extraordinary years  of World Series Cricket.
As Wisden’s obituary pointed out, Packer, for better or for  worse, “was the media tycoon whose intervention in cricket  created the finances, shape and tone of the modern game”.