AS you go through this column, the last of the One Day Internationals between Australia and the World XI under the Super Series banner would be under way. As I write, however, I am watching the only first of it and it is far from over. There is hardly any point in talking about the game itself right now, but let me take up the issue of official status that has been granted by the ICC to these contests. Just before the start of the encounters, Adam Gilchrist surprised me with his statement opposing the ICC decision. But to me he didn’t make much sense.
I find the ICC decision much better than what it was more than thirty years ago when the players were denied that status, and I was one of them. The argument that since we were deprived, everyone else should also suffer, is not my idea of justice. It was wrong not to grant official status to a similar series of contests more than three decades ago, and it is absolutely right not to get influenced by that decision and make the correct choice now.
In that series of yore, a full-fledged Rest of The World side had squared off against a full-strength Australian team. It was an all-star affair that was intensely contested on and off the field. There were the Chappell brothers, Keith Stackpole, Doug Walters, Ian Redpath, Rod Marsh, Dennis Lillee and Bob Massie on one side, while the Rest were led by the legendary Garry Sobers, and had names like the Pollock brothers, Rohan Kanhai, Clive Lloyd, Sunil Gavaskar, Bishen Bedi and others. I was a novice on the international scene at the time, and considered myself lucky to be there, and even luckier that I ended up playing all the five unofficial Tests.
It was a full tour lasting some three months, and featured side matches against Australian state sides as well as Tests and one-dayers. With such big names on both sides, scintillating performances were only inevitable, and they were duly delivered in good numbers. Ian Chappell was the star of the show, scoring a huge pile of runs. I think he scored a century in all but one Tests. Brother Greg was not far either.
On the bowling side, Lillee and Bedi in their diametrically contrasting styles had a lot of fun, ending up with some 25 wickets each in the series. Statistically speaking, all these were wasted efforts, for nothing showed against their career aggregates. Do you think that was fair to the players? For many of them who had starred in that series, the games were right up there among the toughest that they had played in their lives. And yet their performances counted for practically nothing just because they were unofficial games even though they had the blessings of the then cricketing establishment.
Then came my involvement with Kerry Packer games that engulfed the cricketing world in the mid-70s. Again I saw leading cricketers of the time delivering top-notch performances against fierce competitors. Statistically, it was a monumental waste of effort.
The Packer affair was, in fact, a double-edged sword. The performances were being counted for nothing, and the respective cricketing boards were being discouraged from including the players in their national sides. We all missed out on a decent amount of ‘official’ but certainly less intense cricket. I, for instance, missed two rubbers against England, a side which, alongside India, represented happy hunting opportunities for me right across the international career.
Having personally missed out on some of the key — and, may I say, proud — data in my cricketing life, I cannot support any notion that calls for doing it all over again for any reason whatsoever.
I will touch on it again probably at the end of the Super Series because there is much more to be said on this count. For the time being, let’s enjoy the games.
AS you go through this column, the last of the One Day Internationals between Australia and the World XI under the Super Series banner would be under way. As I write, however, I am watching the only first of it and it is far from over. There is hardly any point in talking about the game itself right now, but let me take up the issue of official status that has been granted by the ICC to these contests. Just before the start of the encounters, Adam Gilchrist surprised me with his statement opposing the ICC decision. But to me he didn’t make much sense.
On the bowling side, Lillee and Bedi in their diametrically contrasting styles had a lot of fun, ending up with some 25 wickets each in the series. Statistically speaking, all these were wasted efforts, for nothing showed against their career aggregates. Do you think that was fair to the players? For many of them who had starred in that series, the games were right up there among the toughest that they had played in their lives. And yet their performances counted for practically nothing just because they were unofficial games even though they had the blessings of the then cricketing establishment.
