It has been said that nothing in cricket happens for the first time. In the case of night Test matches, this is almost true.
The hurried testing of a pink ball by Cricket Australia, with a view towards scheduling floodlit Tests in coming seasons, has been described as revolutionary.
Some 32 years ago the world’s finest cricketers were employed to do much the same thing, representing Australia, the West Indies and the World in five day-night “Super Tests” under the umbrella of Kerry Packer’s establishment-busting World Series Cricket.
These matches in the 1978-79 season were played over four days with a white ball and coloured clothing, starting at 1.30pm and going on until 10.30pm.
They were played at the SCG and at Melbourne’s Waverley Park, creating unique night-time drama for spectators but throwing up a number of problematic questions that the game’s administrators remain unable to answer more than three decades later.
Tony Greig, Packer’s chief playing lieutenant and captain of the World XI, argues that lessons learned then, and revisited in sporadic experiments since, make the administrative infatuation with night Test matches a mystery.
“To be perfectly honest I don’t know what is driving it (the desire for night Test cricket),” Greig told AAP.
“Normally boards are quite conservative about things like this and it seems they’ve gone the other way.
“Normally they actually get their ducks in a row quite well and it just seems like they’re trying to rush this one and it does worry me.
“They’re holding back Twenty20 cricket and they’re trying to rush Test cricket into the night.”
Chief among the problems confronted during WSC was the ball, which would not retain its whiteness for the length of time required by the Super Tests, causing manufacturers to coat it with enough lacquer to keep it swinging and seaming almost constantly.
“We had the same problems then that we have now – we just could not keep the thing white,” said Greig. “So you ended up playing with a ball that was harder and harder and a seam that was harder and harder as well, so the thing moved around all over the place, swung all over the place.
“That ball created monstrous problems for us, and those problems, to my way of thinking, still exist.”
CA’s recent experiments have led to the apparent conclusion that pink is not the colour to be used either, leaving orange – already tried in the Sheffield Shield during the 1990s – as a further option.
Ball politics was not the only obstacle to night cricket over consecutive days.
The players’ body clocks began to react negatively to the strains of successive nocturnal exertions.
As the World team’s fastidious wicketkeeper Alan Knott wrote in his biography: “It was an odd feeling to finish play for the day at 10.30pm. I would normally have a meal round midnight, unwind by watching a late-night movie and get to bed about 2am.”
Greig recalls being unable to sleep properly for much of the summer.
“By the time you got back to the hotel at the end of the day’s play, you still feel pretty highly strung and it really takes a bit of time to wind down,” he said. “We found certainly that we weren’t sleeping very well.
“The other thing is you used to have a very late meal and then try to sleep in a bit of the morning. So it was very different and it certainly takes a toll.”
On the field, the batsmen found the going tough – only four out of 16 completed innings tallied more than 300 runs – and as Greg Chappell said, they had never felt more vulnerable.
“I felt that if ever I was going to get cleaned up, it was going to be under lights,” Chappell told Gideon Haigh in The Cricket War.
“It was that much harder to see the ball, your reaction time was that much slower.
“The ball coming toward you, being rimmed by shadow, actually seemed smaller than a normal one.”
The players’ difficulties then, as now, ran headlong into the commercial imperatives of the day.
Following the first season of the WSC venture, several tweaks were made by Packer’s marketing men to make the series more distinctively different from the officially sanctioned Ashes Tests that were to be played that summer.
One of these was to take the night formula, which had been far more successful than the day matches in season one, and spread it to the longer form of the game.
This was done in part because television executives felt Test cricket’s deliberately paced rhythms were becoming out of step with public interest, a view now seemingly shared by CA chief executive James Sutherland.
His comments about how the majority of a Test takes place outside the hours that a regular working family can happily commit to it were uttered, if a little more militantly, by Nine executive Lynton Taylor at the height of the WSC split.
“I do not know that Test cricket can be saved. I hope so but I am not convinced,” Taylor said in 1978.
“People will no longer sit through five days of a match. Those days are long gone. People don’t go to watch beautiful defensive shots or the battle of tactics anymore.”
With that attitude in mind, night Super Tests were scheduled, and Greig said the players rode the bumps in the spirit of revolution.
“In WSC we were going down a very innovative line, and initially there were very few people watching and obviously Kerry was quite keen to make sure he delivered this cricket that he had into prime time,” he said.
“During WSC, everything was a bit of an experiment.
“By comparison with where we are now, I happen to think it is totally different.
“We’ve got an established night game, or two established night games, and I think the right place for Test matches, certainly until we can perfect the ball, is during the day.”
Greig’s reticence about night Test cricket is informative, given that he is known as much if not more today as a businessman and commentator than for his allround cricketing exploits of the 1970s.
“We’ve got two limited overs forms and obviously the two limited overs forms are the ones that must be played at night, because they lend themselves to that sort of thing,” he said.
“The Test match being a five-day match, particularly during the Christmas holidays, I am comfortable and I think Australians are comfortable having the traditional game played in a fashion where you have traditional values.
“I think there’s a place for that game in cricket, because we happen to have three different formats.
“The other aspect is we’re just not ready for it, we haven’t got a ball. “Whatever they say, there is no ball.”
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