We seem to play India a lot these days, and we sulk about the suits, and the dollar chased, and roads, and rankings. Never mind, it’ll be some kid’s nostalgia one day.
Through the 1980s, Australia played the West Indies with a regularity that saw the Calypso team in the country for at least a day in nine calendar years out of the ten.
The decade was just a bub and Australia was already accustomed to being bossed by the Windies. The public felt it too, and didn’t half mind. We wanted our guys to win for sure, but we were terrified with pleasure to be belted by the guests.
The administrators, of course, engineered it and loved it.
Australia didn’t have a bad line-up. They even had some greats in Greg Chappell and Dennis Lillee, but it was no era of tumbling records. Nor strike rates, though they were coming into fashion.
Against this opposition, just being at the crease was pretty exciting. Never mind the run rate, how’s the wicket rate going? There were times when it felt like Australia went about three per over on both counts.
Averages, reputations, stumps, they were all at risk, although nothing more so than helmets. Strapless was favoured by a few, despite that style being better left to the partners at red-carpet functions. More than one Australian batsman in this period looked in relief as a dislodged helmet missed the bails by the thickness of a coat of arms.
Bruce Laird was one whom fortune didn’t favour, out hit-wicket on one occasion when batsmen didn’t need novel ways to get out.
In 1981-82, a season where Australia played 14 one day internationals, the second was at the SCG on 24 November. For the West Indies, the bowling attack Holding, Roberts, Marshall, and Garner. The fifth bowler was Colin Croft. Gawd almighty.
They were defending 236, a score that was beyond most chasing teams back then.
The start of the innings was typically brutal, with Rick Darling and Greg Chappell – on the brink of a form trough that would have ended the careers of the mortals in the team – there and gone with eight runs on the board.
Not that I saw that part of it, as the TV news was the most important and respected program on the box. After the eternal hour of National Nine News and a current affairs show that wasn’t A Current Affair (but was probably appalling anyway), my dad would salt the wound by insisting on watching the ABC news at 7pm.
By the time the cricket came back on, I felt like there’d be some other game underway. Or worse, the same game completed.
When I was reunited with the broadcast, Allan Border was chipping away and the score reached 90 before he was run out. This left Laird, he of the previously mentioned helmet fail, a character so nuggety that you figured he had to have the nickname ‘Nugget’ – it was actually ‘Stumpy’, which felt about right too.
His Test centuries you could count on one hand with a remainder of five and now he was there with Kim Hughes, with a mountain in front of them. If that mountain were Everest, Australia could be expected to make Base Camp, about 143 relatively speaking.
And yet something beautiful happened between the underdog and the prodigy. The runs came and the wickets didn’t. Stumpy passed his century to the adulation of that trickle of confused spectators who used to race to the middle, only to realise that they had no business there and weren’t entirely sure what they aimed to do.
The pair put on 147 and hit the winning runs with a monstrous 12 balls to spare, Laird on 117 and Hughes 62.
I knew we weren’t the best, but we’d beaten the best, and I was alive.
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