Moments that changed cricket forever: Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket

The second season started with a bang on the 28th of November, 1978 at the SCG – it was a match between the Australian and West Indian teams.

World Series Cricket

This was the first time cricket was played under lights on a traditional cricket ground and 45,000 fans turned up to see the spectacle. The ACB should have taken this as a premonition; instead, they put a greenhorn captain in the form of Graham Yallop in charge of the Australian national side to face England in the upcoming Ashes.

The result was a humbling defeat in Brisbane, the first of five, in what turned out to be a long home summer for the Australians.

The England side was more experienced and professional, and unfortunately for the ACB, very boring. Their way of establishing ascendancy was through playing slow cricket and putting their opposition through the grind.

This was in direct contrast to the more glitzy, marketing-savvy grindhouse experience of World Series Cricket. Attendances at the stadia fell and even the media deserted the ACB as it waited for the Australian side to return to full-strength.

The WSC, on the other hand, continued its merry juggernaut of night-time one day matches which pulled in crowds into the stadia as well as on television. Unlike the ACB, the WSC targeted women and children, and this segmentation worked wonders for them. Not to mention, the high standards of cricket helped a lot.

The SuperTest final between Australia and West Indies at the SCG, which was also the last WSC match on Australian soil, drew in a crowd of 40,000 over three days. At the same time, the ACB could hardly managed a cumulative crowd count of 20,000 over five days for the Ashes and the Pakistan summer after that. Eight Tests in a summer served no one any good – the players were tired and the board out of money.

The WSC then headed for the Caribbean and what followed was one of the best series of all time, even though it was unofficial. The series helped the West Indies Cricket Board to come back into financial solvency and added to WSC’s coffers too.

Back home, the ACB was struggling. The prolonged battle with Packer had exhausted all its resources – it seemed as if he had a bottomless pit full of Australian dollars. Truth be told, Packer himself was under the cosh – the losses of the first season had not yet been fully recovered.

So it must have come as a relief to both parties when, after several rounds of meetings, a truce was finally reached on 30th May, 1979.