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“There is a problem with gambling in this country, but the problem doesn’t lie with people who can afford to gamble and afford to lose.”

- John Howard, talking to 3AW’s Neil Mitchell about Kerry Packer after he reportedly lost $32 million in a night at the casino, 1.9.00

If Kerry Packer had not organised a breakaway cricket tournament, someone else would have. Not as well, and probably not for another ten or twenty years.

World Series Cricket was born in 1977 out of the conjunction of a number of remarkable features - there was the ACBC’s snubbing of Packer’s commercially-superior bid for the telecast rights, and there was the paltry conditions of employment which came with playing for Australia. (Ian Chappell actually retired from Test cricket to take up a more lucrative offer to play club cricket for North Melbourne.) The concept of a made-for-TV cricket series did not come, indeed, totally out of the blue - Arthur Mailey had predicted it in his 1958 autobiography, “10 for 66 and All That“. The subterfuge that went on behind the scenes, and behind the backs of the cricketing establishment, was quite extraordinary.

It is wrong to say that Kerry Packer personally revolutionised cricket - but his business sense, his audacity and his belief in the project gave the support to a bunch of people willing to innovate in an attempt to make the game more marketable. It is a fallacy to say that World Series Cricket brought the crowds back to the game - the attendance figures for Test cricket in Australia in 1976-77 show that they hadn’t been away - but now with increased TV rights and increased marketing and merchandising, there was more money flowing into the sport, and more to the players. More than anyone, the impoverished West Indian cricketers appreciated this.

While some of the ideas brought into WSC were intelligent - fielding circles, drop-in pitches and batting helmets, for example - some of the marketing ideas were daft. Sledging was encouraged as part of the “excitement” of the game, we were frequently subjected to the sight in TV ads of West Indian opener Roy Fredericks giving an obscene gesture to Dennis Lillee (or at least trying to, through his batting glove). Kids were encouraged to run onto the field and thump their heroes on the back whenever a batsman reached 50 (and I saw occasions where they were actually being marshalled into position by WSC ground staff, ready to leap the fence.) Press releases claimed that the WSC supertests were more exciting than the official Test matches because more fours were being struck.

Things started to click, however, in WSC’s second season, 1978-79. After NSW Government intervention, WSC was permitted to play on the Sydney Cricket Ground instead of the grungier Sydney Showground next door. And to bring the game to more mid-week spectators and to prime-time TV audiences, night cricket was developed. Floodlights strong enough to safely view the ball, which nonetheless had to be painted white; coloured uniforms for the players, even though the West Indians started off in poofy pink; umpires in brown jackets and black shirts; blackened sightscreens. And - so that Channel Nine could fit more ads in - a shortening of the over from eight balls to six.

There are a number of legendary moments of personal intervention by Packer into WSC operations. One was that he personally dictated that Ian Chappell should captain the Australian team, and not the incumbent Test skipper, brother Greg. Another was when David Hookes had his jaw broken by Andy Roberts at the Sydney Showground. Packer personally drove Hookes to St Vincent’s Hospital (Packer’s favourite, but not too far from the ground), speeding and driving on the wrong side of the road as if he was driving an ambulance himself.

Also coming to mind is the very first day-nighter at the SCG in November 1978. With thousands of people queuing outside an already seemingly-packed ground, Packer ordered the gates to be opened so that they could get in free. Crowd control? What’s that?

Another fallacy about World Series Cricket is that Kerry Packer did it just to make money. It ran at a loss, and he knew that it would. That wasn’t as important as getting revenge over an antiquated establishment. He was passionate about revolutionising cricket, although if he had won those tennis rights in 1976 he probably wouldn’t have cared less about it.

With peace between WSC and the establishment in 1979, Packer’s personal influence disappeared from view apart from the fact that the Nine Network (of which he owned TCN9 in Sydney and GTV9 in Melbourne, not the entire network) continued, to this day, to televise all international cricket played in Australia. The channels 9 were out of Packer’s ownership between 1987 and 1990 when Alan Bond made his absurdly over-priced purchase.

In recent years Nine’s committment to cricket has looked tired and indifferent. Some of the commentators have been around for almost thirty years and it shows. Game shows have taken precedence in the programming when play runs overtime. Match times have been rearranged to accomodate the 6pm news, even when there is broad daylight till 8. Just as cricket was a tiny microcosm of Kerry Packer’s business empire, so the telecast’s decline is a microcosm of the decline in PBL’s fortunes since Kerry slipped further into semi-retirement.

It’s all now in the hands of One-Tel Jamie. Oh, and next time you book a ticket to a game at the SCG, don’t forget that the profits from the booking fee go towards a Packer company (Ticketek).

If Kerry Packer hadn’t been the mogul to come along and shake up cricket, who would it have eventually been? Abdurahman Bukhatir, who created the cricketing oasis at Sharjah? Would it have been the guys at Zee, who had a made-for-TV cricket ground raring to go in Kathmandu for a while? Would it have been Mark Mascarenhas, or perhaps even private businessman Jagmohan Dalmiya? Or would we be waiting till 2006 for a Texan chap by the name of Allen Stanford to mosey along? I think I can say with a fair deal of confidence that it wouldn’t have been Rupert Murdoch.

Packer’s father, Frank, ordered that the Daily Telegraph use the headline “Stalin Dead Hooray” when the Soviet dictator died. I wouldn’t go that far in commenting on Kerry Packer’s passing, but I see him as a scoundrel whose boots-and-all business culture has no place in 21st century society, and whose good deeds were only possible because of his success with that business culture. What does that say about his legacy to cricket? Quite a bit, I reckon…….

“I’ve been to the other side son, and there’s f#$king nothing there.”

- Kerry Packer, on his heart attack in 1990, during which he was clinically dead.

Kerry Packer, who died on Monday night, was one of the most remarkable characters of modern-day Australia. His career, his lifestyle, his personality made for a capitalist’s wet dream. But he wasn’t so much a captain of industry as he was the overlord of a feudal empire.

Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer was a third generation businessman, his grandfather Robert Packer having founded the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, his father Sir Frank Packer having built the publishing business into a news and magazine empire before gaining a foothold at the birth of the Australian television industry.

Kerry expanded the media empire further (notably television Channel Nine in Sydney and Melbourne), diversified into property and casinos (an industry in which he was a highly-valued customer) and into primary industry, especially cattle.

As a businessman he was aggressive, rude, foul-mouthed, ruthless and physically terrifying, traits that he inherited from his father. As an employer, he showed extraordinary generosity and loyalty to the staff of his many ventures, and expected (and mostly received) unswerving loyalty in return. This loyalty was taken to extremes in 2000 when Packer’s personal helicopter pilot gave a kidney to save his life.

He made shitloads of money for himself, his family and his shareholders, and was comfortable in throwing smaller shitloads of it about. He was said to have lost $32 million in one night at a Las Vegas casino. After a near-fatal heart attack while playing polo in 1990, he donated over a million dollars so that every ambulance in New South Wales could have a defibrillator on board. He was exceedingly generous in his donations to hospitals and medical research - especially so in areas where he had suffered illness himself (he had polio as a child and smoked heavily as an adult). Donations to charity represented just one small area in which he was able to reduce his personal and corporate tax liabilities. For years the income and company taxes paid on the Packer empire’s multi-billion dollar assets were just a handful of percent.

Unlike his contemporary and rival, second-generation media boss Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer had little urge to expand his business interests worldwide, (although he did own Yorkshire Television at one stage). He brushed aside the stock market slump of the late 1980s, and made a killing when he sold Channel Nine to Alan Bond for a billion dollars in 1987 and bought it back three years later for about a quarter that price. Bond was just one of the many corporate cowboys of that era to end up on the wrong side of a prison cell door. Packer’s nose remained clean, even after a brush with a Royal Commission after it had been alleged that he was the mysterious organised crime boss known as “The Goanna”.

Kerry Packer died on Boxing Day with an estimated personal wealth of around seven billion dollars. The new feudal overlord is his only son, 38 year-old Jamie.

The Fourth Lord of Packer already has two remarkable badges of honour to his name. One is that he lost around 800 million dollars when Australia’s biggest dot-com, telco One.Tel, disintegrated. The other is that he is a disciple of L.Ron Hubbard.

Like so many elements of the Packer persona, Kerry inherited his love of sport from his dad. They were both partial to owning racehorses and America’s Cup yachts. Kerry took up polo on medical advice, and was one of Australia’s leading players for a time (hell, how many polo players in Australia do you think there are anyway?). Kerry loved following rugby league, especially his beloved Eastern Suburbs Roosters. He loved golf - he was good mates with Jack Nicklaus.

He loved tennis, and tried in 1976 to buy for Channel Nine the exclusive rights to telecast the Australian summer tennis circuit. He failed - Channel Seven won and still hold those rights.

If Packer had won, cricket might not be the game it is today.

Part two of this obituary will deal with Packer’s involvement with cricket from 1976 onwards.

Kerry O’Keeffe used to call him the “Oswald” in the Australian one-day team alongside (Shane) Lee and (Ian) Harvey. But Andrew “Roy” Symonds has suddenly decided to snap into gear as a wannabe born-again dreadlocked Andrew “Fred” Flintoff. Or maybe, even more ambitiously, a Jacques “Jacques” Kallis with personality. Just remember that this is the guy who is now keeping Michael Clarke out of the Test eleven.

Meanwhile, there is Mike Hussey. I regret that I didn’t get to see his century on Tuesday morning as I was on a train somewhere between Sydney and Newcastle at the time. There’s a great tradition of these almost single-handed late-order hundreds in the MCG Boxing Day Test - Kim Hughes (1981 v West Indies), Greg Matthews (1985 v India) and Doug Walters (1980 v New Zealand) are three that come to mind, though the Walters ton had at least one clearly bad umpiring decision to help it along.

While Symonds may have just pushed himself over the line to remain in the Test squad for a while, Hussey has well and truly pushed himself off the top of the chart. Hussey, of course, is a useful stand-in opening bat as well, and Phil Jaques has to be careful not to turn into the new Wayne N.Phillips.

Finally, there is the passing of Kerry Packer. I heard the news just as I was heading off to take Adara on a post-Christmas vacation at her grandmother’s. If you’re wondering why I haven’t written my obligatory Packer obit yet then it’s because I have been away on holiday and simply haven’t had the time yet.

The media coverage of Packer’s death reminds me of that when Ronald Reagan shuffled off last year, and like with the former Bedtime for Bonzo co-star, most of the tributes to Packer are so far removed from reality that it’s not even funny.

I have illustrated this blog entry with a cricket-related snapshot from our Lake Macquarie sojourn, namely a pair of ducks.

A Merry Christmas to all who celebrate the birth of Jesus today. To everyone, I wish peace, happiness and harmony for the festive season and beyond.

And to the Australian and South African teams, don’t work too hard in the MCG nets today

This issue of The Net Sessions is a bit different to my previous podcasts, indeed to most conventional podcasts, as it is a Podcast With An Appendix.

Also enclosed with this audio file is a playlist file which will take you - provided you are on-line at the time, of course - to a number of other audio files available for streaming on the net dealing with cricket over the last couple of weeks. In some podcast software such as iTunes, you may need to read the show notes or go to the website to find the playlist file. The open source program Juice - formerly known as iPodder - works fine with this edition of The Net Sessions.

This is not, I stress, part of my podcast, nor am I attempting to pinch other people’s work. Think of it in a similar way to a web page or blog entry which gives a list of links to related items elsewhere on the web. The playlist enables you to stream, not download these audio files, and I recommend that you read the terms and conditions on the copyright owners’ websites before using them in any other manner. Of course, these links may break in the future as files are archived or removed, and I have no control over this.

In some podcast software such as iTunes, you may need to read the show notes or go to the website to find the playlist file. The open source program Juice - formerly known as iPodder - works fine with this edition of The Net Sessions.

If this experiment with the appendix playlists is successful, I’ll repeat it in future editions. Please email me if you have any feedback or questions.

There’s a total of 45 minutes’ listening in eight MP3 audio files. The first five consist of the daily highlights of the First Test between Australia and South Africa at the WACA, which finished in a draw on Tuesday. These highlights from ABC radio come to you from the Cricket Australia website, www.cricket.com.au. They are followed by the post-match comments of the two captains, firstly Ricky Ponting and then Graeme Smith, again from Cricket Australia. The last audio is a ten-minute feature on the first Australian cricket team to tour England, the Aboriginal team of 1868. This runs for about ten minutes and is from SBS Radio’s English-language nightly news program, Worldview. Their website is www.sbs.com.au

Attached files: The Net Sessions 6 (MP3) and streaming playlist file.

This issue of The Net Sessions is a bit different to my previous podcasts, indeed to most conventional podcasts, as it is a Podcast With An Appendix.

Also enclosed with this audio file is a playlist file which will take you - provided you are on-line at the time, of course - to a number of other audio files available for streaming on the net dealing with cricket over the last couple of weeks.

This is not, I stress, part of my podcast, nor am I attempting to pinch other people’s work. Think of it in a similar way to a web page or blog entry which gives a list of links to related items elsewhere on the web. The playlist enables you to stream, not download these audio files, and I recommend that you read the terms and conditions on the copyright owners’ websites before using them in any other manner. Of course, these links may break in the future as files are archived or removed, and I have no control over this.

If this experiment with the appendix playlists is successful, I’ll repeat it in future editions. Please email me if you have any feedback or questions.

There’s a total of 45 minutes’ listening in eight MP3 audio files. The first five consist of the daily highlights of the First Test between Australia and South Africa at the WACA, which finished in a draw on Tuesday. These highlights from ABC radio come to you from the Cricket Australia website, www.cricket.com.au. They are followed by the post-match comments of the two captains, firstly Ricky Ponting and then Graeme Smith, again from Cricket Australia. The last audio is a ten-minute feature on the first Australian cricket team to tour England, the Aboriginal team of 1868. This runs for about ten minutes and is from SBS Radio’s English-language nightly news program, Worldview. Their website is www.sbs.com.au

Attached files: The Net Sessions 6 (Ogg Vorbis) and streaming playlist file.

Brad Hodge’s 203 against South Africa at the WACA continues to demonstrate the remarkable depth of batting reserves available to the Australian selectors.

Both he and Mike Hussey have given excellent service since being promoted to the Test arena during the West Indies series. Hussey has two centuries in four Tests, though his 23 and 58 in this game means his Test batting average has actually dropped to double figures (88.7 to be precise).

Hodge and Hussey follow in something of a tradition of leading shield players stepping up to the crease and playing well for their country, often grabbing a century in their first or second Test. Michael Clarke, Martin Love, Darren Lehmann and Tom Moody are all players who have fitted that mould. (Even Stuart Law in his one and only Test outing.)

Not everyone has clicked in that role. Simon Katich, despite two centuries and a 99 in 22 genuine Test appearances, never really seemed settled in the Australian lineup. Andrew Symonds has failed to reproduce his outstanding form from Queensland, numerous English counties, or the Australian one-day team, and I would expect him to be dropped from the team for the Boxing Day Test, which the NSP will announce later today.

I’ve always thought Andrew Symonds had potential as a “horses for courses” off-spin all-rounder. I was really hoping he’d slot in to the Mark Waugh but not to be. He may still have value on overseas tours. Expect to see his name in the Test squad when the Bangladesh touring party is announced in a couple of months.

With Langer injured, there’s a couple of ways Trev and the NSP boys can turn. They can promote Hussey to the top of the order again, or blood let another Player of the Future.

My verdict: Step up to the plate, Phil Jaques.

I also think that Michael Clarke’s three-Test stint in the Batting Form Sin Bin should come to an end and that he should take Symonds’ spot in the middle order. Clarke has done awesome things for the Blues in his two Pura Cup appearances for them: 178 and 16 not out against South Australia, 201 not out against Queensland. That’s a 2005-06 Pura Cup season batting average to date of 395.00.

If I were to choose a roughie to take Symonds’ place, it would be Cameron White. (All-rounder, local Victorian boy, future captaincy material, blah blah blah.) However, his first-class form in 2005-06 (5 matches for Victoria, 301 runs at 37.62, 10 wickets at 33.10) look very rough indeed.

Sort of like the numbers when Shane Warne was first picked for Australia.

It’s that time of year again. All the news agencies are starting to roll out their best-ofs for 2005, and I have a chuckle this morning as U3 (Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Bono) are named Time Magazine’s People of the Year.

One of the popular form of lists that is put out by the wire services is the “top 10 stories of the year”. Unfortunately, because of deadlines and stuff, most of these are issued in mid-December, thus missing any big events at the end of the year (watch and see how they deal with the 26 December 2004 tsunami).

Inspired by these lists, I’ve been doing, on-and-off, the “top 10 cricket stories” since 1996, though trying as much as possible to hold off the list until the very end of the year - you never know what a Boxing Day Test may bring! I’ll do it again this year, and will make my first announcement of the list in a podcast just before NYE.

I have the 1996 and 1997 list archived somewhere and it will take me a while to find just which CD-ROM they are on. I called for submissions for a 1998 list but didn’t get around to collating them. I did one for 2003, which I do have online. (You might like to take a look at the end-of-year reviews I put together for CricInfo365 at the end of 1999 and 2000).

Anyway, to start scratching together a list of 2005’s biggest cricket stories. Off the top of my head, here are a dozen. If you have any suggestions, please comment below. My final list will be out on NYE. (NB: I’m preparing two podcasts at the moment - one before Christmas and one at year’s end, so I might be quiet on the blogs, where I spent most of my spare time last week writing about the race riots in Sydney.)

• The Ashes
• Greg Chappell v Saurav Ganguly
• Lara’s World Record
• The Tsunami Appeal
• Warnie
• Zimbabwe
• TV rights
• The supersub and the powerplay
• West Indies contractual disputes
• The defeat of Dalmiya
• Victories for Bangladesh
• Tendulkar
• New South Wales’ stunning comeback to win the Pura Cup (sorry I just had to chuck that one in)

As usual, the New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority is giving plenty of advance notice of traffic alterations for streets leading to the SCG for the New Years’ Test. But why are they only setting up a Special Event Clearway for four days this time, as this sign that I spotted on Cleveland St, Darlington, shows?

The ICC’s appalling and arbitrary decision to designate October’s “supertest” at the SCG an official Test match has led, today, to another premature “breaking” of a world record.

When Shane Warne dismissed Ashwell Prince today in South Africa’s first innings at the WACA, it was celebrated as being his 86th Test wicket of the calendar year, one more than Dennis Lillee’s world record of 85 set in 1981. That total, however, included six wickets from that noble and proud Test nation, the ICC World XI, claimed in that stuportest.

A CricInfo Statsguru query of Warne’s Test bowling since 1 January 2005, excluding “ICC World XI” from the list of opponents, appears here. After South Africa’s first innings, in which he took 3/92, he now has 81 wickets in Test matches against other ICC full member entities. He has a maximum of three innings to go in 2005, including the Boxing Day Test at the McG, and it’s hard to imagine that he won’t break the record for real by year’s end.

Warnie has had, even by his standards, a quite astonishing year in 2005. As in the case of Brian Lara three weeks ago, a pox on the ICC for cheapening his honour, distorting history in the name of commercial expedience.