Kerry Packer and John Cornell choppered out to VFL Park one damp and unpromising May evening to meet Alan Aylett, head of the VFL, a former champion footballer, now a dentist (Aylett became honorary tooth-guy to the WSC players). Shortly after they turned up, the four huge light towers were lit for a VFL game between South Melbourne and Footscray. Kerry and Cornell looked out through the thin night mist at the footballers churning into mud the area where they hoped to play cricket in the coming summer and it didn’t help their mood. But the powerful lights held their own magic. Kerry, always with a schoolboy’s fascination for the new and the fresh and the untried, gazed around in awe.
‘Jesus, son,’ he said to Cornell, ‘it’s almost bright enough to play cricket’.
Not many eureka turning points, in sport or anywhere else, are so clearly defined as this moment. The two men looked at each other, instantly knowing that a flash of insight had passed between them. Perhaps at that second Kerry hadn’t grasped the full implication of what he had just said, but Cornell took it that last small step. He said, ‘Hey, that’s a good idea, Kerry. Night cricket’. Bang. Not only was major day-night cricket invented at that moment, but so was the saviour of the whole World Series Cricket enterprise.
As WSC progressed over the next two years it would be the floodlit matches that the public took to its heart. While other WSC contests languished, struggling to fit with the public’s view of what it was trying to achieve, day-night cricket, with its family oriented informality, its revolutionary white ball and its coloured ‘pyjamas’ for the players, would come to define WSC in the public imagination.
Cornell and Kerry were in a buoyant mood on their way back to central Melbourne in the chopper. The manifesto for day-night cricket was born on that flight – the two men beginning to realise the full implications of their inspiration. Night cricket made perfect sense. ‘We only play English times,’ Cornell recalls their discussion, ‘how ridiculous it is, in the heat of the day, we go out and play cricket. We don’t even start till eleven. And all around the world in hot countries we’re following these old English traditions.’
On that return trip above the night lights of Melbourne they came to the conclusion that it was ‘a ripper of an idea’ and over the following weeks they continued to hone and polish their revelation. Just for starters, night cricket would probably need a different coloured ball to the traditional dark red one. And maybe a few of the game’s rules would have to be tweaked – talk to Richie about that. And nights would only work for VFL Park – have to put up lights at other venues. The list went on.
This is an edited excerpt from Christopher Lee’s Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, published by NewSouth.
