Australia’s cricketers lost to Zimbabwe for the first time in more than 30 years over night. Mercury staff member RICK ALLEN was there all those years ago.
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We were in Nottingham for Australia’s opening game of the World Cup – June 9, 1983.
I was covering the match for the now defunct Sydney Sun newspaper. My rather appealing job as chief cricket writer was to cover the World Cup, and then hang around for a week until Wimbledon started and cover the tennis too.
This would save them the cost of flying the tennis writer overseas as well, a bit like newspapers today.
It was a great job, but our tennis writer at the time – John Brady, who went on to become the NSW Rugby League media manager for the best part of 20 years – saw things rather differently.
But back to the cricket.
Australia wasn’t exactly in a golden era but there was no doubting the quality of the players it had ... Lillee, Thomson, Marsh, Border, Hughes, Hogg, Hookes and so on.
Zimbabwe? Well, Duncan Fletcher (recently dumped as England manager) played and top scored , and the others ... let’s just say you’d need to be a serious cricket fan to remember, but they included names such as Pycroft, Butchart and Curran.
Don’t remember? Didn’t think so.
The big thing then was that limited over cricket, certainly for Australia, was in its infancy.
Australia’s tactic was to approach it pretty much like any first class game. Run in, bowl hard and fast, try to intimidate.
Spinners? No way, not back then. They were too easy to hit.
How the game has changed. These days spinners not only play every time, but occasionally even open the bowling.
So Australia’s four-prong pace battery of Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson, Rodney Hogg and Geoff Lawson came ripping in and bowled fast. Very fast.
And a lot of balls, as is the Australian way, went flying past the batsmen’s nose.
The trouble was, with Zimbabwe’s batsmen looking to score, the balls were flying everywhere. Occasionally off the middle, often off the edges, but either way the balls were flying to the fence.
Despite the healthy run rate (by 1983 standards anyway), Australia didn’t change tactics. It wasn’t in our team’s DNA. Australia played to take wickets, not contain runs.
In the end, Zimbabwe totalled a formidable 239 from their 60 overs.
Ironically, Australia’s “fifth bowler”, part-timers Allan Border and Graham Yallop, bowled more than their allotted 12 overs. In fact, they bowled 14 between them and were easily the most economical, going for 39 runs, and claiming three wickets.
By today’s standard a total of 239 from 60 overs would be a walk in the park, but back then it was a sizeable chase.
Remember there were no one day specialists. This was pretty much the Australian Test team, minus a spinner.
When Zimbabwe bowled the difference in pace compared to the Australian quartet was extraordinary. Little pop-gun type stuff compared to Australia’s missiles.
But they bowled stump to stump, nothing short, with sensible fields. Australia’s batsmen were given no pace to work with, and had to hit the balls over the top.
In the end, their simple tactics proved decisive. Australia fell 13 runs short at 7-226, with Kepler Wessels top-scoring with 76, and only a brisk unbeaten 50 by Rod Marsh getting the scores close.
As a young pup, I still remember my intro for the Sun: “Australia suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in its cricket history when ...”
If ever there was a lesson that one-day cricket is a whole different ballgame, this was it.
Ironically, the final between the West Indies and India was a carbon copy of this match.
The great West Indies, with their searingly fast pace attack (Roberts, Marshall, Garner, Holding), unable to come to grips with India’s very gentle but accurate medium pacers (Kapil Dev, BS Sandhu, Madan Lal, Roger Binny) and being rolled for 140 in what is still one of the World Cup’s great upsets.
But at least I had the tennis to look forward to.
While there have been some great finals, I wasn’t as fortunate in 1983 (thank heavens, or John Brady would never have forgiven me).
Martina Navratilova smashed a young Andrea Jaeger in the women’s final 6-0 6-3, and in the men’s, New Zealander Chris Lewis defied the odds to make it through to meet John McEnroe.
The result? Like the women’s, never in doubt: McEnroe 6-2 6-2 6-2. And what’s more he didn’t even blow up.