World Series Cricket: the breakaway that changed the game.

The signings, May 1977

The ICC's history page says that in 1977 Kerry Packer signed many leading players for World Series Cricket, a privately run competition outside official international cricket, and that it also hired some South African players who were then barred from international cricket.

The historian Martin Williamson, writing for ESPNcricinfo on 10 October 2006, says the signings became public on 9 May 1977, as Australia prepared for an Ashes tour of England, and that 13 of the 17 touring players had signed. Williamson says Packer acted after the Australian Cricket Board turned down his Channel Nine network's bids for television rights in favour of its relationship with the ABC.

The ban and the court case

Williamson says the ICC ruled in July 1977 that Packer's matches were not first-class, and that anyone who played in them would be barred from first-class and Test cricket. The ICC's own history records that World Series Cricket dominated its business in 1978.

Three players, Tony Greig, John Snow and Mike Procter, backed by Packer's company, challenged the bans in the High Court in London. Williamson says the hearing began on 26 September 1977 and lasted seven weeks. Mr Justice Slade found for the players, holding the bans to be an unreasonable restraint of trade. The case is reported as Greig v Insole [1978] 1 WLR 302, a Chancery Division judgment, as the Edge Hill University Centre for Sports Law Research records.

The day of the judgment is given two ways. ESPNcricinfo prints 26 November 1977; other reports, including Stabroek News in a search summary, give 25 November 1977. We could not check the law report itself for the day.

World Series Cricket in play

Williamson's account gives these markers:

• 2 December 1977: the first official "Supertest", Australia against West Indies, began at VFL Park in Melbourne.
• Drop-in pitches: so it could play at stadiums not built for cricket, World Series Cricket used pitches grown in greenhouses by the groundsman John Maley and moved into place.
• 28 November 1978: a floodlit match at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the first under lights at a traditional cricket venue.
• Injuries and helmets: Williamson says the broken jaw suffered by David Hookes in World Series Cricket sped up the arrival of helmets. Sports Gazette (29 November 2024) places that injury, from a ball by Andy Roberts, at the Sydney Showground in 1977, and says Dennis Amiss wore a helmet in World Series Cricket that year; a Wikipedia summary puts his regular use of a helmet in 1978 instead. That story is on the helmet.

The truce, 30 May 1979

Williamson says a truce with the Australian Cricket Board was announced on 30 May 1979. It gave Channel Nine the rights to broadcast Australian cricket and gave Packer's company a ten-year agreement to promote and market the game. The ICC's history says World Series Cricket ended two years after it began.

What it left behind

The ICC names coloured kit and night matches among World Series Cricket's lasting effects. Some of the changes can be dated from the sources:

The one-day game that grew alongside these changes is on one-day and T20 cricket, and the South African players' situation in this period on South Africa: isolation and return.