In the aftermath of a frustrating draw in Karachi, the composure of Pat Cummins’ team reflected a resilient attitude. It also underlined how far Australian cricket has come since one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the side.
Thirty-four years ago, also in Karachi, an Australian team voted to fly home early in the face of what they and the team’s management saw as a “conspiracy” of dusty pitches and home umpires to ensure they could not win. Oppressive heat and humidity did not help matters: this was a tour Imran Khan declined to play in on the basis it was the wrong time of the year.
From the moment the off spinner Tim May was denied three lbw appeals against Javed Miandad on day one of the series - the first two marginal, the third rather less so - the Australians felt they had been set up to fail. By the third day, after Javed had made 211 and as the tourists’ first innings collapsed, the game was almost totally overshadowed by the Australian reaction.
Extraordinarily their response was led by the team manager and Australian Cricket Board director Colin Egar, who fronted the PCB secretary Arif Abbasi, and also Tahir Memon, head of Wills, the principle sponsor of the series. Then, Egar went to the umpires’ room to berate the officials Mahboob Shah and Khizer Hayat.
Next, Egar and the coach Bob Simpson called a teatime press conference for the Australian travelling media to make their feelings known. As Egar recalled in 2007: “I called them cheats. I put it right to their board and their chief sponsor, Wills. Well, they weren’t gonna do anything, so I went to the umpires’ room and lined ’em up. Then I spoke to our press and said: ‘If you wanna know what’s going on, I’ll tell ya.’”
At the end of the match, lost by an innings early on the fifth day, Border joined the fracas. “This was a conspiracy from the word go. We are not going to be allowed to win,” he said. “The feeling that we were never in the game right from the word go is what really irks the players. We weren’t even given a chance and that is most depressing.”
The following day at the team hotel, Egar, Simpson and Border permitted a vote among the players about whether the tour should continue. All but two players, a young Tony Dodemaide and Jamie Siddons, voted to leave immediately. That they did not was largely a product of a few cooler heads, including that of the ACB chairman Malcolm Gray, back home in Australia.
“All the guys were really upset,” Dodemaide, now a national selector, tells The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. “By the end of the Test there was definitely a vote taken that a stand would be taken. I certainly didn’t vote for it, and I can recall speaking to Simmo afterwards, and you don’t want to be seen as a pariah with the rest of your teammates.” Advertisement
“I said to Simmo, ‘I can see where things need to change, but I don’t want to throw away the tour.’ We were young players as well and just wanted to play. More so on reflection you think, wow, that was a really significant moment.”
As he went on, Dodemaide would captain Victoria, become the chief executive of two state associations, and now join the selection panel. From that vantage point, he appreciates that they were never going home.
”With the advent of those extra experiences, I certainly look back now ... that the team sits around in the captain’s room and takes a vote to go home - there was no way it was going to happen,” he says. “I think in a way everyone knew that at the time, but wanted to make a statement. We genuinely felt that it wasn’t in the spirit of the way cricket should be played.”
Gray, who had impressed upon the touring party the need for a calm approach after a widely publicised fight between the England captain Mike Gatting and the umpire Shakoor Rana on the previous Pakistan tour, sought counsel beyond that of Egar and Simpson. He went to Mike Coward, then the secretary of the Australian Cricket Media Association, for an independent reading of events.
“There certainly was contact - I think he sensed from our reports that the divisions were pretty strong, and we were polarised, and confidentially he sought another view,” Coward says. “The belligerence and arrogance was breathtaking. It was a diplomatic disaster.
”It wasn’t so much that the umpiring was good, bad or indifferent. It was more that the Australians completely lost it, a collective loss of responsibility, care, and an absolute insult to Dodemaide and [Bruce] Reid, who were absolutely outstanding. Across the 1980, 1982 and 1988 tours, 45 catches were dropped in nine Tests. Some would argue about the light or catching so close, but I would say it had a hell of a lot more to do with state of mind in Pakistan.”
As Gray said in Inside Story: “I’d gotten to know Mike and respected him, so I got hold of him and asked if he could take off his journalist’s hat for a bit and talk to me, and tell me what is going on. And he told, basically the opposite of what I was hearing back through Dave [Richards, ACB CEO] from Egar and Simpson - how they’d gone down into the room and fronted the umpires, and what a disgrace it was.”
Mahboob Shah, the umpire responsible for most of the decisions that the Australians took exception to, spoke to Coward for his groundbreaking book Cricket Beyond The Bazaar: “I am sure there is a general view that with a coloured umpire it is often a question of integrity; with a white-skinned man the same mistake is called human error. I’ve never received anything like this criticism on the cricket field or otherwise. I thought I was good friends with Mr Egar until the first Test match started.”
Events were deemed so dramatic that a 60 Minutes crew, with reporter Mike Munro, was sent to Pakistan to follow up the story. Told he would get no access to the team, Munro interrupted a press conference with the touring media for grabs from Border and Simpson, while also confronting Egar during training sessions. Meanwhile, Javed gave the crew his view of events.
“Always been poor losers, the Australians,” he said, smiling. “I know in the past, they’ve always been bad losers. I was very upset and sad the way they behaved in the first Test match.”
Gradually, the Australian response de-escalated. A team statement was released, with the tour continuing initially “under protest”, before that position was also retracted. The PCB re-appointed Shah for the second Test. In Faisalabad and Lahore, Border’s men performed far better, and got within a couple of wickets of squaring the series on its final day. Dodemaide sees it as a moment in time that ultimately helped the team’s growth.
“Steve Waugh’s reflection on that was it really steeled him for a lot of the back end of his career,” he says. “Particularly going back to Asia and the sort of mindset and approach you needed to have to win over there. It certainly laid some foundations for a pretty resilient team.”
