Looking through the tributes to Kerry Packer I haven’t yet come across a breath of criticism of the great man. Not that there should be of course, for in a couple of years around 1978-79 he carried through more reforms of the game than had been achieved in the previous 50.
Even the Daily Telegraph could only come up with;
“His innovations, such as one-day games, floodlighting, and players wearing coloured “pyjamas”, were shunned by the staid cricketing hierarchy. But now, more than 25 years later, they have become standard features of the modern game.”
But back in 1978 all the stops were pulled out to stymie his World Series Cricket operations: the MCC frantically organising extra tours to Australia, pressure was put on players like Jeff Thomson and Alvin Kallicharan to defect, and players who signed up for him, such as Dennis Amiss, were shunned in their county dressing rooms. There were even suggestions that he had plans to take cricket to the USA where a radical re-write of the rules would prevent batsmen not playing at more than 3 balls in succession.
But all of this has been forgotten, where even the Daily Telegraph see him as a much-needed reformer. And this in the end is a measure of the man’s success: he saw that the game needed innovation and the best players needed to be properly rewarded for their efforts far before anyone else. And now everyone just agrees with him.
