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(Part 39.) Winning starts for Aussies and Kiwis.
They may be neighbours and both former British colonies in the Southern Hemisphere, but there is a world of difference between Australia and New Zealand; on and off the field of play.
Brash and confrontational to the point of being obnoxious at times, the Aussies are nevertheless admired for their fiercely competitive nature and a desire to win—in all sport, not just cricket—which has invariably seen them excel in almost every other discipline as well.
In contrast, the two islands which comprise the much smaller nation of New Zealand are home to a sports-loving population every bit as competitive as the Australians, except that there is very little, if any, in-your-face aggressiveness.
So, with just 12 days to go to the 50th anniversary of the West Indies victory over those combative Australians in the 1975 World Cup final at Lord’s, we look at how the two teams from Down Under fared in their opening encounters of this inaugural men’s international limited-over tournament.
On the same day, 7 June, that the West Indies were brushing aside Sri Lanka by nine wickets in Manchester and hosts England were demolishing a strangely uncompetitive India side by 202 runs at Lord’s, Australia and New Zealand opened their campaigns with equally comfortable victories at Leeds and Birmingham respectively.
Let’s focus first on the performance of Ian Chappell’s Australians in the 73-run win over Pakistan, a team with the talent and potential to go all the way except that their temperament and inconsistency often conspired against them.
Scores:
Australia 278 for 7 off 60 overs (Ross Edwards 80 not out, Alan Turner 46, Greg Chappell 45; Naseer Malik 2-37, Imran Khan 2-44, Asif Masood 1-50, Asif Iqbal 1-58, Sarfraz Nawaz 1-63);
Pakistan 203 all out off 53 overs (Majid Khan 65, Asif Iqbal 53, Wasim Raja 31; Dennis Lillee 5-34, Max Walker 2-32, Jeff Thomson 1-25, Doug Walters 1-29, Ashley Mallett 1-49).
Result: Australia won by 73 runs.
Toss: Australia.
Photo: Getty Images.
As mentioned earlier in this series, even with the West Indies installed as pre-tournament favourites and enjoying strong neutral and expatriate Caribbean support, for the English, the Australians were the team they loved to hate.
And given the havoc wreaked by the fast bowling pair of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in the preceding Ashes series in Australia, and with another Ashes campaign to come right after the World Cup, local interest in this opening game was intense.
There was also a strong Pakistani presence at Headingley which, unsurprisingly, served as motivation for the Aussies to make a clear statement from the start of the competition, at the expense of Asif Iqbal’s team.
(via You Lin Magazine.)
Despite the experience of a few One-Day Internationals—their meeting with England in Melbourne in a makeshift fixture on 5 January 1971 was subsequently deemed the first official ODI—tactics in the relatively new form of the game were still a grey area.
“It was new, we didn’t know what to do,” said Gary Gilmour, the left-arm swing bowler and useful lower-order hitter, in the Fox Television documentary 1975 Cricket World Cup Story.
“Ian Chappell used to say to us that if we got through the first 15 overs with 30 runs on the board, without losing a wicket, we’ve done well. Of course, these days if you haven’t got a hundred runs on the board at 15 overs then there’s something wrong with the batting.”
Photo: Getty Images.
Choosing to bat first, openers Alan Turner and Rick McCosker displayed contrasting attitudes in an opening stand of 65. Turner’s 46 came off 54 balls before he was the first wicket to fall while McCosker seemed to have been assigned the sheet anchor role in occupying 76 deliveries for his 25.
Ian Chappell fell to Sarfraz for 28 while younger brother Greg stroked 45 before falling to Imran. But it was Ross Edwards who really took control of the innings and pushed Australia to what was considered then to be a formidable total.
Coming to the crease at 124 for four when Doug Walters departed cheaply, Edwards’ unbeaten 80 off 94 balls with six fours more than doubled his team’s total, with useful support from Max Walker and Thomson.
Edwards topscored with an unbeaten 80 in Australia’s opening match of the 1975 World Cup against Pakistan.
Set 279 for victory, Pakistan were in early trouble to the fearsome tandem of Lillee and Thomson, slipping to 27 for two as Lillee bowled Sadiq Mohammad and Thomson had Zaheer Abbas caught by Turner.
Majid Khan was as serene as always in getting to a topscore of 65 but after Mushtaq Mohammad also fell cheaply, the opener’s demise—caught behind off off-spinner Ashley Mallett—left Australia in control at 104 for four.
Asif and Wasim Raja put on 77 for the fifth wicket but the required run-rate kept going up. And when the captain was bowled by Lillee, a familiar capitulation followed with the last six wickets falling for just 24 runs.
(via Cricmash.)
Lillee’s pace and cunning was too much for the Pakistan lower-order—the experienced fast bowler finishing with the impressive figures of five for 34 his allotted 12 overs.
For Australia, the opening encounter allowed them to flex their muscles and with the Sri Lanka minnows as their next opponents, a place in the semi-finals already seemed assured before they closed out the Group B schedule with a match against the West Indies.
Across in Birmingham, New Zealand were hardly challenged by the amateurs of East Africa with their captain and premier opening batsman Glenn Turner leading the way.
(via Wisden.)
Scores: New Zealand 309 for 5 off 60 overs (Glenn Turner 171 not out, John Parker 66; Prabhu Nana 1-34, Mehmood Quraishy 1-39);
East Africa 128 for 8 off 60 overs (Frasat Ali 45, Zulfiqar Ali 30; Dayle Hadlee 3-21, Hedley Howarth 3-29, Richard Collinge 1-23).
Result: New Zealand won by 181 runs.
Toss: New Zealand.
No stranger to English conditions as a prolific scorer for reigning county champions Worcestershire, Turner was also someone Caribbean fans had seen more than enough of on the Kiwis’ historic 1972 tour of the West Indies where all five Tests were drawn.
Copyright: Getty Images.
There he compiled 672 runs at an average of 96 with two centuries and two fifties. He got to a Test-best 259 at Bourda in a tedious run-fest described by Tony Cozier in the 1972 West Indies Cricket Annual as “perhaps the worst Test match seen in the Caribbean”.
Cozier described it as a “pointless, boring five-day spectacle.”
An attractive batsman he certainly wasn’t although for Turner, substance mattered much more than style, as the East Africans found out via his unbeaten 171 off 201 balls with 16 fours and two sixes.
(via SportsCrunch.)
It stood as the highest individual score in a World Cup until Kapil Dev’s 175 rescued eventual champions India from the depths of 17 for five in a preliminary group match against Zimbabwe in 1983.
Turner put on 149 for the third wicket with John Parker, who contributed 66.
He did have a moment of good fortune early on though. Forty-one-year-old India-born left-arm orthodox spinner Prabhu Nana failed to hold on to a caught-and-bowled chance when the New Zealand captain was on 16. Nana finished with the impressive figures of one for 34 from his 12 overs.
Hadlee went wicketless against East Africa, although he conceded just 10 runs off his 12 overs.
East Africa were never going to threaten a target of 310 but they at least batted through their full 60 overs.
Seamer Dayle Hadlee and spinner Hedley Howarth took three wickets each while Dayle’s younger brother Richard, at the fledgling stage of what would become a long, record-breaking international career, conceded just ten runs from 12 accurate but wicketless overs.
With England to come next, New Zealand needed an emphatic victory to get their campaign underway and got it—even though, as usual, hardly anyone was taking any notice of them as title challengers.
Next: Competing perspectives on the World Cup experiment.
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Fazeer Mohammed is a journalist/broadcaster with almost 40 years’ experience across a range of media.
His interest in cricket, and particularly its history, started at home via his father’s small collection of autobiographies and magazines, offering perspectives and context which have informed his commentary and analysis on contemporary issues in the game.
