Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

It was on 9 May 1977, at the start of the Ashes series in England, that the cricket world heard the astonishing news that media mogul Kerry Packer had signed some three dozen of the world’s best cricketers. A plot, months in the making, had very strong Western Australian ingredients. Local TV entertainer and manager, John ‘Strop’ Cornell, and record goal-kicking former Subiaco footballer Austin Robertson provided important links between players and the Packer organisation. Lillee and Ross Edwards were among the very first to sign in secret in January and February. Edwards, an accountant, had come out of an early retirement, as Graham McKenzie soon did. More important in inflaming local hostility to the rebel group was that the Packer organisation had signed six of the players who had so recently won the Sheffield Shield for the fourth time in six seasons. One of those six, Trevor Chappell, was a recent arrival in the West and had played only four matches for the state. But Lillee, Marsh, Laird, Langer and Mick Malone were all home-grown products. Occasional dressing-room conversations among some of those players gave Ric Charlesworth only a vague idea that something was afoot. The eventual revelation of how much had been going on didn’t upset him. ‘I was never going to get contracted to World Series Cricket. I was the wrong sort of player,’ he reflected in 2009. Instead he became a more senior member of the team in the following season, when Packer’s recruits didn’t play official first-class cricket. And he wasn’t the only beneficiary: ‘Bruce Laird, who I was opening the batting with at the time, got invited [to join WSC]’. Graeme Wood, ‘a better player than Bruce Laird’, got greater opportunities for the state and soon for Australia by staying with the traditional game. Charlesworth began the 1977/78 season with mixed form in the first four Shield matches at the WACA ground in November. Out for one in an innings victory over Tasmania, he scored 23 and 50 in a defeat of New South Wales, five and 48 in a draw against Queensland and 31 and 30 not out in the defeat of South Australia. At the same time Wood, Kim Hughes and Craig Serjeant began to make themselves indispensable to the state selectors and attractive to the national ones. Hughes, who had played his first Test on the recent England tour, made 80 against Tasmania and 85 against New South Wales. Serjeant, who had played three Tests in England, had scores of 20, 129, 140 and 63 in the three matches: he would soon be selected as Bob Simpson’s vice-captain for the 1976-1981 37