Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

depleted Test team to play India. Wood scored 100 not out against Queensland and 67 not out against South Australia. Charlesworth came close to matching them in the next match. His 95 in a victory over the touring Indians in December was the closest he’d come so far to a first-class century. Thirty-two years later he still deplored the uncharacteristic way he’d fallen short, caught at backward square leg trying to sweep off-spinner Prasanna. If his second- innings 67 suggested a man in form, the next two matches told a different story: seventeen in an innings defeat of South Australia in Adelaide, where Wood made 109 and Geoff Marsh 58, batting at number six on debut; eight and nine in a 205-run victory over Victoria at the WACA ground, with Wood scoring 73 in the first innings, Serjeant 62 in the second and Hughes 61 and 43. Run out in both the semi-final (24) and final (33) in early 1977, Charlesworth was member of a winning Gillette Cup side, thanks not least to the bowling of Wayne Clark, Sam Gannon and Terry Alderman in both matches and 108 not out fromWood in the final. But as Western Australia moved towards its fifth Sheffield Shield in the decade, renewed good form made Ric an important member of the team, after Wood had been selected for Australia in the Third Test against India at the end of January. Ric made 95 (again) and 78 in a draw with Queensland at the ‘Gabba, while his new opening partner, Geoff Marsh, scored 34 and 79. His 36 and 18 in a five-wicket win over New South Wales in Sydney was overshadowed by captain John Inverarity’s 125. But he finished the season in style, with his first-innings 71 the team’s top score – ‘one of the best innings I played,’ he recalled in 2009 – in its 137-run defeat of Victoria at the MCG, helping him to a season’s average, in Shield matches, of 36.00. Important he may have become in the state’s depleted cricket resources, but in early 1978 there were even more competing interests in his crowded life. In January 1978 he had married Frances Osborne from Bunbury, further south down the west coast from Perth. And, as the cricket season ended he was about to fly to Buenos Aires for another hockey World Cup tournament, in which Australia eventually won the bronze medal, behind the Netherlands (silver) and Pakistan (gold). * * * * * 38 1976-1981