Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

three it had always enjoyed on a par with New South Wales and Victoria. But while many former players remained hostile to WSC, divisions between the two groups of current players were far from mutual hatred. Indeed for a variety of reasons virtually all the Western Australian loyalists had more sympathy for the so-called rebels than for the ACB. John Inverarity and Tony Mann, both teachers, Sam Gannon, a successful businessman and Craig Serjeant, a pharmacist, all had professional security that allowed them to play cricket for pleasure and also the sense to understand the financial pressures that made many of their friends sign with WSC. Ric Charlesworth was no exception. As a man with an assured professional future and different priorities from Lillee, Marsh and company, it was of no great concern that he received only $A50 per day playing Shield cricket. But he accepted the argument, rejected by Sir Donald Bradman, that players deserved a greater share of the revenue generated by their on-field performances: ‘I was sympathetic to it. I was a left-winger, I suppose. There was exploitation.’ His father, he recalled, sided with traditional cricket, but was more ‘even-handed’ than many: ‘he said, “well, Bradman made plenty out of the game!”’ Naturally, the return of players as accomplished as Lillee and Marsh put the places of several interim replacements in jeopardy. WSC ‘certainly put a schism through our team’, said Ric, but traditional West Australian parochialism generally united the players when they went onto the field to confront eastern states opponents. The only major exception to tolerance of Packer players’ motives, and threat to harmony on match days, was a scarcely disguised tension between Lillee and Marsh, on the one hand, and Kim Hughes on the other. Although Lillee saw it as a misunderstanding and Marsh flatly denied any problem, when interviewed by the present writer some ten years ago, Hughes insisted it was there. By 2009 all three, long since reconciled, were evidently in denial: a biographer of Hughes was unable to get interviews with any of them. 20 42 1976-1981 20 Christian Ryan, Kim Hughes and the Bad Old Days of Australian Cricket . Allen and Unwin: Sydney, 2009.