Western Suburbs People: A Western Suburbs District Cricket Club Story
Western Suburbs District Cricket Club Sydney | December 24, 2024
The following article is an extract from our 2006 book “Cricket in Black and White: 110 Not Out: The history of the Western Suburbs District Cricket Club”.
The game from which Bob Simpson retired in 1978-79 had changed profoundly in the quarter-century since his career began. In the aftermath of World Series Cricket, it became possible to earn a healthy living from playing cricket in Australia; but a greatly expanded programme of international matches was demanded by the television stations whose money now fuelled the professional game. In three seasons during the 1960s there had been no Test cricket played at all in Australia, and in 1964-65 only a single Test against Pakistan was scheduled; in 1979- 80 Australia played six home Tests against two touring teams, as well as eight games in the triangular tournament of one-day internationals. Even the domestic representative season had grown; the introduction of Tasmania extended the Sheffield Shield season, the interstate one-day competition had grown from its initial knockout format, and there were more regular junior representative matches - Second XI, Colts and Under 19 games.
All of this had an inevitable impact upon Grade cricket. In 1967-68, it had been possible for Bob Simpson to captain Australia and New South Wales throughout a ful representative season and still fit in 15 innings for Western Suburbs. In 1979-80, in contrast, Peter Toohey batted only four times for his club. Grade clubs could no longer expect their representative players to be available except on rare occasions, usually early in the season.
This changed, not only the composition of Grade teams, but the economy of club cricket. As late as 1973, Western Suburbs' largest single source of income was gate money. Members of the public were still prepared to pay to watch Grade matches on a Saturday afternoon because it was an opportunity to watch famous cricketers at close quarters - a game between Western Suburbs and St George might feature more than half of the Sheffield Shield team, as well as some former State players and some future stars. But by 1980, gate receipts had dwindled away to the point where the club ceased collecting money at all. The players who would once have attracted crowds to Pratten Park were now playing in televised limited-overs matches in coloured clothing.
This made Wests - like almost every other Grade club - dependent upon grants from the New South Wales Cricket Association, and sponsorship. The amounts of money that now flowed into the first-class game equipped the Association to make generous grants, which clubs required in order to survive. From time to time, the grants were tied to conditions - for example, that the money be spent to employ a coach - and they were never intended to cover all the costs of running a Grade club, so finding sponsors became vital.
Western Suburbs was fortunate to find the Wests Leagues Club at Ashfield as an early, keen and lasting sponsor. A local retailer, John Finn Discounts, also supported the club for a few seasons from 1980. The value that a Grade cricket club - with limited exposure in the media or to the public - can provide to a sponsor has always been difficult to measure, so sponsorships have always been a gesture of support to the grass roots of the game as much as a calculated business decision.
Grade cricket had changed in other ways as well. The rules on residential qualification had never been followed with scrupulous honesty, and by 1980 they had become absurd. Players no longer considered themselves bound to represent the district in which they lived, but turned out for whichever club would provide them with the most attractive opportunities or the most enjoyment. In any case, the club boundaries had not kept pace with Sydney's changing demographics, so that there was still a concentration of clubs in and around inner Sydney, even though the city's population growth was to the south and west. Increasingly, residential rules were flouted openly. In one season, according to the official registration forms, a dozen Wests players were sharing the same house in Concord. One fast bowler played for four clubs (including Wests) in four successive seasons, which gave rise to a popular - and possibly true - story that the residential rules were deemed not to apply to him because he lived in the back of his panel van.
And as players began to change clubs more frequently, so clubs began to encourage movements by paying players. It is difficult to know exactly when this began, because the arrangements were usually kept secret, but the Waverley club, through the generosity of sponsors, engaged two high-profile professionals (Tony Greig and Geoff Boycott) in the mid-1970s and within a few years ti had become relatively common for clubs that could bear the cost to attract talented players with cash. Sometimes, the Cricket Association's grant was used for this - if the Association offered $3000 for the payment of a coach, then there were several clubs (but not Wests) that used the grant to engage a high-profile player as coach.
Chemist Warehouse Ashfield is a proud sponsor of Western Suburbs District Cricket Club
All of this tended to disengage the Grade club from the district it represented, and for Western Suburbs in the later 1970s and early 1980s, this had the unhappy result that the club became isolated from the junior associations that had been its principal source of talented young players. Partly as a result of this, the seasons between 1978-79 and 1981-82 were some of the bleakest in the club's history. Nothing was won. The club's teams were seldom even competitive. In 1979-80, no team finished higher than tenth (out of 16) in its competition; the following season, the best-performed team was Third Grade, which came eleventh. It was, according to the club's Annual Report, "a fairly miserable overall performance".
Not long after Simpson's retirement, the club also lost Peter Toohey and Steve Rixon, both of whom switched to new clubs after changing addresses. Rixon's departure should have created more opportunities for the gifted Dyer, but he had already moved to the Sydney club in search of a regular First Grade place. So Greg Bowden, Ray's son, became First Grade's wicket-keeper, and impressed with his agile work behind the stumps and some dogged lower-order batting.
Bowden was one of the few young players able to seize the opportunities that were available at Western Suburbs. Matthew Troy, David O'Neil, Ken Shelston and Michael Webster all had talent and played well at times, but without finding any level of consistency. In 1979-80 the First Grade team lost 188 wickets while scoring 2976 runs - meaning that, on average, the team was usually bowled out for 158. This wasn't enough to win many matches, especially as the increased use of pitch covers meant that Grade matches were becoming more high-scoring affairs. Even with covers, though, batting at Pratten Park was seldom straightforward. Throughout the sixties and seventies, the Pratten pitch had a reputation for helping the quicker bowlers - it was fast, bouncy and well-grassed. But by the late seventies the pitch had also developed a ridge, just short of a length. A ball that hit the down slope of the ridge might keep low, whilst a ball that pitched only an inch or two shorter, on the up- slope, could rise almost vertically. Two of the club's better young players had their careers disrupted by injury: in the course of the same game, both David O'Neil and Mark Spicer were struck damaging blows by the State opening bowlers, Geoff Lawson and Greg Watson. O'Neil remembers that:
“Spice was hit over the heart by Greg Watson - "Gulgong" - and it was a good thing we were playing University of NSW because Paddy Grattan-Smith, who was a doctor, was on the field. He made sure Spice was OK, but apparently his heart stopped for a time, and he stopped playing at the end of that year. I was hit pretty much flush on the side of the head by Geoff Lawson. After that I became one of the first players to experiment with using helmets, but it's probably true that after that my batting never developed as it might have done.“
To say the least, these were far from ideal conditions in which to nurture young batsmen. The team's bowling, on the other hand, was generally effective. Phil Kelleard, accurate and probing, and the aggressive John Coyle were always a threat with the new ball. The spin attack was not as well settled, but leg-spinner Peter Walsh showed plenty of promise and the left-armer Mark Tudehope did well in his early appearances in Firsts in 1979-80. Tudehope was unusually tall and moved awkwardly; in his run-up and delivery he resembled a puppet with slightly tangled strings. But he was accurate, flighted the ball daringly, and turned it enough to worry most batsmen. His First Grade career didn't quite live up to its promising start, but he was a formidable lower-grade bowler for 147 over twenty years. Like Tudehope, Walsh never quite developed into a consistently threatening First Grade bowler, although he performed strongly for the club for many years, especially in Second Grade. He was a thoughtful, competitive bowler, who not only turned the ball but had the ability to produce sharp drift in the air. Off the field, his contribution to the Club was invaluable, since he was a constant source of innovative ideas on how the Club and its players could improve their performance.
Pictured above: Dirk Wellham
His team's struggles made the performances of Dirk Wellham even more outstanding. Batting for a weak team on a poor pitch, he played with calm, consistent authority, even though he was also burdened with the captaincy. When he was appointed ni 1979-80, at the age of 20, he was the youngest man to be appointed the regular captain of a Sydney First Grade team, and he led from the front by scoring 618 runs - more than double the aggregate of the next- best batsman. He possessed an excellent technique, a wide range of strokes and an ideal temperament. He had played so well for so long that his promotion to the State team in 1980-81 seemed overdue, even though he was still only 21. Wellham marked his first-class debut with a brilliant century against Victoria on a dreadful pitch in Melbourne, and after only five more first-class games, he was hurried into the Australian team that toured England in 1981. It was not a happy tour for Australia, and Wellham did not reach the Test team until the final match at The Oval. In his first innings, he was bowled by Bob Willis for 24; but in the second, he batted for more than four hours for a brilliant 103. He had the good fortune to be dropped on 99 by Geoffrey Boycott, but otherwise there was no luck about his innings, which was mature, confident and distinguished by some audacious back-foot drives from the bowling of Willis and lan Botham. Only one other batsman, India's Gundappa Viswanath, had scored a century in both his first first-class game and first Test.
Wellham's early seasons as captain were often trying, he remembers, because:
“We had a really inexperienced side. We had lost Bob Simpson, Peter Toohey, Steve Rixon, Gary Gilmour and Brian Rhodes all at about the same time, and we had young guys like Pete Walsh and Greg Bowden finding their way. At times it was a struggle, but they were all good people. John Coyle was our strike bowler, and Phil Kelleard was phenomenal throughout that whole period. So, yes, it was hard, but I still enjoyed ti because they were all powerful Western Suburbs culture people who I had grown up with.“
An inescapable consequence of Wellham's success, however, was that he became less frequently available to his club. But with a neat symmetry, another promising young batsman was introduced into First Grade in the first match of 1981-82. Brad McNamara had enjoyed three successful seasons of Green Shield cricket but had never scored a fifty in Grade cricket when he was selected in Firsts for the opening match of the season. Balmain's attack was led by the Indian Test spinner Erappali Prasanna, but the 15 year-old McNamara was unfazed and batted with uncommon maturity to score 66. He already had a watertight defensive technique and always seemed to have plenty of time to play his strokes. If his progress to the New South Wales team turned out to be a little slower than expected, there was never any doubt about his talent and commitment.
