by OBITUARY: The Australian ODI Tri-Series (1979-2008)
In the first week of March 2008, life support will be turned off on
the annual one-day tri-series which has filled Australian cricket
stadia, and television schedules, for 29 seasons. This is a venerable
age for any limited-overs event, but the tournament has fallen victim
to a chronic illness which was first suspected early in its life -
insipidity. Aggravated by an allergy to the recently emergent cricket
virus, Twenty20, the death of this Tri-Series may in fact be just the
precursor to the demise of the fifty over game altogether.
Any overview of the Australian Tri-Series must begin with its family
history. It is descended from the 1975 World Cup, but its own parent
was the illegitimately-conceived World Series Cricket. WSC in its two
Australian seasons involved three distinct competitions in a parellel
schedule across a summer of cricket. The "international" teams
competed in Supertests and in a round-robin of limited overs matches;
the two leading teams from the round robin would contest a Final for
the International Cup. As the WSC International Cup matured, it grew
coloured clothing, white cricket balls, fielding restriction circles,
tight control of leg-side bowling, and playing hours which straddled
sunset in order to suit prime-time television broadcasts. All of
these genes were inherited by its offspring, the Australian Tri-
Series, as well as being adopted by its nephews and nieces around the
world over the ensuing ten years.
The Tri-Series was born in 1979, the result of the Australian Cricket
Board being screwed by World Series Cricket. With that union having
been blessed by a number of other cricket authorities - including
reluctantly but resignedly the TCCB - the World Series Cup (as the
tournament was first called) was given a veneer of respectability.
It's first season, though, was not without the stumbles and tears
often experienced by babies trying to walk. England and West Indies
came to Australia, both sides for the entire season, with the one-day
matches interspersed in the schedule with six Test matches. The 14
matches took from 27 November until 22 January, and all except two
were played in Sydney or Melbourne (Brisbane and Adelaide each hosted
a match not involving the home side). England refused to adopt
coloured clothing, and indeed the coloured uniforms worn by Australia
and West Indies were 90% white with just a few stripes here and
there. Fielding circles were vetoed, also by England whose players
had never experienced them; coincidentally it was England which had
ten men on the boundary fence to prevent West Indies winning on the
last ball of the second round-robin match. Australia had the better
of West Indies (which would not always be the case in future years)
but lost every game to England; the two visiting sides thus contested
the best-of-three Finals in a blow to home pride and television
ratings.
The marketing machine and the television cheer squad - led by Richie
Benaud whose reputation as a cricket observer and commentator is built
on everything but his association with this enterprise - lauded the
summer as the pinnacle of cricket. The players and independent media
took the opposite view, that the summer schedule was crowded and
tiring and that all cricket besides the international game suffered.
Fans who might have attended Sheffield Shield in order to catch a
sight of their heroes two or three years earlier now had no need -
they were on TV every other day or could be seen in a single-day game
where every convolution of rules was applied to always produce a
"result". But most importantly, the Australian Cricket Board was
rolling in cash after two years of penury during the WSC schism.
There would be no turning back.
The sophomore year of the World Series Cup saw it expand, not unlike
an overfed child. The round-robin matches were still scattered across
the summer amongst the six Test matches, but there were now 15 of them
followed by a best-of-five Finals - the 19 ODIs contested in Australia
that season represented exactly one-sixth of ALL such matches to that
point in history. The first ODI had been played at Melbourne in
January 1971; the 6th preliminary match, Australia vs India at Sydney
on 18 December 1980, was the 100th ODI, a span of not quite 10 years.
By the end of 1990 the total was up to 659, and at the end of 2000 it
was 1662. If the 2007-08 Commonwealth Bank Series goes to three
Finals, that match should be ODI number 2690. Whilst the increase in
the number of competing teams, and the proliferation of tournaments,
has fed this acceleration in ODI frequency it is all the fault of the
Australian Cricket Board, and its puppeteer PBL Marketing which
controlled the Australian summer for five years from 1979 to 1984 (and
indirectly and unduly influenced it for some time after that).
The second World Series Cup also happened to produce one of cricket's
most infamous incidents. To eliminate the possibility of New Zealand
tying the 3rd Final at Melbourne on 1 February 1981, Australian
captain Greg Chappell instructed the bowler, his brother Trevor, to
bowl underarm and roll the ball along the ground. An explosion of
negative commentary, vilification and even diplomatic angst followed.
Later in the year, Greg Chappell made this occurrence the cornerstone
of his book "Unders and Overs", in which he also addressed issues like
the proliferation of cricket and the demands placed upon him as
captain. To read that book now is to wonder what has been learned,
because even with the huge support crew now available to cricket
captains and the improvement in cricket scheduling there are still
regular wailings heard about "too much cricket".
The third World Series Cup, in 1981-82, saw the return of West Indies
yet again. From 1975-76 until 1988-89, and including the World Series
Cricket West Indies sides, Australian crowds paid to watch the
Carribean team in half of those seasons. West Indies was seen as a
winner for the marketing side of the game - irresistable on the field,
it was a case of bringing Goliath back every other year to see how
well David might be able to do. Australia was cast as the underdog,
and rightly so after retirements and rebel tour defections gutted the
team from 1984 onwards. West Indies' record in the tri-series was
unmatched until the Australian teams of the 1990s assumed leadership
of the cricketing world. In the first 10 years of the World Series
Cup, West Indies played 68 matches, winning 47 and losing 20 with one
tied. In Finals matches their record was 11 wins from 15 starts, and
they won the trophy at each of their first four starts (first missing
out in Gatting's Grand Slam season). It was the West Indies Series
Cup until the restoration of Australian cricket fortunes after 1989
allowed the marketers to promote the home side without embarassment.
Success - as measured by gate receipts and television revenues, rather
than on-field achievement - eventually bred siblings and cousins.
Whirlwind multi-team tournaments popped up in the seasons of 1984-85
(for the sesquicentenary of the state of Victoria, a "World
Championship of Cricket"), and in 1986-87 (to coincide with the
America's Cup regatta in Perth, a "Challenge"). And the rest of the
world had taken note and followed suit, although typically with
shorter tournaments and single-match finals. The first ODI tournament
in Sharjah was a three-team event (IND-PAK-SLK) in April 1984, and a
four-team tournament (AUS-ENG-IND-PAK) was staged a year later.
Whilst the coloured clothing and white balls were slow to spread
around the world - the World Cup of 1987 used red balls and white
clothes - the ODI during this time became standardised to a 50-over
game with fielding restrictions based on a 30-yard perimeter around
the pitch; it was the World Series Cup which created and proselytised
these artificial conditions on the game.
By the late 80s, the structure of the Australian cricket summer had
changed so that Test matches were cleared off the calendar by the
first week of January, leaving that lucrative month of school holidays
for the staging of the one-day tournament. The best-of-five Finals
series only lasted two seasons, cut back to best-of-three from
1982-83, and the tournament was reduced to 12 round robin matches
(from 15) in 1986-87. (The 2004-05 tournament, alone, was of 9 round-
robin matches). The smaller state capitals had joined the scheduling
roster from the second year, although Hobart would invariably host a
game between the two visiting sides and the Finals remained a Sydney-
Melbourne duopoly. By the time the 2007-08 tournament ends, exactly
one match out of over 420 (inclusive of the List-A games in 1994-95
involving Australia A) will have been played outside the six state
capitals - India vs Sri Lanka at Canberra on 12 February 2008. In
1994-95 the inclusion of Zimbabwe was seen as a marketing loss for the
tournament, and thus a second XI of Australian players - Australia A -
joined the tournament as a fourth side. The two Australias duly
bettered both Zimbabwe and England to reach the Finals and thus rob
those matches of ODI status. This shameful exercise was never
repeated.
Playing every season, Australia naturally has the most wins in the
tournament's history (186 wins from 290 ODI starts), and only their
indifferent form of recent years has deposed West Indies from having
the best win percentage (won 68 of 120, but as mentioned above it was
much more impressive before 1995). Australia has lifted the trophy,
under its various guises, 19 times and missed the Finals only three
times - the last two such failures 1996-97 and 2001-02. West Indies
has six trophies, most recently in 1992-93, and was runner-up twice.
England (1986-87), Pakistan (1996-97) and South Africa (2001-02) make
up the winners' list, whilst New Zealand are yet to win after five
Finals appearances from 8
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