Windies rival Woeful Wallabies
The West Indies showed all the fight of a paper bag but they mightn’t be the worst side to tour here.
The West Indies cricket team, thrashed in all forms of the game by an intense and dynamic Black Caps side, are surely the worst major sporting team to ever tour here.
Yes, it’s true Chris Gayle looked like a rock star. But the pity was that in the T20 games he was able to play he batted like one: Keith Richards.
The Windies are the current T20 world champions, but in the field they were lazy and careless. No jury in the world would have convicted their leader Carlos Brathwaite had he punched a fielder who in the T20 game in Christchurch couldn’t bring himself to dive to save a four, but instead stuck his foot out. Of course the ball skipped off his boot over the boundary.
Some might point back to the 1979-80 Windies side as candidates for the worst of all time title, and it’s true they remain alone as the most undisciplined cricket team ever seen here. Examples? Fast bowler Colin Croft on his run in smacking umpire Fred Goodall with a suspiciously well placed elbow, and Michael Holding kicking out the stumps when an lbw appeal was turned down.
They even held a vote during the second test in Christchurch as to whether they should just pack up and go home. By a two to one majority they decided to stay. It was claimed the captain, Clive Lloyd, was among those voting to leave.
Working on a magazine story I began to feel genuinely sorry for the team manager, Willie Rodriquez. Hugely stressed, treated like dirt by New Zealand officials and his own men, he said: ‘‘In a couple of days time I’ll wake up in my own bed, and I’ll try to pretend this was all a nightmare.’’
By the end of the tour the West Indians had come to call Kiwi media ‘‘The pricks’’, and Kiwi cricket writers dubbed them ‘‘The freckles’’. It wasn’t a reference to spots on the face.
But unlike the current Windies outfit, while the bad boys of ‘79-80 might have lost the test series, with one loss and two draws, they really wanted to win, and the results show they were very competitive. That sole loss was by just one wicket.
The true contenders for worst visitors of all time are a rugby team, the 1972 Wallabies, AKA ‘‘The Woeful Wallabies’’ or ‘‘The Awful Aussies’’.
And they were. This was a team who followed up a 26-0 loss to Otago in their opening game by losing 15-10 to West Coast-Buller in Westport. Think England losing to Iceland in Euro 2016.
There’s more. If the ‘72 Wallabies were rubbish in the provincial games, they were total crap in the tests, losing the first 29-6, and the second 30-17. ‘‘We didn’t even have to play well to beat them,’’ a still slightly bemused All Black captain Ian Kirkpatrick would later say. The level of mediocrity was a surprise. The only superstar they’d lost before the tour was injured halfback John Hipwell.
By the time the Wallabies were getting ready for the third test at Eden Park revered writer Terry McLean, in a column headlined ‘‘Dump The Aussies!’’ thundered, ‘‘the NZRU must rethink its international programme. You just simply can’t expect the New Zealand public to shovel out $2.50 for seats at matches played by the Wallabies.’’ And sure enough, there were 13,000 empty seats at Eden Park. After the game, a 38-3 romp for the All Blacks, another veteran writer, Alex Veysey, noted how robustly McLean had laid it on the line in his preview story. Veysey said that ‘‘the Wallabies backed (McLean’s) judgement to the hilt’’.
As it happens the NZRU didn’t dump the Wallabies. In fact the decade after ‘72 saw an increasing number of games being played between New Zealand provinces and Aussie sides.
It’s one of rugby’s great ironies that a driving force behind the exchanges was Queensland’s Bob Templeton, who had coached the Awful Aussies, and saw that if Australian teams wanted to get better they needed more, not less, exposure to New Zealand rugby.
Auckland linked with New South Wales, Canterbury with Queensland, and by 1981 Auckland, Bay of Plenty, Northland, and Canterbury were making minitours of Australia, Queensland was
If the ’72 Wallabies were rubbish in the provincial games, they were total crap in the tests.
here playing Otago, Manawatu, and Southland, while Australian Capital Territory (think the amateur version of the Brumbies) played in Pukekohe, Blenheim, and Otorohanga.
From there it was a short step in ‘86 to a South Pacific championship, a six team competition, which included the Fiji national side. In the most weird of ways, it’d be fair to say that if the ‘72 Wallabies were a disaster on the field, the aftermath of their tour helped set the foundations for what would become Super Rugby.
Footnote: Bob Templeton, gruff but likeable, was the assistant to Wallabies’ coach Bob Dwyer when they won the ‘91 World Cup. During the final, against England at Twickenham, Templeton was seated next to Princess Diana. A chain smoker, he was told, to his horror, that smoking was banned in the Royal enclosure. After the game Templeton was rushed in the Aussie shed by John Eales, Nick Farr-Jones, and other players demanding to know what the glamorous young princess was like. Templeton, frantically sucking on a cigarette, paused between drags, and gasped: ‘‘Well I can tell ya this. She knows f... all about rugby.’’