![]() Packer, and father, Frank, had a reputation for hot temper and bullying, but they also inspired great loyalty. Buccaneers in business, Kerry's grandfather, R.C. But what is he really like and where did he come from?In this the first book ever written about the man and his family, Paul Barry charts the Packer dynasty's unstoppable rise to power.The Packers have always made enemies and almost always had their way with the world. His friends generally refuse to speak about him, while his employees and rivals don't dare. As he shows, the world's best cricket was being played in some unusual venues in front of only handfuls of fans (of whom I was often one), but it was the future of cricket, and we all thought so at the time.Kerry Packer is Australia's richest and most powerful man, with a media empire worth $3000 million. Personally, being of similar age to Haigh, I relished the recollection of some of the fantastic moments of World Series Cricket, that I was addicted to as a teenager growing up in Australia. The fraternity of cricket clearly transgressed the boundaries the cricket authorities were heavy-handed in attempting to reinforce, and this in itself tells its own tale of inflexible committeemen failing to understand the shape of the game in their stewardship. Certainly the main players (and I don't just mean the cricketers) knew each other well, especially by the end when the ACB finally surrendered to the corporates of PBL. The writing has echoes of the standards of the genre: stats pepper the stories of the matches, but the really interesting part of the narrative is showing the kind of civil war it was. As Haigh notes, Packer filled his boots at the same time, having worked out the differential between the cost of cricket and its potential in commercial terms with considerable nous. The lack of genuflection he has in common with Kerry Packer, the apparent villian of the piece, whose audacious redefining of cricket in the '70s determined the destiny of the game around the world. I first got to know Haigh's writing from columns in the Guardian, and whilst this is an early work, it is a pleasure to read such a well informed and devoted writer about cricket, who does not treat it with sacred reverence, at book length. ![]() This edition of The Cricket War, Gideon Haigh’s first book about cricket originally published in 1993, has been updated with new photographs and a new introduction by the author. Gideon Haigh has published over thirty books, over twenty of them about cricket. It was the end of cricket as we knew it – and the beginning of cricket as we know it. A compelling account of the top-class sporting life, The Cricket War also gives a unique insight into the motives and methods of the man who became Australia’s richest, and remained so, until the day he died. ![]() In boardrooms and courtrooms Packer and cricket’s rulers fought a bitter war of nerves. In helmets, under lights, with white balls, and in coloured clothes, the outlaw armies of Ian Chappell, Tony Greig and Clive Lloyd fought a daily battle of survival. The Cricket War is the definitive account of the split that changed the game on the field and on the screen. One of The Times' 50 Greatest Sports Books In May 1977, the cricket world awoke to discover that a thirty-nine-year-old Sydney Businessman called Kerry Packer had signed thirty-five elite international players for his own televised ‘World Series’. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. ![]() We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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