Cricket: In the beginning, there was ... a no-ball

The first non-red ball bowled under floodlights was delivered by Australian angry man Len Pascoe to South African genius Barry Richards on January 23, 1978, at what was then called VFL Park, subsequently Waverley Park. Day-night cricket was one of dozens of half-baked innovations in the first of two seasons of Kerry Packer's revolutionary World Series Cricket.

Pascoe remembered that he was having no-ball problems at the time. "I just wanted to get the 22 yards," he said. Predictably, it was an attempted bouncer. It was also a no-ball, and a wide. "I scored the first run in day-night cricket, too," said Pascoe, by way of historical justification.

Richards was thinking what every opening batsman thinks: don't get out. "We didn't know what to expect," he said. "It was, let's get through the first 20 minutes or so and see what happens." As it happens, he did get out that over, caught at square leg for a duck. But he would become one of WSC's superstars, gratifyingly for him, because South Africa was then banned and he played sadly little other international cricket. To this day, he said, South African archives do not acknowledge him as a Test player.

Let's see what happens: it might have been the motif of WSC. As explained by Ian Chappell, then Australian captain, Packer had not expected to have to run a cricket competition, only to elbow his way into the one that existed. As remembered by the principals now, WSC was exciting, but madcap and ad lib, and virtually all its R and D was done on the run.

There was the ball, and pardon if this sounds familiar. Greg Chappell recalls that only red dye would soak into tanned leather. Red was unsuited to night cricket, but no colour would hold unless caked in layers of lacquer, giving the ball the feel of plastic. When dye and shine wore off, the ball became camouflaged against the turf. It still does. Richards said that in his seven years on the MCC's cricket committee, the single insoluble problem was an all-purpose ball.

But for Greg Chappell, there was a reflexive bonus: when he returned to day cricket, the red ball looked to him as big and hittable as a football.

Coloured clothing wasn't entirely for glamour's sake. Ian Chappell recalls a WSC trial match under lights at the SCG, experimenting with yellow, orange and white balls. From gully especially, it was clear to him that playing in creams, unsighted fieldsmen were at risk of harm. "Someone's gonna get killed," he reported. Soon enough, Barb, his wife-to-be, was dyeing whites in a bath tub as the great adventure went on. Richards sees an accident waiting to happen in the modern game, to bowlers and umpires, from turbo-charged bats.

The first floodlights were rudimentary; they were made for football, dim and yellowy. Greg Chappell said batting at twilight was batting in definitively bad light. To some extent, it still is. Pitches, including the first drop-ins, were problematic. The one at VFL Park was in two halves, and if the ball hit the join, the bounce was mortally random. Chappell said that at the SCG, when the sun went down, the pitch invariably perked up; that was new. But again for Chappell, there was compensation. The pitch at the Sydney Showgrounds, he said, was the best he ever played on, anywhere.

Ian Chappell remembered a WSC match in Auckland on a pitch so perilous he decided to take a suicide single, calling out to the fieldsman: "Hit 'em." He did. Chappell had not faced a ball. Richards recalled one innings of 17, in a world team total of 101, and said it was one of the best hands he ever played. This is the man who once hit 325 not out in a day for South Australia.

Helmets were comically new. Richards said his opening partner in that first season, Denis Amiss, wore an equestrian style, with perspex custom-fitted. Richards tried it, too, but found that it either fogged up, or distorted his view. "I couldn't have something in front of me," he said. Australian player Ian Davis recommended to teammate David Hookes a version developed by a prosthetics maker in Sydney, complete with mask.

In such a murky environment, Ian Chappell said that he and World XI captain Tony Greig initially agreed to go easy on bouncers. Then Greig bowled a first-night bouncer anyway, whereupon Chappell threatened to turn all the lights off when he next batted. Chappell, incidentally, was characteristically trenchant about the present Cricket Australia review of safety. "It's a waste of time because it's not including technique," he said. "What's the point?"

Duckworth-Lewis was years in the future. One night at VFL Park, Australia thought it was defending 240 and the West Indies thought they were chasing 228, and when they got them and ran triumphantly from the ground, Ian Chappell was apoplectic. Packer tried to appease him, saying he would pay the Australians as if they had won. "You can shove your cheque book up your arse," retorted Chappell. Not many, perhaps no one, ever said that to Packer.

Another night, as the West Indies dawdled in their over rate, a boy was sent to hold back the hands of the stadium clock so that the full quota would fit inside curfew.

After two years, Packer and the establishment called a truce to their potentially ruinous war, but WSC had left an indelible mark. Greg Chappell said that unlike others who had found themselves at history's crossroads, he knew the import. "It felt like a historic moment," he said. But the years have done their usual mellowing and yellowing work. When Pascoe re-enacted his ball to Richards at the Adelaide Oval on Tuesday evening, he again dug it in short, and it bounced.

Then it bounced again.