Australia’s second dual home international summer in 1980/81 was a tumultuous one that set the scene for the upheaval that bedeviled the Australian team in the first half of that decade. The second Australian summer since the Packer realignment had irrevocably altered the country’s cricket schedules and saw tensions rise and players wilt under the new demands. Most prominent among these was the Australian captain himself, Greg Chappell, whose spectacular burnout reached its all too public peak under the full glare of a baking Melbourne sun in February 1981.
When Chappell decided the mind and body could take no more, he opted to skip the Ashes series in the 1981 English summer. The mythology of Botham’s Ashes also has an Australian side to the story, not least that of the man who would lead…
