When Kerry Packer published the first details of his World Series Cricket in his news magazine The Bulletin almost 30 years ago, his minions seemed to have hit a piercing high C on the hyperbole register. Oddly, perhaps, the hype has stood up well' World Series Cricket was "most imaginative" and very much a "staggering coup", produced some cricket worthy of (he description "magnificent" and proved enough of a "boost" to cricket to Justify a minute's silence at the MCG on the news of Packer's death on Boxing Day. Thirty years ago the rights to broadcast Australian cricket were worth A$70.000 a year. Today the figure is A$45m (around £19m).

Yet this is also misleading. One of the tricks history plays is making events appear manifest destiny when they are actually coalitions of circumstance and character. Geoffrey Blaine, in his evocative history of the first century of Australian settlement. A Land Half Won, devotes a fascinating section to the movement for secession of north Queensland. even producing a speculative chronology for the colony that never was. "There can be no discussion of a powerful event without realising that it is like a traffic junction where a society is capable suddenly of changing direction," he says, "In writing history we concentrate more on what did happen, but many of the crucial events are those which almost happened." The secessionist movement of Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket did happen, but what if it had not, which was nearly the case?

The origins of WSC lie in two parallel ambitions. One was Packer's desire to obtain exclusive Test match broadcast rights, as a means of winning cheap and popular summer content fat his Nine Network: the other was the abiding sense of grievance among Australian Test cricketers in the 1970s about their paltry emoluments and the search for a solution by the successfuI television comedians Paul Hogan and John Cornell when they learned of it through their friend and wannabee players manager Austin Robertson. Both stories contain a common enemy: the Australian Cricket Board, which had slammed the door on Packer and dealt grudgingly with the players' complaints. But Packer was unaware of the players' restlessness while neither the players nor their allies knew that Packer had tried without success to prise open a handshake deal between the ACB and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in June 1976.

The narratives might never have intersected had Packer not headhunted Hogan and Cornell from Seven Network three months later and even then they might have led nowhere had the individuals been differently disposed, it compares with Morecambe and Wise encouraging Lord Grade to patronise a world rugby sevens competition. As it was when Cornell discussed some son of independent Australian cricket circuit, Packer instinctively upped the ante: "Why not do the thing properly' Let's gel the world's best cricketers to play Australia's best."

Justice Christopher Slade. in his famous High Court judgement which swept away the 1CC ban on WSC's signatories in November 1977. contended- "The very size of profits made from cricket matches involving star players must for some years have carried the risk that a private promoter would appear on the scene and seek to make money by promoting cricket matches involving world-class cricketers." But had Packer not been that 'private promoter", it is unlikely anyone would have come up with a scheme as grand as WSC. More likely smaller-scale private promotions - like Jack Neary's World Double Wicket Competition in Australia and the Cavaliers in England -- would have gone on being tolerated by the authorities as long as they represented no perceived threat; the alternative of going head-to-head against a 100-year-old brand name, Test cricket, was open to Packer only because the content it generated could be integrated into his television schedules.

The players? Without Packer's irruption they Would probably have continued hustling for Commercial opportunities individually. As Greg Chappell noted at the lime: "Players were becoming So heavily committed to their personal promotional pursuits that it wasn't uncommon in see half the team race off on the eve of a Test to engage in this type of activity.'' At the time of Packer's entrance, too, Australian cricket was obtaining unprecedented sums through the sponsorship of the tobacco conglomerate Amatil which, because of the impending ban on cigarette advertising, was building its Benson & Hedges brand into a big name in sports sponsorship. Belated increases in Test fees might have alleviated some discontents.

Nonetheless, Australian cricketers' grudge against their administrators derived from conditions as much as pay. Flashpoint had very nearly been reached in South Africa in March 1970 when Bill Lawry's team exasperated, and exhausted by five months on the road, had privately boycotted a fifth Test agreed to by the ACB over their heads. It would not have been surprising had they been susceptible to inducements offered by agents for interests other than Packer.

South Africa, in fact, coincidentally destined to be exiled from international cricket soon after that Fifth Test-That-Never-Was but still warmly connected to the game in Australia, was the likeliest source of such enticements. During the summers of 1974-5 and 1975-6 the three Chappell brothers. Dennis Lillee, Max Walker, Ashley Mallett, Terry Jenner, Gary Gilmour. Martin Kent. Alan Hurst, Dav Whatmore, johnny Gleeson and Malcolm Francke had all visited the country, some more than once, as part of multiple tours by the Derrick Robins XI and the International Wanderers; the latter were even managed by Richie Benaud.

Future visits were made problematical by the Soweto uprising in June 1976 and, the following year, the UN declaration against apartheid in spurt and the Commonwealth's signing of the Gleneagles Agreement. But the window-dressing merger of the South African Cricket Association and the 'non-racial' South African Cricket Board Of Control in October 1977 kept alive the illusion that the game there Was 'normalising' of its own accord, and it is probable that overtures from Johannesburg would have been as enticing to peeved Australian Test cricketers in the late 1970s as they were to Graham Gooch's jaded Englishmen a few years later. As it was, leading South Africans were among Packer's eagerest enlistees. But it is just possible that the schism in the game caused by Packer prevented a deeper schism in the game over South Africa.

If we are to contemplate life had secession never happened, it might also be worth considering cricket had secession continued. By early 1979 what had begun as a domestic dispute had become an internal ion a I incident. Packer had five dozen players on his books from six countries. WSC had toured New Zealand, was about to lour West Indies and would have been welcome in South Africa. The united administrative from had crumbled. Only England's Test and County Cricket Board refused to deal with Packer and even it was concerned about disruption of the forthcoming World Cup.

There was the potential at the time for Packer to mobilise a cricket circuit coeval with Test cricket along the lines of Lamar Hunt's World Championship Tennis, or to become a cricket impresario as his pal Mark McCormack at 1MG was to golf and tennis. Though he had not invented one-day cricket, he essentially controlled the patents on its night, coloured and tri-cornered variants. Some of his men were tiring of the routine. Even Joel Garner and Imran Khan, of whom it made stars, later admitted to an abiding hankering for Test cricket. "Beyond a certain point," said Imran, "it is difficult to bowl to brilliant batsmen or face a battery of fast bowlers day after day simply in order to prove one's individual worth." But Packer had also begun investing in young players like the promising left-hander Graeme Wood, whom he had signed on a five-year contract, while the South Africans would have played forever. "To this day," wrote Mike Procter. "I don't know why WSC disbanded so suddenly and why Kerry Packer packed it in." To Clive Rice it "was as if someone had taken away my right arm".

As it was, one of Packer's chief business gifts was not losing sight of the main game: he had gone into WSC to obtain broadcasting rights from the ACB; he decided he would settle for these, with the bonus that he would control Australian cricket's promotion and profitability through PBL Marketing. And, though he had set up WSC in the spirit of competition with the official game, he was also a believer in monopoly -which he restored when he effectively gave the ACB back its players in April 1979. He rested content with an imaginative, staggering, magnificent boost and a healthy piece of the action for himself.

Power Play in Court