WITH the possible exception of W. G. Grace, there has been no more influential figure in the history of cricket than Kerry Packer, who, in terms of the game itself, was no more than an interested bystander. Yet his inherited wealth, business acumen and ruthless streak enabled the entrepreneur from Sydney to outflank the administrators with ease, force his will upon the world game and link Australian cricket with Channel Nine in a fond embrace that has lasted almost 30 years.

He changed cricket beyond recall, recognising its commercial potential as no one had, spotting that the leading players were underpaid for the entertainment they gave and pioneering night cricket in coloured clothing, not everyone’s cup of tea but arguably his greatest legacy to the game. Drop-in pitches, more sophisticated television techniques and player-commentators were other features of the era that started with his angry departure from Lord’s one evening during the Ashes series in 1977, when he turned to the assembled press in the passageway behind the Lord’s pavilion after an aborted meeting with the ICC and said: “It’s every man for himself now and the devil take the hindmost.”

He was seen then as the enemy of the established game, but the revolution he created hastened the process by which television now both pays the piper and calls the tune. Whether it changed international cricket for better or for worse is a matter of opinion. Certainly it became an even harder, more aggressive, brasher game almost from the moment that, during two seasons of his World Series Cricket, he pitted the Australian players against most of the best cricketers from the rest of the world, all of them bought with an open chequebook as a means to his own commercial end.

He simply exploited the players to bulldoze his way into getting the television rights to international cricket in Australia that Australian Cricket Board officials had, for various reasons, refused him. Thereby he did all the leading players of that era a great service, raising their standard of living and ushering in the modern era.

The managing director of World Series Cricket, Andrew Caro, estimated that the company lost £1.5 million in its two years of promoting its own televised games, because big pay packets and the need to hire large grounds, many not then associated with cricket, outweighed income.

After two years of civil war, Packer got his rights, not just to three years (initially) of exclusive television coverage but to the promotion of the game in Australia for the next ten years, so no doubt he won in the end.

The administrators got more television money to feed back to the grass roots and although some of the players he had signed felt let down, having burnt their boats by allowing younger players to establish themselves in national teams, many of them never looked back. For Tony Greig, then England captain, it was the start of a new life that inevitably took him to Australia. Packer, always generous to his friends, set him up in business when his playing days were over.

I happened to interview Greig during the rest day of the Centenary Test in Melbourne in March 1977, just after he had met Packer and agreed to become his main recruiting agent for players outside Australia. Without being able to say anything officially, he was clearly bursting to tell me something, hinting at a big story and “huge changes in the game”.

The details emerged the next May, when Greig was hosting a party in a marquee in his garden during the match between Sussex and Greg Chappell’s Australian touring team. He and Packer were men of like minds, acquisitive, ambitious, open-minded, enterprising and happy to ride roughshod over well-meaning officials. Greig described his mentor yesterday as “a great entrepreneur, a great lateral thinker and a great friend to cricket”.

For a time it was not so. He split the game. The Australian administratrors had originally turned down his offers, with little thought about the consequences for the star players, partly out of loyalty to their longstanding relationship with the Australian Broadcasting Commission but also because the ABC had a wider television reach to country areas than Channel Nine then did. Packer was spurned despite a lucrative offer for exclusive rights to televise Test cricket in Australia for five years in 1975 and another approach for the rights to the 1978-79 series. So he ploughed his own furrow.

Initially, having signed on 35 of the world’s best players, he wanted his promotion to fit into existing international schedules, but these were already expanding and the ICC concluded in its statement in July 1977 that “the whole structure of cricket, for which the governing bodies of the Test countries are responsible, could be seriously damaged by the type of promotion proposed by Mr Packer and his associates”.

It accordingly tried to ban any cricketers who participated in “disapproved” matches, but in his judgment in the High Court after a 31-day hearing, the judge, Sir Christopher Slade, ruled that this was an unreasonable restraint of trade and an unlawful inducement to the players to break their contracts with WSC.

Since the game has always reflected social trends, the changes would probably have come sooner or later anyway. Perhaps, indeed, the effective control of all professional sport now exercised by television, and the consequences of more matches, more tours and much better-rewarded players, was inevitable. If so, it was Packer’s initiative that started the trend.