Greg Chappell’s Baggy Green is missing and Steve Smith’s battery is flat

Chappell is a guest on this week’s Cricket Et Al podcast.

Greg Chappell’s precious Baggy Green cap is missing.

The former Australian cricket captain stopped short of saying it has been stolen, but one of the very few pieces of memorabilia Chappell kept from his celebrated career disappeared from a storage facility in Brisbane.

Chappell only discovered the loss when he and his wife Judy moved recently from Brisbane back to the family’s home town of Adelaide.

Speaking this week on the Cricket Et Al podcast, the 76-year-old former Australian captain said he has given away all of his Test bats and baggy green caps (in that era players were presented with multiple caps) except for one.

“We had stuff in storage for about 10 years or so, and when we moved back to Adelaide we brought everything out of storage and I was expecting to find that baggy green cap, but it didn't appear,” Chappell told Cricket Et Al.

“I don't know what happened to it. I wouldn't like to cast any aspersions, but it went into storage, but it doesn't seem to have come out.”

“I’m a little bit disappointed. I don't surround myself with my cricket memorabilia. I mean, it was a period of my life which I enjoyed hugely, and I'm quite proud of, but I don't want to be surrounded by it.”

In 2020 a Greg Chappell baggy green gifted to England’s Geoffrey Boycott after the 1977 Ashes was sold at auction for $15,000. Others have sold for around $20,000 over the years.

Chappell said much of his and his brother Ian’s memorabilia is on permanent loan to the South Australian Cricket Association.

Last summer’s SCG Test was distracted by the farcical saga of David Warner’s missing baggy green. The player claimed the cap had been stolen from his luggage in transit ahead of his last Test. Qantas was questioned, security staff had the finger pointed at them, and the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a plea for the item’s return before it was found in one of Warner’s bags in the side’s storage room at the hotel where they were staying.

Greg told the podcast that their father, Martin, rescued his brother Ian’s cricket memorabilia from being dumped at the local tip.

“Ian was even less of a hoarder than I am, and even less interested in being surrounded by his cricket memorabilia,” Chappell said. “Our father just happened to arrive at his house many years ago to find Ian loading up the trailer with some detritus from around the house, most of which was his cricket memorabilia.

“Dad said, ‘What are you doing with this?’  and Ian said, ‘I'm taking it to the dump’. And he said, ‘No, you're not’. So dad rescued some of that stuff, and that is with the SACA who've got it stored away.”

Chappell also told the Cricket Et Al the story of how the famous Greg Chappell cricket cap came into existence over 40 years ago and the story of the famous Gray-Nicolls Scoop he used during his career (and of his role in Dennis Lillee’s aluminium bat fiasco).

The former captain and selector says he has not paid as close attention to the game as he once did, but was strong in his belief that Mitchell Marsh should move up to open the batting with Usman Khawaja.

“Mitch plays fast bowling extremely well, hits the ball hard.  Usman (Khawaja) really enjoyed having David Warner as a partner, because David scored at a rate that very few people score at which allowed Uzi just to go about his business and play the way that he plays well,” he said.

 “And, I think, to pick someone else that plays like Uzi is not the answer. We need someone that takes the takes the bowling on, plays fast bowling well.

 “Mitch Marsh with the field up, and he could be as David was, you know, he'd be 20 or 30 at the end of the second over and he's away. You just wouldn't be able to stop him because he hits the ball harder than anyone without trying.

Chappell wrote about a concerning encounter with Steve Smith in his recent book Not Out and said he is worried that the game has worn the star batsman out in much the same way it did to him.

“I saw that in Steve that day in Perth, I thought, ‘man, this guy's in trouble. This is taking a huge toll’ and I mean, I sort of managed to relax a little bit in between play. You know, nighttime I didn't have any trouble sleeping, but Steve said to me that day that during a Test that he doesn't sleep,” he told the podcast.

“I’ve been in the hotel room below him during a Test match in England, and I've heard that tap, tap, tap, tap, three o'clock in the morning …  when he asked for the move as an opening batsman, I pretty much knew that he needed a new challenge.  I know in the last series that I played, I batted number six for most of that series and I found, having batted at three and four throughout most of my career, the waiting was just debilitating.

“And, I think Stephen was finding that the same thing that, you know, he was really struggling, waiting to go in to bat so he wanted to get in there as quickly as he could, and he wanted the new challenge, in the hope that it would regenerate him but when you run the battery that low, it's very, very hard to recharge it.

“And it's not the physical skills that leave you, it's the mental skills that leave you. And if you're 10% off, that's a huge difference. If you're 1% off that's a huge difference at that level. And to play to the level at which he's played for so long takes an enormous toll on on that, on the battery, a mental battery, and unless he can find a way to get a new battery. I'm not sure that we're going to see Steve over a long period.”

Greg Chappell is inviting golfers to join him at The Chappell Foundation’s Golf Day at the Elanora Country Club in Sydney to help raise funds for local homeless youth.

If you missed it, Cricket Et Al recently had Mike Coward on as a guest to discuss the forthcoming release of his updated book he co-authored with Michael Fahey about the baggy green cap.