The Great Cricket Circus

GH on Australia's first professional one-day cricket tournament - in Brisbane in 1933

In the papers of A. J. Hunting at the State Library of Queensland is to be found this clockface. It has neither caption nor provenance. But you can hardly mistake its meaning. Hunting was a man for whom time was of the essence, for whom the faster the better, and fastest was best of all. In the 1920s and 1930s his name was synonymous in three continents with speedway.

But for six heady months in 1933, Hunting was also the Kerry Packer of his day - the impresario of Australia’s first professional one-day cricket competition, which he fantasised of spreading round the country from its Brisbane base. The teams had fancy names and players wore numbers on their back. The batters faced restricted deliveries, and were paid extra per boundary; the bowlers were on wicket bonuses; crowds were dazzled by the rates of scoring.

This was also, as a correspondent in Brisbane’s Telegraph observed, the first cricket match in Australia that was openly and wholly professional: ‘If perchance professionalism does flourish in Australia this match will long be remembered as the genesis of a movement which inscribed a new page in Australian cricket.’ That it isn’t testifies to the vigour of the efforts of authority to destroy not only the attraction but the memory of it. They banned the players; they scorned the play; they set every conceivable obstacle in its path: ‘The Q.C.A. president, Mr J. S. Hutcheon, laughed heartily at the idea and Mr Roger Hartigan, a member of the Board of Control, said it was not cricket and, like all freak things, would die a natural death.’ As Hunting wondered in what look like the notes for a speech or a presentation: ‘Are they afraid or what?’

But on the eve of the final of the hyperprofessional Big Bash League, it’s worth studying the legacy of Professional One-Day Cricket Ltd. For it bequeathed a fascinating legacy, as I learned while trawling its mortal remains during the Brisbane Test, where seventeen rain breaks offered extra study time. And rain, coincidentally, forms part of the story….