Bradman & Packer : The Deal that Changed Cricket

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In 1977 Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket insurgency jolted a staid and traditional sport into a period of chaos and upheaval. Pitting traditionalists against revolutionaries, and players against their paymasters, the affair forever altered not only the power dynamics of the summer game, but the way in which it was presented and viewed.

Much is now understood of Packer’s role in first seizing control of cricket, then handing it back in a drastically different shape, but far less of the part played by Sir Donald Bradman— better known as the game’s greatest batsman, but also an administrator of far-reaching, if secretive, influence.

In Bradman & Packer — The Deal that Changed Cricket, journalist Daniel Brettig, author of the award-winning Whitewash to Whitewash, deftly reconstructs the shadowy period that remade cricket. When two titans of Australian life came face to face in a clandestine meeting, they brokered the peace deal that ended a sporting war.

Following on from Gideon Haigh’s acclaimed Crossing the Line— How Australian cricket lost its way, Bradman & Packer is the second instalment in Slattery Media Group’s ‘Sports Shorts’ collection, a new home for lively and engaging writing on sport. Every edition will illuminate and entertain, all the while fitting into your back pocket on the way to the game.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Daniel Brettig is the author of the award-winning Whitewash to Whitewash (Penguin), which won the Australian Cricket Society’s Jack Pollard Trophy for the best Australian cricket book published in 2015. Brettig had been a journalist for eight years, first with The Advertiser and then AAP in Adelaide and Sydney, when he joined ESPNcricinfo in March 2011. There he remains the Australian correspondent. Among other publications, he has written for Wisden Australia, Wisden, Inside Edge, The Cricketer and Sports Illustrated India.