Return To The Captaincy
When WSC players rejoined official cricket for 1979-80, there was plenty of debate over the Australian captaincy. Chappell was the far from unanimous choice, but led the Test team in twin series, against England (won 3-0) and West Indies (lost 0-2), and the first triangular ODI series where Australia failed to reach the final. It was a mixed bag of results and the programming came in for some criticism. Chappell led by example in scoring 74 and 124 in the Brisbane Test against the West Indies in his comeback to Test cricket. His 98* guided Australia to victory over England at Sydney, then 114 and 40* extracted a similar result at Melbourne. While he averaged 44 with the bat and claimed seven wickets in the ODIs, a constant shuffling of positions ensured an uneven Australian performance.
Despite protesting the strenuous nature of the players' workload in this new era, Chappell found himself leading the team to Pakistan two weeks after the end of the Australian season. Pakistan narrowly won the first Test, then prepared featherbed wickets for the remaining two matches. At Faisalabad, Chappell made 235 and as a protest at the pitch, allowed all eleven Australians to have a bowl in Pakistan's innings - the first time this had happened in a Test since 1884. Australia lost the series 0-1. Later in the year, Australia played a second Centenary Test, this time to commemorate the first Test played in England, and the match (played at Lords) ended in a draw due to poor weather. One of only four players who played both matches, Chappell scored 47 and 59, but his best remembered contribution to the match was an attempted citizen's arrest (along with England captain Ian Botham) of an MCC member who attacked one of the umpires in a very ill-tempered scene.
Read more about this topic: Greg Chappell
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