Neil Harvey - Later Years and Personal Life

Later Years and Personal Life

He was an Australian selector from 1967 to 1979. Immediately after his appointment, he was embroiled in controversy during the First Test against India at Brisbane in 1967–68. The Queensland Cricket Association wrote to the board, complaining that Harvey, who was the selector on duty at the Test, had missed two hours of play. He had been at a race meeting at the invitation of the QCA president. The ACB gave Harvey a talking to. Despite this, he retained his position at the next annual election, with Queensland's Ken Mackay failing to gain a seat on the selection panel.

From 1971 onwards, Harvey was the chairman of selectors. It was a tumultuous period in Australian cricket, where captain Bill Lawry was acrimoniously sacked in the middle of the 1970–71 series against England after a dispute between players and Australian officials. Lawry was not informed of his fate and learned of his omission on the radio when he was still one of Australia's most productive batsmen. The dispute was the genesis of the pay dispute which, led to the formation of World Series Cricket in 1977 and generated a mass exodus of players. This resulted in the recall of Bob Simpson after ten years in retirement at the age of 41 to captain the Test team. Following the rapprochement between the establishment and the WSC players, Harvey left the selection panel. The WSC representatives felt that Harvey's anti-WSC comments made him prejudiced against the selection of former WSC players.

After returning from South Africa in 1950, Harvey was offered a job in captain Lindsay Hassett's sports store. Harvey accepted immediately because sports stores gave more flexible arrangements for leave to play cricket. Harvey was sponsored by Stuart Surridge to use their cricket equipment. He was paid £300 a year, but nevertheless lived at home and shared a bedroom with his brothers Brian and Ray until he married, due to poverty. He used the same cricket uniforms for more than five years.

During the 1949–50 tour of South Africa, Harvey met his first wife Iris Greenish. At the time, Greenish was only 16 years old and Harvey 21, and their relationship became the subject of controversy when her father told the media that he would object to the couple's engagement until his daughter turned 18. They married four years later at Holy Trinity Church in East Melbourne and had three children, two sons and a daughter. After a twenty year marriage, Harvey divorced. Two years later, he married Barbara McGifford at the age of 47.

Harvey's career extended into a successful business, Har-V-Sales, which distributed tupperware, kitchen and cosmetic products.

In later life, he was known for his blunt and critical comments towards modern players, believing the cricket in earlier times to be superior. After Steve Waugh's team set a world record of consecutive Test victories, Harvey named three Australian teams that he thought to be superiors, saying "no, far from it" in response to the suggestion that Waugh's men were the best team in history. He attributed the wins to weak opponents, stating "No I don't think they're up to the world standard they were years ago" and that the 1980s West Indies team were far superior. He also criticised the Australian team for publicly stating praising the skills of their opponents, believing that they did so to aggrandise their statistical performances against teams he considered to be weak. In 2000 he was named in the Australian Cricket Board's Team of the Century and criticised modern day batsmen, noting that players in earlier eras had to play on sticky wickets saying "these guys who play out here are a little bit spoilt in my opinion. They play on flat wickets all the time and they grizzle if there's ... the ball does a little bit off the pitch, and whatever ... But we had to put up with that" and going to assert his opinion that the current players would be no match. Harvey was also inducted into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame in 2000, in the first annual induction of two players since the inaugural ten members were announced in 1996. In 2009, Harvey was one of the 55 inaugural inductees into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame. Harvey vociferously called for Shane Warne and Mark Waugh to be banned from cricket after it was revealed that they accepted money from bookmakers to give pitch and weather information and the ACB privately fined them. He lamented the decline in player conduct in the modern era, also criticising the modern advent of sledging.

In 2002, Harvey called for Mark and Steve Waugh to be dropped from the Australian team, claiming that they were a waste of space. He stated:

Money is the only thing that keeps them playing...If they earned the same money as I did when I was playing they'd have retired at 34 as I did, and Australian cricket would be the better for it.

When Steve was close to being dropped during the 2002–03 series against England, Harvey wrote off a half-century made by Waugh, saying "he's playing against probably one of the worst cricket teams I've ever seen."