Just Like It Was Yesterday – NSW 1982-83 Sheffield Shield Champions
Peter Langston | September 13, 2023
I have always loved birthdays and after so many of them, you would think there would hardly be surprises in store at the next. Good, better, best should have been long gone but then last Friday, the 67th took me to new, ethereal heights as I celebrated it with mates, heroes and my first love, cricket.
Peter Quirk and Geoff Kirk – Quirky and Kirky, my life’s Bill and Ben – are committee members of the Hunter Lord Taverners, a charitable organisation who raise funds to support the sight impaired and others with disabilities to have sporting experiences otherwise denied them by a lack of the advantages us able-bodied folks take for granted. This merry bunch, whom I would euphemistically describe as experienced, also travel around Australia and the world, playing veterans cricket convincing themselves that grace takes precedence over power and the quick single was always over-rated. They play from old memories in making new ones.
Quirky and Kirky had invited me and another close mate, Claude, to attend a luncheon celebration of the 40th anniversary of the NSW Blues win in the inaugural Sheffield Shield Final. Organised by the Taverners Patron, the then skipper of the NSW side, Rick McCosker and featuring the other ten players who took the field with him over the five days of the Final, three months of anticipation became an afternoon which may have started as recollection but became so much more.
The attendees were (in batting order from the Final):
Rick McCosker, John Dyson, Steve Smith (the original), Dirk Wellham, Peter Toohey, Trevor Chappell, Greg Matthews, Murray Bennett, Steve Rixon, Geoff Lawson, Mike Whitney.
Missing in action from the twelve selected was twelfth man Lenny Pascoe who chose to replicate his role in Perth but this time, not even watch from the sidelines.
If you want the facts and figures of the match, you can go here but I have no intention of falling into the trap of letting them get in the way of the good stories told throughout the afternoon. Suffice to say, neither side reached 300 in the four complete innings of the match. There were no centuries to the batsmen and Lawson’s second innings 5-52 was the only five wicket haul and a man of the match performance. Most present said that honour belonged to Trevor Chappell, whose all round contribution was crucial.
Over three courses, the players regaled us with anecdotes from the game, firstly with knives and forks emphasising key points in personal exchanges as they broke bread with us at our tables. Two seats to my right, Mike Whitney was an entertaining and effusive source of stories, not the least being the role he played in the marriage of Randwick and Petersham, early in his continuing twenty three years as president of the merger.