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John Snow exclusive interview: How the man who terrorised Australia and the authorities changed cricket forever
Search for 1970s fast bowler John Snow on YouTube and you’ll find a black-and-white video of him ripping through the Aussies in Sydney. One ball bowls Greg Chappell behind his legs; another rears up to send Graham McKenzie spinning away with blood pouring from his nose.
At the end of a brutal seven-wicket spell, Snow is lionised by ABC host Richie Benaud. “What a tremendous performance that was, John. One of the best I’ve seen.” To which Snow offers an embarrassed little laugh. “Very kind of you to say so, Richie. You’ve seen a few others better than that I’m sure.”
The exchange made me smile because it is all so polite, more decorous than tea at the vicarage. Which, incidentally, is where Snow grew up, as the son of a Scottish clergyman.
And yet this vignette gives little idea of what a hellraiser Snow once was: not only a classic “nasty fastie” with a lethal bouncer – once described by Ian Chappell as the best overseas bowler he ever faced – but also a notorious thorn in the side of the British establishment.
If he wasn’t felling tailenders or barging Sunil Gavaskar to the ground – an infamous incident at Lord’s that the MCC held against him for years – Snow was arguing the toss over the insulting working conditions that prevailed in the early-to-mid 1970s.
In fact, he was so determined to improve the cricketer’s lot that he became a kind of early Bosman. In 1977, when the old guard tried to strangle World Series Cricket at birth, Snow claimed restraint of trade at the High Court.
Joined by a pair of South Africans in Tony Greig and Mike Procter, he won a historic victory, one for which Thursday’s new IPL millionaires should be enormously grateful.
When I called 79-year-old Snow at his home in Sussex last week, I was intending to discuss the 1970-71 Ashes, which finished 50 years ago on Wednesday. Snow came away with 31 wickets, the best by an England tourist since Harold Larwood in the “Bodyline” series. As it happened, though, we mainly ended up discussing Snow’s activism.
Rarely has such a quiet man – a dreamer with a sideline in Wordsworth-style poetry – had to shout so loudly to be heard.
“I wasn’t always nasty to the people in power,” Snow tells me. “I started off polite. But I soon discovered that if you stood up as an individual you got shot and sandbagged. You had to think much bigger, co-operate as a group. That’s what World Series Cricket was all about.”
The 1970-71 Ashes delivered one of only five post-War series wins Down Under. But the cricket was only part of the story. During our conversation, Snow describes some of the ructions behind the scenes.
“They told us we were playing an extra Test match, to make up for the one that was rained off, but they didn’t offer us any more money. We almost went on strike. When you’re charging around Australia like a blue-arsed fly, and you have that rammed down your throat, you start asking ‘What the hell is going on?’”
The injustice stuck in Snow’s craw, and – in his opinion – added to the gradual radicalisation of other Packer recruits, such as the mild-mannered Kent duo of Derek Underwood and Alan Knott.
But if Snow’s memories of 1970-71 are coloured by his run-ins with David Clark, England’s starchy tour manager, the most famous episode was the mini-riot that halted the final Test in Sydney.
It hardly needs saying that Snow was at the heart of this imbroglio as well. It began when he struck Australian leg-spinner Terry Jenner with a shortish ball that Jenner ducked into. All series, his instructions from captain Ray Illingworth had been to terrorise the Aussies with short, sharp spells. One Australian cricket writer suggested that he had “a healthy touch of brimstone in his bloodstream”.
When Snow had been warned for a similarly chest-high ball in Perth, two months earlier, he had responded by firing one at Doug Walters’s head, turning to the hard-nosed Australian umpire Lou Rowan, and saying, “Now that’s a f---ing bouncer”. Now, as Rowan warned him again, he simply took his cap and skulked off to fine leg.
But when beer cans started raining onto the outfield, and a particularly well-oiled fan leaned over the fence to grab Snow by the arm, England captain Illingworth led the team off. They refused to return until the field had been cleared and the crowd subdued by police.
“We all walked back into the dressing room in a crocodile,” says Snow, “with Ray and I somewhere in the middle. We had Clark standing at one end telling us to go back out, and Rowan storming in at the other to say we would forfeit the match. Ray was bouncing up and down in the middle, which was lucky, because if he could have got to either one, he might have swung for them.
“Clark was just very old-school. I had a confrontation with him in Perth, after a net session, when he asked me why I was so awkward. He even used the C-word! I was so annoyed I had to get away for 24 hours, went off to Fremantle and stayed with a mate.”
Soon after the Sydney insurrection had been quelled, England rounded off their 2-0 series win through the spin of Illingworth and Underwood. This remains a unique achievement. Fifty-seven teams have travelled to Australia for a series of four Tests or more, and Illingworth’s men are still the only ones not to lose a Test.
Snow missed the moment of glory, after ramming his hand into the picket fence while going for a catch on the final day. A quick operation was needed, but he returned for the celebrations. His autobiography, Cricket Rebel, marvels at the number of times Basil D’Oliveira “stabbed his forefinger into the chest of complete strangers and told them, ‘We stuffed you!’”
The same autobiography speaks of Snow’s satisfaction at ticking off a lifetime ambition – one he had held close since “a youth spent hawk-like wheeling and swooping in the innocent pleasures of the countryside”. But as his plane gained altitude over Darwin on its way home, a new ambition was forming in his mind. “To have my say [about] the biased attitude and incompetence ... in cricket administration.”
“Back then, it was all still gentlemen and players, dyed-in-the-wool attitudes,” Snow says. “I can understand that people who had been through the War were used to hierarchy. But the game was changing around them. Society was opening up. I started playing for England in the late 60s, just as Freddie Laker’s package tours were taking ordinary people to Florida for the first time.”
Snow’s choice of words reveals his personal interest in the travel industry. He formed a cricket touring business after retirement, and those who knew him in that guise – I was one client – only ever saw the man from the Benaud interview: diffident, understated, quintessentially English.
But there has always been another side to him – an inner fire that would spark up when he encountered cant or hypocrisy.
The opposition to Packer was a classic case. Snow recalls a “childish argument” with the lawyer from Lord’s, who insisted that his April-to-September contract with Sussex actually bound him for the whole year. “It was one of those ’tis, ’tisn’t sort of things. The same man was sitting in the front row of the High Court when the verdict was handed down. They wasted hundreds of thousands on a case they could never win.”
So, after all the build-up, was World Series everything he had hoped for? The answer, for the most part, is yes.
"Packer was there, waiting, when we landed,” Snow recalls. “He said, ‘If you’re here to f--- about, you might as well get back on the plane’. And, yes, it was hard work for everyone. But the difference was that he looked after you.
“We were playing in Sydney one time and this officious little steward tried to stop the wives and families as they walked around looking for somewhere to sit, told them they couldn’t go in the Members’ Area. Packer overheard and said, ‘I’ve rented this stadium for the day, they can sit where they want’.”
Finally, Snow had discovered freedom from small minds and piffling rules. It was what he had been searching for, ever since he wheeled hawk-like on those Sussex downs.
