In 1977, Kerry Packer discovered he could not use the Laws of Cricket. The MCC owned the copyright and they were not going to lend them to a breakaway competition.
So Packer rang a retired Australian captain and asked him to write a new set.
Richie Benaud did it. The playing conditions, the regulations, the whole framework, including the eight-ball over. A parallel rulebook for a parallel sport, written by one man.
And he had been getting ready for something like this for twenty-one years without knowing it. In 1956, while still playing Test cricket for Australia, Benaud arranged three weeks of training at the BBC in the gap between the English and subcontinental legs of the tour. Television had barely reached Australia. Nobody had asked him to do it.
Meanwhile, the man born on exactly the same date, sixteen years later, was doing the dangerous half.
Tony Greig was England's captain in 1977 when he began secretly signing players for Packer, from England, the West Indies and Pakistan. He lost the captaincy for it almost immediately. Then, when the administrators moved to ban everybody involved, Greig went to the High Court in London with Mike Procter and John Snow, and on 25 November 1977 they won.
Now the freakish part is what the two of them became afterwards.
On Channel Nine, Benaud was the voice of authority and Greig was the voice of the spectacle, and between them they turned television rights into the thing that funds the entire sport.
Wisden later wrote that without Benaud to legitimise it, World Series Cricket might never have survived its first difficult months.
Born on the same day, sixteen years apart.
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