Cricket identity recalls threats crisis

The Australian team received death threats from Pakistani extremists. Then, a novice tour manager made a decision which saved world cricket.

It was 1979. Australia's cricketers were in India. Bob Merriman was their tour manager.

He wasn't initially meant to be there.

But Merriman soon was the central figure in a flashpoint in which the lives of Australia's cricketers were threatened and relations imperiled between the sport's powers.

The largely untold tale involves Kerry Packer and Don Bradman, Australian and Indian governments and their emissaries, Pakistani extremists, the disputed territory of Kashmir, India's army, and cricketers such as Kim Hughes and Jim Higgs.

And Merriman.

He had never been overseas before being called-up to manage the team a month before departure when the wife of incumbent manager Sam Loxton fell ill.

Merriman, if he ultimately made a different decision, has little doubt of the ramifications.

"The relationship with India ... would have been just destroyed forever," Merriman told AAP on Thursday.

"And that would have meant in subsequent years ... the only relationships we would have had in cricket would have probably been New Zealand and England.

"Because India from there on, from 1980, 81, maybe 82, they dominated world cricket in organisational structure.

"They had West Indies covered, they had South Africa covered, they had Zimbabwe covered. It just wasn't the Asian bloc - and it still isn't."

The crisis centred around Australia's tour game in Srinagar, Kashmir, ahead of a six-Test series in India.

The tour from August to November, in the maddening Indian summer heat, was a "goodwill tour", Merriman said.

Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket and the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) had just