DON NOT ON: Former Australian cricketer Gary Cosier. Picture: Liam Kidston. Source: The Courier-Mail
WORLD Series Cricket outcast Gary Cosier has lifted the lid on one of the game's most explosive secrets - the legendary Sir Don Bradman was loathed by many great Australian cricketers of the 1970s and early 80s.
Cosier, who is portrayed in Channel Nine's hit TV series Howzat!, believes Kerry Packer's famous cricket revolution was almost as much spurred by the players' dislike of establishment figure Bradman than money.
Test batsman Cosier was shunned by Packer, not offered a breakaway cricket contract like most of his teammates.
But he has refused to become bitter and is now enjoying life as the chief executive of Brisbane's Indooroopilly Golf Club.
Cosier reveals there was no love lost between senior Australian players of the time and Bradman, cricket's greatest batsman and a leading Australian administrator and selector for several decades.
"The thing that hasn't been written before is that during the 1977 Centenary Test at our pre-match gathering, Rod Marsh and a few other players were just so harsh on Bradman," Cosier told The Courier-Mail.
"We were there to play against the Poms the next day and Sir Donald got as big a serve as any of the Englishmen did - probably a lot more.
"There was an intense, I don't know if hatred is the right word, but dislike (for Bradman).
"Plenty of the players were carrying on about Bradman and saying they couldn't stand him. As long as Bradman was alive, they thought he kind of ran Australian cricket, and they didn't like that."
"The Don" died in 2001 and is such an iconic and revered figure in Australian sport that few are prepared to speak critically of him, despite the fact his administration style was often autocratic and delivered with an iron fist.
HOWZAT: Actor Lachy Hulme as Kerry Packer in a scene from Channel Nine telemovie 'Howzat! Kerry Packer's War'. Source: Supplied
Cosier, 59, believes the breakaway war which led to day-night cricket in coloured clothes was about Packer versus Bradman as much as it was about anything else.
"Between Kerry Packer and Don Bradman there was never going to be a coming together of the minds," Cosier said.
"One would have been completely as steadfast in their belief as the other one.
"What Packer was asking for from the cricket establishment I think was reasonable."
OLD SCHOOL: Australia's Ashes 1977 tour of England, Gary Cosier, David Hookes, Jeff Thomson and Max Walker wearing long johns. Source: The Courier-Mail
Cosier was in an uncomfortable position when his Australian teammates kept their Packer contracts a secret from him.
He says his portrayal in Howzat!, which he watched on Sunday night with his daughter Cheyenne, is fairly accurate but insists he does not hold grudges against Aussie teammates who kept him out of the loop.
"If that was what had to be done I didn't have a problem with being excluded in that manner - because that was what they were instructed to do," Cosier said.
CRICKET GREAT: Sir Donald (Don) Bradman speaks at the opening of the Bradman Museum at Bowral in the Southern Highlands in 1989. Source: The Courier-Mail
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