Australia's 1884-85 Strike — Eleven New Caps in One Test

The 1884 Australian tour of England had been a commercial success. When the players returned, they argued they had earned the right to negotiate as a collective. The VCA, the dominant administrative body in Australian cricket then, took a different view: gate receipts belonged to the host association, which paid players a fee.

The 1884-85 series had begun with a comfortable Australian win in the first Test at Adelaide. The Melbourne Test was the second of a five-match series. The strike news broke in the Melbourne press in mid-January, days before the match.

Australia's victorious 1884 tour of England had returned with substantial profits, divided between players, agent Conway and the various colonial associations. When the home Test series began against the visiting English side under Shaw and Shrewsbury in late 1884, Murdoch and his fellow tourists demanded 50% of the gate from the second Test. The VCA, citing precedent, offered 30%. Negotiations collapsed.

For the Melbourne Test starting 19 January 1885, the entire 1884 touring party — Murdoch, Bannerman, Bonnor, Spofforth, McDonnell, Scott, Boyle, Palmer, Giffen, Cooper and Midwinter — refused to play. The Victoria selectors picked a virtually new side. Tom Horan was named captain; Sammy Jones was the only other player retained from the first Test (held earlier in Adelaide). Of the eleven who took the field, nine were on Test debut.

The replacement Australians were brave but outclassed. England won by 10 wickets, with Shrewsbury and Barnes seeing them home. The strike collapsed within weeks; the VCA refused to budge and Murdoch's men returned for the third Test, but the damage to Australian harmony lasted years. Murdoch effectively retired from Tests after 1884 (he made one further appearance in 1890), and the tour profits dispute marked the formal beginning of the long Australian conversation about player pay that would erupt again in 1912 with the Big Six dispute.

“An action that has placed Australian cricket in a position of unparalleled difficulty.”

The strike collapsed without VCA concessions. Murdoch and most of the 1884 tourists returned for the third Test at Sydney, but Murdoch played only one more Test for Australia. England went on to win the series 3-2.

The larger structural argument — between players claiming a share of profit and associations claiming control — would recur in Australian cricket throughout the next 130 years, most famously in the 1912 Big Six revolt, the 1977 Packer split, and the 2017 pay dispute under Cricket Australia chairman David Peever.