1. Chappelli the player

Neither a supreme stylist nor a statistical titan, Ian Chappell was a fearless batsman who hooked and pulled with an indomitable spirit throughout his career, eager to attack and score briskly. Across two full decades of first-class cricket he always strode purposefully to the crease with an upturned collar and a compulsion to fidget, repeatedly marking out his guard and adjusting his protector in a series of idiosyncratic tics. Upon facing up his first movement was invariably back and across the crease, ready to play favoured horizontal bat strokes.

Chappell was stumped only twice in his first hundred Test innings. Richie Benaud once labelled his supple footwork to spinners “close to perfect”. He took some time to find his feet as an international batsman, but once promoted to No 3 in the 1968-69 home summer against the West Indies, he flourished and made the spot his own. There was 117 and 50 in the Brisbane Test, 165 at the MCG, and 76 and 96 on his home ground Adelaide; 548 in all, helping Australia to a 3-1 series victory.

“By 26 he developed a fully furnished batting style with wall-to-wall footwork,” said Ray Robinson. To him, Chappell was “a cricket Houdini”, both for what he was able to conjure as a captain and the physical durability he showed as a batsman in a run of 71 Tests without injury.

John Arlott called Chappell “a cricketer of effect rather than the graces” and at no time was he more effective than in partnership with his younger brother Greg. Both scored centuries in a 201-run stand in the 1972 Oval Test, which Australia won by five wickets. A partnership of 264 was plundered at the expensive of the 1974 New Zealanders in Wellington, with Ian (145 and 121) and Greg (247 and 133) making remarkable twin centuries. The irony of that familial dominance was that it came in a drawn encounter, a result that wasn’t of much appeal to Chappelli the captain. Fittingly, his own high water mark of 196 came in a crushing innings victory over Pakistan at Adelaide in 1972.

An underrated aspect of Chappell’s batting when he was also encumbered with that captaincy (for 30 Tests), was that his openers shielded him from the new ball to the extent of a 100-run partnership only twice. In 29 innings during that time he entered the crease with fewer than 20 runs on the board. Never did that pressure faze him unduly.

His were fighting instincts. After rolling his ankle on a tennis ball 24 hours before the third Test of Australia’s 1973 tour of the West Indies, Chappell iced the injury, strapped his foot and despite the limitations placed upon his signature footwork, played a match-winning innings of 97 to help Australia to a narrow victory. In that innings the West Indies spin triumvirate of Lance Gibbs, Inshan Ali and Elquemedo Willett bowled 94 of the 107 overs on a sharply turning wicket.

Chappell’s career record of 14 Test centuries doesn’t tell the full story. He made another four against Garry Sobers’s World XI of 1971-72, matches against formidable attacks that nevertheless don’t count on official Test records. As reliable a slip fielder as any to play the game, Chappell snared 105 catches in Test cricket and took a staggering 27 in the summer of 1968-69.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chappell’s 192 against England at the Oval in 1975.

2. Chappelli the captain

It’s no coincidence that Ian Chappell never lost a single Test series as Australian captain. Though he’d inherited a mess after Bill Lawry’s exit, his men lived and breathed the Gospel of Chappelli and he extracted every ounce of ability from them.

“The most important objective in my cricket life was to win the respect of the players in my team,” Chappell once said. According to one of his charges, John Benaud, players were “forever volunteering to walk on water for him”.

Playing under the adventurous Les Favell at South Australia in the early stages of his career formed a great deal of Chappell’s cricket philosophy. Elevated by Favell from the middle-order to No 3 (above Sobers), the young Chappell scored a double-century two games later. That willingness to give responsibility and backing to the player rubbed off on Chappell in his own leadership.

Chappell was having lunch in a cafe when the call came from a journalist that he would replace Lawry as national captain. Lawry himself was just as shocked, hearing the news on the radio. Out of the experience Chappell vowed that administrators would “never get me like that”.

Chappell was a lateral thinker when it came to tactics. In his first Test as captain he won the toss and elected to bowl, a call he had never before made as a first-class captain. Hours later England had been bowled out for 184 with spinners Terry Jenner and Kerry O’Keefe sharing six wickets.

Under Chappell, every player knew his role and none wanted to disappoint their captain. He was the first Australian to lead his country in 30 Tests, a period of continuity we would now take for granted, but it was time enough to shape a tough, era-defining side from which many of the sweat-soaked myths and legends of Australian cricket sprang. Robinson said Chappell’s success as captain was underpinned by his ability to keep the “psychological temperature of the dressing room at [a] tolerable level”.

Chappell believed in catering to the differences between individuals, and his primary interest in a player was whether he’d offer Chappell a century or five wickets. Camaraderie was vital and a key responsibility of the skipper.

“Kim Hughes made the comment that you can’t be one of the boys and be a good captain,” Chappell said recently, “which is the greatest load of codswallop I’ve ever heard in my life.”

In hindsight it’s clearer to see that Ian Chappell was born to Australian captaincy – his directness and will to win could certainly be seen as an apple not falling far from the tree. His grandfather Victor Richardson was a popular captain and lead Australia in five of his 19 Test matches, and his brother Greg followed him into the top job.

“He bred loyalty,” Jenner said. In one Shield game against Victoria, a sparse Adelaide crowd of about 200 began heckling Jenner as he bowled. Chappell told the bowler to leave the retorts to him.

“Ian started to call them wankers and returned their insults. They left me alone and went for him.” Soon enough, a refocused Jenner had four wickets to his name.

In 1975 it was Chappell himself that took the initiative to pass on the leadership to his brother, thus refusing to allow the board to beat him to it. On hearing news of the announcement, one unnamed administrator was quoted as saying, “I’m glad the bastard has gone. He’s a bloody rebel.”

“I’ve had enough … enough of the pressure and enough of the glory, too,” were Chappell’s parting words. But he was right, they hadn’t “got him”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chappell on the difference between captaincy and leadership.

3. Chappelli the pundit

As a writer and broadcaster, Chappell has always been every bit as forthright as he was as a player, never suffering fools and often getting to the nub of issues where others are prepared to blather inconsequentially.

Chappell has always expressed a preference for the written word over his commentary work for Nine and broadcasters around the cricket world. “In television you’ve got so many other blokes putting in their bit,” he said.

As a prolific columnist, Chappell holds the increasingly rare distinction among players of having completely resisted the blunt hand of a ghostwriter. In the early 1970s, magazine editor Eric Beecher granted him six weeks’ grace before deciding whether any intervention was necessary and a follow-up discussion never eventuated.

“I think if you’re going to take the cheque you should write the column,” Chappell told the Guardian .

Without his long-time television offsiders Richie Benaud, Lawry and Tony Greig, Chappell is now an oddity hemmed into the jocular, frat-party atmosphere of the Nine commentary box, and also a lone wolf in the credibility stakes.

Unperturbed, many of his sharpest takes on the game are now seen in the more cerebral, open-ended and engaging Google+ video blogs he does for Cricinfo, where he’s taken on a Yoda-like quality and proved that you can teach an old dog new tricks. There’s something appealing about watching Chappell, free from the constraints of commercial TV, exchanging ideas with a new generation of fans via webcam with a nondescript study as his backdrop.

Chappell has always known his own mind, making him one of the most engaging pundits in the business. In the early 90s he was asked by a journalist whether everything he was saying was on the record. Chappell responded bluntly, “Mate, if I don’t want you to fucking quote me on something, I won’t fucking say it.”

No great fan of the defensive captaincy style of India’s MS Dhoni, Chappell made headlines last year for his refusal to suppress his strong views when offered a commentary post for the seven-game one-day series between India and Australia.

Invited by ESPN to call the series, Chappell was nonplussed once he found out he would be subject to editorial restrictions by the home board. “I couldn’t talk about Indian selection, DRS or administrative matters,” Chappell said. “I responded saying I didn’t feel I could do my job properly under those circumstances and therefore declined the offer.”

His spot was filled by the more malleable Matthew Hayden.

His views remain pungent and ever-quotable. Last year he told The Cricketer, “If you want to know how to run cricket, have a look at what England do, do the opposite and you’ll be fairly close to the mark.”

Asked for his thoughts on the cult of the baggy green, Chappell replied, “It’s a five-dollar piece of cloth. Now it’s given this huge fanfare. That’s bullshit. Bill Lawry used to use it to clean out the loft and it was covered in pigeon droppings.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chappell on the fifth Test of last year’s Ashes series.

4. Chappelli the icon

If Ian Chappell was revered as a cricketer and a leader of men, he also remains a strong symbol of a bygone era when Australian cricketers smashed the system and endured times of immense upheaval to secure a brighter future for themselves and those who followed. It was Chappell who did their bidding and who always fought tooth and nail for their interests. Every Australian cricketer since owes him a debt. Without a players association or even a coach to call upon, he shouldered much of the burden alone.

Critics saw Chappell as symbolic of an increasingly ugly Australia, where trade unions were gaining unprecedented powers and the national cricket team looked and sometimes behaved like a marauding gang of bikies. Mike Coward saw it in a positive light and remarked that Chappell “wore a blue singlet under his white shirt … there was always a little bit of the unionist in him, and I think that was based on that sense of fair play and a sense of justice”.

“There was never any doubt that Ian was going to clash with cricket administrators just because of their attitude,” said his brother Greg. “I mean, his attitude was one of break or break through. If he felt that somebody was holding him back or holding us back, the he was going to challenge it.”

Despite his role in revolutionising the game as a key player in the World Series breakaway, Chappell rails against any inflation of his standing within the game. “Everyone nowadays seems to be a bloody legend,” he said last year. “Some kid’ll came up and say, ‘Can I have your autograph, you’re a legend.’ Mate, have a look at this – see, two arms, two legs – I’m not a legend, I’m the same as everybody else.”

The barbs were inevitable. “The self-daubed smudge on Ian Chappell’s public image looked darker and uglier to older generations,” said Robinson, “finding it most difficult to accept that, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, offence is in the ear of the hearer.”

5. The lesser-known Chappelli

As he advances in years, Chappell has become noticeably more engaged on a number of non-cricket issues, particularly over the past decade. A noted republican, Chappell is also an outspoken advocate for the rights of asylum seekers and is a high-profile protester against mandatory detention. In an episode of ABC’s Australian Story in the wake of the Tampa crisis, Chappell said, “No matter what you think about protecting the Australian borders, these are human beings and you can’t just treat them like that.

“The games that I’ve played in my life are very good tutors in teaching you what is fair and what is unfair. And that was why I was offended by what I saw with the Tampa crisis. I just thought, ‘That’s not fair.’” Drafted in to help the UNHCR with their advocacy for asylum seeker rights, Chappell said he wanted to “do a bit more than write a letter and send it out”, so soon joined A Just Australia, a lobby group campaigning for a fairer go for asylum seekers. That willingness to fight for the underdog and call a spade a spade is consistent thread of the Chappell ethos.

Chappell’s sense of fair play and loyalty to his peers was exemplified in the compassion shown to his former teammate Jenner when the spinner was jailed for embezzlement and at his lowest ebb. Among Jenner’s first visitors in jail, Chappell used his media appearances and Sun-Herald column to ask that Jenner be given a second chance.

Often Chappell will seek to deny he’s any great student of cricket’s history, but among his areas of interest he campaigned vocally for proper recognition of the first Australian side to tour England, the Aboriginal tourists of 1868. “It was important that Australian cricket recognised what these blokes did,” he said.

6. Chappelli’s beefs

As might be expected of someone with such forthright opinions and sense of his own mind, Chappell has always had a tendency to create conflict. To Chappell, Steve Waugh was a selfish captain who “ran out of ideas quickly”. Former teammate Max Walker “doesn’t know much about anything … He’s not interested in anything but himself and his next pat answer … And you know what, I’ve never seen the colour of his money.”

Of the latter-day revival of his famous bar-room clash with Ian Botham, of which each has a differing account, Chappell recently noted that the author of the story, Charlie Sale of the Daily Mail, had “written a fairytale on this occasion”. He added, “that makes them a good pair because Botham deals in fairytales as well”.

He was an outspoken critic of Kim Hughes throughout the Western Australian’s career, first shunning him during the latter’s short-lived move to South Australia in 1974-75, a period in which the talented batsman wasn’t even invited to train with the Chappell-led SACA squad. That snub was repeated during the World Series breakaway, when Chappell was selecting the list of Australian players at the behest of Kerry Packer. Later he would write that Hughes and another ill-fated Australian, Graham Yallop, were “the worst choice as leaders since Robert O’Hara Burke … the only difference with Yallop and Hughes is they got away with their lives”.

Still, Chappell is the first to acknowledge Hughes’s gifts as a batsman, recently labelling his unbeaten 100 against the West Indies in 1981-82 Australia’s greatest postwar innings and “the bravest innings I’ve ever seen”.

His strike threat and stand-off with the SACA on a range of petty administrative issues was orchestrated to establish a fairer deal for his players after Chappell had felt slighted by the board not consulting him on the selection of a squad to play in Sydney and Brisbane. Under duress Chappell caved in, saying: “I have lost all feeling for the SACA. I have no respect for the association. I am going for the players.”

One of two players to vote against Chappell’s strike, Gary Cosier, would later pay a price when, like Hughes, he failed to receive a lucrative World Series Cricket offer.

Most famously of all, Chappell butted heads with Sir Donald Bradman in the latter’s days as an administrator. Honesty and a man’s word have always been paramount to Chappell.

“There were a couple of occasions when I didn’t get truthful answers from Don Bradman and that affected the relationship from my end.

“If I’m asked the question, I’ve got no problems saying what I thought of him.”