Motivation Quote by Tony Greig

Greig’s line has the casual shrug of a locker-room aside, but it’s really a quietly radical claim about power: one media tycoon didn’t just change cricket’s business model, he changed what the sport is allowed to look like. By framing Packer as an unknowable “what if,” Greig isn’t praising a patron so much as underlining how thoroughly Packer rewired the game’s incentives, aesthetics, and labor relations.

The key move is in “the world over.” Greig widens the blast radius beyond Australia’s World Series Cricket in the late 1970s, suggesting a ripple effect that became baseline: night matches, white balls, colored kits, prime-time TV logic, aggressive marketing, and above all the normalization of players as paid talent with leverage. “Will ever know” hints at a historical amnesia built into modern fandom. Once the circus becomes the tent, it stops feeling like a renovation and starts feeling like tradition.

There’s subtext, too: Greig is speaking as someone who got burned and benefited. His own involvement with Packer cost him the England captaincy and made him a symbol in cricket’s culture war between old guardianship and new money. So the sentence carries a faint defensiveness: don’t reduce this to betrayal; recognize the structural shift.

It works because it compresses a messy moral story into a single counterfactual. Greig isn’t arguing Packer was good. He’s arguing Packer was decisive, and cricket has been living in that decision ever since.