Australia v India: The ugly day John Snow was grabbed by a spectator at the SCG

It’s been 50 years since the worst day in cricket spectator history at the SCG, when tensions between the crowd and the English team boiled over.

Batsman Terry Jenner on ground after being struck on back of head by a John Snow bouncer.

Next month is the 50th anniversary of one of Test match cricket’s most dramatic days ... but there will be no celebration.

And after yesterday’s events at the same ground we can fully understand why.

It was the day when another SCG Test match ground to a halt after an on-field showdown and a drunken fan set an Ashes Test ablaze.

However tense it may have been in the stands and on the field after Mohammed Siraj was abused at the SCG on Sunday it didn’t quite top the Richter scale reading of the day English fast bowler John Snow was grabbed by a spectator in the seventh Ashes Test of 1970-71 at the same ground.

Guy gets Snow by the arm.

Trevor Guy grabs at John Snow.

English captain Ray Illingworth led his team off the field after Snow, fielding on the boundary, was grabbed by a spectator who became called “the man in the towelling hat.’’

After decades of anonymity, Trevor Guy, then a Sylvania Waters resident, came forward and owned up after answering a plea from ABC radio.

Guy admitted he was angry at Snow for hitting tailender Terry Jenner in the head.

England had moved a short leg to near Jenner’s hip pocket and he was felled in a sickening blow.

Dozens of beer cans rained onto the ground and many were aimed at the fast bowler. It was mayhem.

Umpire Lou Rowan argues with fast bowler John Snow and captain Ray Illingworth after an incident in which tail-end batsman Terry Jenner was assisted from field after being hit by bouncer.

Journalists covering the game wrote that Snow deliberately fielded ultra-close to the boundary as a “come on then’’ gesture to angry fans but he denied this.

Snow was angry at being warned by umpire Lou Rowan for intimidatory bowling and incredulous that his team could not snare an lbw verdict in the seven Test series.

Rowan, a police detective with an iron will and a love of robust debate, told Illingworth to return his team to the field or forfeit the match.

Rowan late wrote of the incident he had no regrets.

“It is not a happy thought that, as an umpire, I might have been the spark to explode Anglo-Australian Test cricket relations to smithereens,” Rowan wrote.

Terry Jenner goes down after being hit in the head.

“But I have no regrets for my part in the affair; I would act no differently in similar circumstances now, whether at club or international cricket level.”

“But cricket had a close shave that day at the SCG, a mighty close one when one considers how easily events far less acrimonious than Ray Illingworth’s had been built into international incidents ... I had to act, as I have repeatedly done in my job as a policeman in Brisbane and elsewhere, in the interests of maintaining the peace.”

Tension between Rowan and Snow had been rising all series.

Rowan had warned Snow for intimidatory bowling during the second Test prompting him to unleash the mother of all bouncers whizzing past Ian Redpath’s baggy green cap.

“That’s a real bouncer,’’ Snow said to Rowan.

Earlier he has suggested his previous shorter balls were not bouncers to which the umpire replied “Someone’s bowling them from this end and it’s not me.”