GREG AND TREVOR CHAPPELL talk every few weeks about issues any set of brothers would chew over.

But there’s one that’s never been discussed in detail and probably never will ... it’s that day and that ball.

It’s 40 years next Monday since former Australian captain Greg instructed Trevor to bowl the underarm delivery to New Zealand’s Brian McKechnie when the visitors needed six runs off the final ball of the match to tie a 50-over game against Australia at the MCG.

McKechnie blocked the ball away, tossed his bat in anger and a trans-Tasman feud like no other erupted as New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon called it “an act of true cowardice and I consider it appropriate that the Australian team were wearing yellow”.

Trevor has had four decades to deep dive on the issue with his big brother had the mood taken him.

But the pragmatic youngest brother of three Test players, admired by the likes of former Test captain Mark Taylor for his love of the game, simply shrugs it all off in the belief some things are best left unsaid.

“I remember talking to Greg in the 1990s when he was living in Canberra and it was February 1, the anniversary,’’ Trevor told The Courier-Mail.

“I said to him ‘you know what today is?’ That is about as close as we have come to really talking about it.

“There is not much point. It was a negative thing in your life. Get over it. Get on with life.

“That’s also the reason why I have never said sorry to the New Zealanders. Whether I am sorry or whether I am not is not going to change anything. It is not going to make any difference to them.

“One thing I have learnt in life and focus on negative events it does not do you mental health or physical health any good. For the most part I try not to think about it but a situation at the moment with the 40th anniversary will be hard to avoid. Then it is just a matter of taking it as light and easy as possible. Get on the bandwagon without taking the piss out of it really.

“Greg told me he had a couple of lines ready, like the day I chased him around the backyard with a tomahawk when we were young. He reckons it took him a long time to get revenge but he got me in the end.”

Trevor did not find out until well after the incident, through Greg’s own confessions to the media, how exhausted Greg had been at the time with constant fights with officialdom leaving him, in his own words, “unfit to be captain’’ at the time of the incident.

However massive the fallout, this much is certain – had it happened today it would have been not so much a bushfire as a collision of planets due to the inflammatory forces of social media.

ACCEPTING THE CONSEQUENCES

TREVOR NEVER REVELLED in the notoriety but he did learn to roll with it.

He partnered McKechnie in a benefit game for New Zealand opener Bruce Edgar in

Wellington in 1986 and when signing autographs on the boundary heard someone say “it’s not you we want it’s your brother.’’

On another occasion he was at a function in Auckland when the leader of the Kiwi supporters group – the Beige Brigade – said his father thought Trevor was “an arsehole’’ but would he mind signing his birthday card.

“I signed it ‘So you think I am an arsehole do you? Happy birthday.’ The guy thought it was hilarious. The Kiwi players have been fine. I get along very well with a lot of them.’’

“Not so much in recent years but when I was playing for a lot of years after it when I was bowling someone would yell out ‘try an underarm’.

“Quite often if I was introduced to someone I would say ‘Trevor Chappell’ and they would say ‘the underarm bowler’. It comes up a little bit.’’

Chappell’s memory of the moment which changed his life is clear.

“Greg said to me ‘how is your underarm bowling?’ and I said ‘I don’t know’ and he said ‘you are just about to find out’. I said ‘OK, sounds all right’.

“Rod Marsh was saying ‘don’t do it’ but I just shrugged my shoulders and pointed in Greg’s direction and said ‘tell him, not me’.”

Would he handle it differently today?

“I would have to do it differently because it is illegal now. I was a new player in the team. I did not feel I had any authority to say ‘I don‘t think that is a great idea’,’’ Chappell said.

“I do remember Dennis Lillee saying if he had been asked to do it there was a ball he could have bowled which was just as effective as the underarm.”

THE ONGOING FALLOUT

THE PLAYERS DID not have to wait long to realise they were the centre of a cyclone.

“When we got back to the dressing room no-one touched a beer, not even Doug Walters,” Chappell said.

“(Former Test player and Australian selector) Sam Loxton came down and spoke with Greg. He was obviously a big fan of the MCG and was really upset it happened at the G. He left in tears.”

Then Joe Public muscled their way into the equation in the most unusual way.

“I was right near the dressing room phone. The first call came from Perth and some bloke said he wanted to speak to Greg. I said he was not available. Then came a call from New Zealand and I said the same thing. I certainly didn’t tell him who I was,’’ Chappell said.

Small signs told Trevor the world was starting to spin on its axis.

“Normally the tunnel we would go through out the back of the change rooms would be full of kids looking for autographs. Someone looked out and noticed it was empty. That was very unusual,” he said.

“We packed our bags headed up to Hilton pack up go to airport. Players tried to lighten it up. Doug Walters had that line about how the game is never over until the last ball is bowled. Len Pascoe joked that next time Greg spoke to the media he would say ‘I have got no idea why Trevor would do something like that’”.