and by the time he regained form, Kim Hughes had become the established batsman in "reserve". In January 1977, Ian Chappell selected a hypothetical Ashes tour squad for Cricketer magazine that excluded Yallop, writing that he had not "made enough runs off the Melbourne ground to prove he has the goods" and that "I still maintain that Yallop was picked prematurely for Australia. Yallop was not selected for the tour of England in 1977. Test recall The advent of World Series Cricket (WSC) during 1977 meant that a number of leading Australian cricketers were banned from playing for the national side. Yallop took over the captaincy of Victoria after Richie Robinson signed to play WSC. Bob Simpson came out of retirement to captain Australia over the 1977–78 summer, but Yallop was not selected for the first Test against the touring Indians, once more having started the summer not in top form. Even after a pair of centuries against New South Wales he was not selected until the fifth and final Test of the summer. With the series standing at 2–2, Yallop was selected as vice-captain, scoring 121 runs in Australia's first innings, his maiden Test century as Australian won the series. He made a total of 729 first-class runs that summer, at an average of 56.07 runs per innings. The Australian side to tour the West Indies was selected at the same time as the fifth Test and Yallop played in the first two Tests of the tour before his jaw was broken by a bouncer from Colin Croft after he had scored 118 in a tour game against Guyana. He missed the third Test but regained his place for the subsequent matches in the series, scoring a total of 317 Test runs at an average of 45.29. Australian Captain: "A lamb to the slaughter" At the beginning of the 1978–79 season, the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) decided that Bob Simpson should not continue as captain and Yallop was installed as his replacement ahead of the first Test of the Ashes series against England. The Australian side was inexperienced at an international level. According to Christian Ryan, "Most observers suspected John Inverarity, wily and versatile, would have been a more astute choice" than Yallop; the Australian selectors, however, did not have faith in Inverarity's ability at Test level. Yallop made what he later described as a "flippant" prediction that his