Waves crashing. Cicadas singing. And always the burble of cricket on the radio, unifying summers and people with its gentle pleasures for an uncertain world. My father was a man of his generation, which meant when summer rolled around and the cricket season started, he insisted on muting Channel Nine’s coverage and blasting the ABC’s radio commentary instead.
![[Villagers play twilight cricket in a township 70km south of Srinagar, summer capital of Kashmir.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4094eb5dc2cd88b1f6fde1ac8c4a397f71261fed/0_75_3000_1799/master/3000.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Ours was a complicated relationship but one thing for which I’ll be forever grateful was the way my father shared his love for Test cricket with me. I grew up as a cricket obsessive. My love for the game survived childhood, adolescence, and even the realisation that, given I was batting No 11 for South Melbourne under-12s, my dream to open the batting for Australia was unlikely to be fulfilled.
![[Henry Blofeld and the BBC radio Test match special team in the commentary box at Lord’s.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d98987a936f5fbe1becc5c5a226e55dee34c8283/0_7_3788_2274/master/3788.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
And while the reasons for my father’s aversion to the collegiate atmosphere of Nine’s commentary remain a mystery, I’m glad he insisted on the ABC commentary, because it led to radio and cricket becoming synonymous to me. So I dashed to the car when my mum picked me up from school, desperate to turn on the radio – usually to hear one the great West Indies teams of the 1980s had yet again laid waste to the Australian batting order. I listened from the beach in 1989 as Allan Border turned the tables on the Windies with his left-arm spin, taking 11 wickets on the way to a famous SCG victory. And I tuned in on my Walkman a few years later as a chubby kid from Sandringham made his Test debut – and had his leg-breaks smashed all around the park.
