Pitch perfect: why listening to cricket on radio soothes a world that won’t hear sense

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.

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.

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.

When my life took me away from Australia, it was always easier to find the cricket on the radio than on the TV. I sat in my London bedsit and listened with mounting disbelief to VVS Laxman crafting his masterpiece during India’s famous come-from-behind victory at Eden Gardens in 2001. Four years later, while living in India, I got hold of a questionable BBC stream to hear England regain the Ashes.

Whenever I found myself home during summer, I seized the opportunity to visit the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Whatever else happened, day two of the Boxing Day Test was always my day at the cricket. Even then, the force of decades’ worth of acquired habit meant I’d turn on the radio for the other days, instead of trying to work out where to find the TV telecast.

And now, two decades later, I’m sitting in a new home in Brooklyn, looking down at a dark, wet street, wondering if it’ll ever snow again, and listening to the cricket.

Nostalgia is the most seductive of poisons but hearing Australia play India on the radio feels like a small but vital link to a time when the world felt like it made some sort of sense. A lost era of lazy days bookended by radio cricket commentary melting into the distant sound of crashing surf and cicadas that began singing in the hour before stumps.

Those years seem impossibly distant in America’s winter of discontent. Like many in this country, I find myself contemplating the end of a difficult year and the imminent arrival of one that will likely bring nothing better. The sense of possibility that once came with a future that felt unwritten has long since gone, replaced by a queasy feeling of dread and a fear that if anything is to change, it will change only for the worse.

Everything changes, even the cricket commentary. As the years have come and gone, so have the voices on the radio. Players’ names have changed as careers have begun, flourished, and ended. Even the subtle rhythms of the game itself have evolved. These days we have Tests decided in two days, something that would have been unthinkable to my father and his generation. Even the way I listen has changed: the crackle of the humble transistor radio has long since been replaced by the crystal-clear sound of an internet stream.

But the experience of listening remains: a quiet, simple pleasure, an anchor for a peripatetic life, a source of certainty – or something that feels like certainty – in a world that feels ever more uncertain. Here comes McDermott/ McGrath/ Starc. Three slips and a gully. Mid-on, mid-off. Cover, extra cover. Deep backward square leg. The crowd roars.