“What are you blokes up to now?” When explaining to friends and colleagues that I had decided to purchase the radio rights for Australia’s Test series against Pakistan, the response bounced somewhere between curious and bewildered. Geoff Lemon and I have frequently taken an unorthodox approach to staying afloat as freelancers, but buying the means of production on my credit cards, without a sponsor in sight, appeared a new and preposterous one.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, to the penultimate delivery of the 90th over of the final day at Dubai. Sure, throughout the gripping struggle our vantage point was air-conditioned and comfortable, as opposed to the sweat-soaked and heatstroked condition of players on the field. But having called half the Test each and stayed on air through almost every interval, we had logged some 21 hours apiece behind the mic by the time Tim Paine’s stoic defencestuck the landing on his fledgling side’s 140-over Mission Impossible.
We did not feel the exhaustion at that point, just the elation and adrenaline at describing a classic moment in Test cricket’s grand narrative, and the energy of having listeners from all over the world surge to our coverage to hear the grandstand conclusion. Still, as soon as the mics went off, we realised our condition was what the Australian parlance would describe as “completely rooted”.
Perhaps not quite as rooted as six months earlier, when the Australian men’s Test team comprehensively destroyed their international reputation in South Africa, and we did not sleep for a week in trying to service every media outlet around the world that wanted round-the-clock updates on the story. But that was not the moment that we reflected on at stumps in Dubai. Instead, we looked back four years, to the corresponding Australia tour of the UAE in Michael Clarke’s reign.
Disclaimer time: there is no way to honour the Guardian’s kind request and tell this tale without now moving into a backstory that could be read as self-indulgent. Please be kind below the line.
In 2014 it was Geoff’s second year running pro-am internet radio commentary out of his living room. He was not the first to chance his hand at calling the cricket off the telly – Daniel Norcross and company of Test Match Sofa had that honour – but he was the first in Australia and had a more pressing reason given there was often no radio coverage of our nation’s overseas tours. I had been pondering a similar idea, so Geoff found me off the internet and gave me a start for his project. We had a ball (-by-ball), commentating from the obscene vinyl and velour couch inside a ramshackle house owned by freemasons who had been threatening to demolish it for a decade. Soon the venture was streamlined and White Line Wireless was born.
A few months on, Geoff incinerated the Nine Network’s Channel Nine’s cricket coverage and the disintegration of some elements of its quality, in what remains his most-read piece and perhaps his most impactful. Nine’s director of cricket, Brad McNamara, came in for particular attention and did not take the criticism well. But what he did not grasp was that Geoff’s comments came from a place of love: a belief that cricket commentary should have intelligence and warmth and should welcome everyone the same way; and a desire to see it weave its magic on new arrivals to the game in the way that it captured us when we were kids.
What we shared was an unstinting love for radio cricket commentary and a belief that it was special and necessary. We became quasi-business partners on the cricket circuit full-time, incessantly enough that Geoff began using the phrase “platonic life partners”. For his part, his former life as a poet meant that he was born for the soliloquies and metaphors that cricket writing demands. For mine, a decade beating the hell out of myself in professional politics suggested that I had the endurance. Various chances brought us together calling cricket on the radio here and there, but neither of us were naive enough to imagine ending up on any full-time rosters.
At the beginning Geoff’s rationale for pirate radio was that nobody else was broadcasting the Tests from overseas, so he would do it himself. Aside from the fact that only people with financial means could buy pay-coverage of those games, one particular point of note was that people with vision impairments could not follow television coverage. When cricket fans in that position wrote to thank us for being their lifeline, it had a huge impact.
For this tour in 2018, the situation and rationale was much the same. No formal outlet was doing it, aside from our dear friends at White Line Wireless. But now, we had a much better command of how to do it with the official tag. Given the support of Wisden Cricket Monthly through its online platform, the deal was struck with the Pakistan board and with it Wisden.com Test Cricket.
We didn’t know how to pay for it, of course, but nothing sharpens the mind like the prospect of losing a serious sum of money – especially when learning that my initial projections were well short of the pin. As for technology and the broader logistical maze that needed navigating, if our friend from home Andrew Donnison hadn’t made the trip to produce the show, we simply couldn’t have made it to air.
After Paine defended that final delivery, he and Nathan Lyon shared a hug. So did we in the commentary box, with the energy of the audience which had justified our idea to begin: that cricket on the radio is special. The cliche about it being the soundtrack of summer exists because, for so many millions of Australians, it’s true. The number of people who wrote to thank us for the providing the coverage while they were washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving home late at night, or rocking the kids to sleep only affirmed what we knew to be true.
So no, we won’t leave the Emirates with bulging pockets. And because we have now given this a bash and made it happen, there will be people cleverer and better resourced who might do the same next time around. Perhaps they’ll blow us out of the water. Perhaps we will find the means to do it again. But at least we had a crack when the chance and the need arose. That’s good enough for me.
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