Gideon Haigh | The Love Of Cricket, Archives & Eclectic Curiosities - Doyen Of Cricket History & Correspondence

A probe into Gideon Haigh's worldview, someone I've anticipated interviewing ever since this podcast began. 

Some highlights from the podcast.

• On cricket: “Cricket marches backwards into the future — always haunted by its past.”
• On Warne: “He had perfect superficiality and the gift of putting everyone at ease.”
• On journalism: “Legacy media has become mindlessly negative. If they can’t own it, they destroy it.”
• On new media: “It’s amazingly empowering to write something and press publish — no intermediaries, no gatekeepers.”
• On India: “India has become the gravitational centre of world cricket — a nation full of gods, and some of them play cricket.”
• On memory: “Memory is a slippery thing — journalists are constantly trying to pin it down, trusting it when it suits us, interrogating it when it doesn’t.”

Gideon is a veteran journalist, author and the most eclectic cricket writer alive today. He has prolific output. He’s published more than 50 books and thousands of articles scoping a gamut of topics. Work, bureaucracy, the office, Australian crime, banks, business, scandals, cricket, cricket history, cricket politics, media, journalism, biography, memoir, and too many more to rattle off. 

Check out the video of this one (Spotify or Youtube). The decor is a very on the nose projection for Gideon's aforementioned interests. Lining opposite walls are two imposing floor to ceiling bookshelves eyeing each down for Gideons attention. Behind him a shrine to cricket and across from him a shrine to the rest. 

Gideon is also the co-host, alongside Peter Lalor, the wonderful Substack and podcast - Cricket Et Al. 

If you like Cricket than you’ll love Cricket Et Al.

... a few quotes from Gideon in the interview to leave you with.

• "I've always thought journalism was a great vehicle for curiosity"
• “Contemporaneous documentation — that which was created at the time — is the closest thing we have to truth.”
• “Part of the romance of archives is finding them — going to see the thing that no one else has looked at.”
• “We are too easily satisfied with low-hanging fruit. I believe strongly in delayed gratification.”
• “An inquest is like a lightning flash — it illuminates everything in its surroundings for a moment before vanishing.”
• “If the record spoke for itself, it wouldn’t need interpretation.”
• “A good historian has humility. They know they can’t tell the whole thing, but they do their best.”
• “It’s not imagination that’s rare, it’s perseverance.”
• “I’m interested in delighting readers, not just informing them.”
• “The minute I stop getting better, I’ll stop doing it.”
• “Journalism should be a vehicle for curiosity, not defensiveness.”
• “I’ve always thought the best journalism comes from knowing who really pulls the strings.”
• “The site, the Substack — it’s a hungry beast. It requires constant replenishment.”
• “I’m not just writing to be read. I’m writing to find out what I think.”
• “I dislike the term ‘non-fiction’ — defining something by what it’s not.”
• “Legacy media is in long-term decline. They can’t own new ideas — so they’d rather destroy them.”
• “The barriers to entry have never been lower. The barriers to making a living have never been higher.”
• “Cricket is a game that marches backward into the future — every feat echoes those that came before.”
• “Test cricket is romantic love; T20 is carnal love.”

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Gideon Hay is a veteran journalist, author, and the most eclectic cricket writer alive today. He has prolific output. He's published more than fifty books and thousands of articles, scoping a gamut of topics. Work, bureaucracy, the office, Australian crime, banks, business, scandals, cricket, cricket history, career politics, media, journalism. He's also offered to add asbestos into the mix, but as well biography, memoir, and too many more to rattle off. This was recorded in his Melbourne office, the decor of which is a very on the nose projection for these previously rattled interests. Lining opposite walls are two imposing floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, eyeing each other down for Gideon's attention. Behind him, his shrine to cricket, and across the shrine to everything else. Gideon is now also the co-host, alongside Peter Lalo, the wonderful Substack and podcast, Cricket et al. Therefore, toe in water, new media, which Gideon reflects, is a total blank slate for him and Peter and contributors of their choice to write and talk about anything of obscure cricketing interest that they fancy, and therefore open to all the wonderful serendipity that this new venture will make possible. If you like cricket, then you'll love cricket et al. This interview wasn't all cricket though. In fact, it really only touches on it here and there. But amid Gid's reflections of his life in journalism, his love for archival study, uh, the mutest man who ever lived, we get Gideon Hay on Warney Coley, India, Club Cricket, the Cricket at Al origin story, and I'm sure plenty more in between here and there as well. And therefore, with no further ado, I'm very lucky to present to you, Gideon Hay.

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Memory's a slippery thing, um and journalists are constantly p sort of uh working at its at the margins, trying to to pin it down, um relying on it, but but sometimes to a fault. Uh we tend to trust first hand recollection when it suits us, of course. Um, you know, we're we're conditioned to uh approving of narratives that that suit our purposes. But I'm also a sceptic of them. I think they deserve to be interrogated like everything else. The memories deserve to be interrogated. For sure, yeah. I mean every journalist historian uses a variety of sources and they have a kind of a hierarchy of trust. Um I guess a lot of my work has been around using contemporaneous documentation, which I do tend to accord a certain primacy to. And while I've been an enthusiast for oral history, I'm always mindful of Gough Whitlam's description of it as malice recollected intranquility.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

You lost me with the description of it, but you have some Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

Contemporaneous documentation. Okay, well what is that? Documentation that was created at the time. Okay. Um sometimes with close to first hand as possible. Yeah, sometimes with an expectation it will be read, sometimes it won't be. Uh I have a I have an imprint um called the Archives Liberation Front. I publish short books about historical curios, and often they involve delving into public records um at the various archival offices in Australia, um, personal papers of uh of of individuals involved, a constant search for substantiating information. I I've got a um a a pedantic uh obsession with getting dates right and places and names. Uh once you're there, you know you know where you are, and everything else after that can be um regarded as kind of ornamentation or coloration.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

That imprint, that that's a a publishing house?

SPEAKER_02 3:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's um about 2020 I was um involved in a campaign to secure emergency funding for National Archives. One day I was sitting at home um uh on a Sunday night watching um Senate estimates, as you do. Yeah, absolutely. Um and that's a normal Friday night. Yeah, exactly. You know, I love a good time. And I was watching uh Amanda Stoker testify about the decrepitude um into which National Archives Audiovisual Collection had fallen, uh, and it was being claimed that the likelihood was that the audiovisual collection would disintegrate in the next two years, and she sort of said, Oh well, you know, easy come, easy go, it's all part of the aging process. And I thought that's someone who really, really just does not understand the integral nature of archival research to the to the creation of history. So I rang a friend of mine, Graham Davison, uh Monash, Emeritus Professor of History, on Monday, and I said, you know, we should do something about this. I wrote an op-ed for the Australian. Uh, and he said, Well, why don't we write a letter to the um Attorney General? I said, Well, let's write an open letter to the Prime Minister and let's get lots and lots of people to sign it. So we got 150 prominent Australians to uh to sign it, and the movement came to be known as the Archives Liberation Front. It was given that name by my friend Claire Wright, the historian from La Trobe University, and we did in fact secure $67 million worth of emergency funding for National Archives to put that audiovisual collection back together. And to commemorate uh this successful work of uh public agitation, I was looking for a vehicle to publish some little short books uh on my own account, and I got my daughter to design a colophon, which is a uh a manila folder with angels' wings on it, and it has the slogan in Latin, files just want to be free. So I think I've done four books and I'm in the process of doing my fifth under that imprint. Sixty-seven million bucks. Well, that's what they needed. That's a huge feat. That's what they needed, and in fact, I said to to the treasurer at the time, you know, the only reason that you're spending this money now is because of all the money that you didn't spend when you should have.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

You're just playing catch-up. And that money is to convert these old videos and audio files into some digital copy.

SPEAKER_02 6:26

Something digital, yeah, yeah. Just for their um you know, for their preservation. Because once you lose these things, they're lost forever. They're lost forever, yeah. The other thing about contemporaneous documentation is that we often don't realise it's valuable until we need it. It's often created for other needs, and then further needs arise later and it becomes valuable. Often the people who are creating these records didn't realise the uses to which they were going to be put. Uh, for instance, I've been using um mental health records recently, and you know they're they're accented to the cases of particular patients, but they do give us a very powerful uh insight into the way in which society regarded people with with mental afflictions. Uh I've got a fascination with inquests. I've always had a fascination with uh with inquests. I've been looking at them for more than 30 years, and it's not because I'm particularly fascinated by death, but I'm fascinated by life. And an inquest is a little bit like a lightning flash that illuminates everything in its surroundings for a moment before receding, before vanishing. It can tell you an awful lot about how people lived by the manner in which they died.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Because the inquest has to be so detailed about getting all of the details right so we can understand what that's because it's so comprehensive and it's so multifocal.

SPEAKER_02 7:54

It often involves multiple witnesses, uh, it involves material circumstances, um, yeah, what a living room looked like, what a kitchen looked like, what a bedroom looked like, what the work that people did, yeah, uh the needs that they had, um, the extremities in in which they operated.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

All those types of details which it'd be impossible for us to really imagine or know. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 8:18

They're procedural, they're legal, they're statutory documents, but they're in fact they're a hugely valuable socio-historical archive.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

You know about uh David Grant?

SPEAKER_02 8:27

Yes, I do, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

Yep. Uh he obviously uh shares the the love of historical archives with you. But for instance, in the Kills of the Flower Moon and the shipwreck one, these were one random archival document which hinted to a story. Yes, yes. And then in the process of years and years and years and uh uh unimaginable amounts of research, you know, he pulls together this narrative which is as close to history as the archives will let us get to them in terms of how people might have felt, which is really out of stretch if you're talking about someone hundreds of years ago. Yeah. But anyway, uh he made the observation that with the LLMs and with whether it's funding or just the technology, to have all these documents scanned and organized. For instance, with this project you did, organize them with the power of these LLMs, like how many beautiful stories are going to be extracted from there and much fuller pictures, which one Gideon Hay brain could do in over the course of a few years, maybe extract one or two or three of the stories, but the computer can extract it all.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Yes, yes, it can, but that I'm I have reservations about that because I think part of the romance of archives is going to find them, right? Is going to see that thing that no one else can look at, going to the effort of of discovering them. I think we we are too easily satisfied these days with with low-hanging fruit. I believe strongly in delayed gratification. I love the hunt, I love the the search. I love the feel. Um, you know, I've I love thinking that I'm the first person to look at this set of documents since they were created. That might be very remunded to you, but the end result might still be. Look, I mean my daughter is obsessed with Ans with um uh genealogy, and she we're both subscribers to uh to to Ancestry and we love being able to uh to See where the ancestors are. See see where the ancestors are and also had to have this huge quantity of information at our fingertips. You know, if you find someone in your family tree who is a serviceman, for instance, in Australia, you just go to National Archives and you can look at their their service record. Um you know, if you want to find something about you know where they lived or who they married or um uh some other stories about their life, you can go on Trove, just do a keyword search. It's easy and it's it's instantly electrifying. You know, all of a sudden you're kind of in touch with the with the fabric of history. But I've worked hard to convince her that that's not all there is, that there is lots and lots of ways to intersect with the with the historical record, and not all of them can be gratified at once. What did you discover about your family tree? It's curious, isn't it? Because often the family that you're least curious about is your own family. Everything seems so familiar, everything seems so routine. You already have all the answers. Yeah, yeah. But um my daughter's got a fantastically compendious memory, so she's probably the better person to talk to about our family than uh that than I am. But it's a great way to look at the way in which um how people worked and what their backgrounds were, how how how difficult it used to be to travel, how readily we travel now, and how we take that for granted.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

And the serendipity that had to happen a thousand times compounded to end up here.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

Yeah, the accidental nature of our existences.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

You did a biography on Doc Abbott. I wouldn't I'm reluctant to call it a biography. It's biographical, but I don't think it's a full-scale biography. In fact, it really only deals with the with the first half of his life. It's an attempt to re-examine him through the prism of this particular legal case, Chester vs. the Council of Waverley, which involved the accidental death of a seven-year-old child in a rain-filled council maintenance ditch in um Waverley in 1937. And the story is often the books books come to you accidentally. Books books crop up, books that you find that need to be written that that that haven't. And for the last about two fifteen or so years I've been involved in uh training programs for the judiciary in Australia, uh through the National Judicial College, uh where uh a group of judges is uh um introduced to a group of writers, and the writers kind of uh uh reinforce the tenets of plain English, lucidity, accessibility, um and you know encourage the the the judges to think of themselves as telling a a story. And the this is the way the writers tell a story, but maybe these some of the approaches might might suit you. We were at a faculty meeting one year where a general conversation cropped up about the intersection of law and literature. And one of the judges said, Ah, well, of course there's Chester versus the Council of Waverley, Everett's dissent in that case. So I went, Oh, that sounds interesting. I need to look it up. So I went on Ostley and the the Chester family lost the case, but Evert wrote this very powerful dissenting judgment saying that the family deserved compensation for um the mental shock of seeing the body of their son or the mother wanted compensation for the shock of seeing the the body of her son being fished from this this trench. And it's a very perceptive, uh, very sympathetic, but also very intellectually rigorous look at how the law can make good uh a grievous loss.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Yeah, how do you calculate that? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

And it was interesting to me that um Evert himself uh had lost two brothers during the Second World War, lost two other brothers to to illness in their in their infancy. Uh he was um uh uh intensely worried about infection. Uh he was he was very conscious of mortality, um all the all the possible ways by which his historical destiny might be thwarted. So I thought there's a possibility to look at Evert anew through this interesting facet. He wrote about this case with a particular personal pang, and I thought this is an opportunity to look at him in a in a in a new way. So that's the way in which I do it. It's a it's a kind of a keyhole look at um at Everett.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

But rather, in that uh response you're saying it wasn't necessarily like a timeline biography, obviously. It's not a full-scale biography, no. And I and I you know telling a story with this person as being a central character, but it's rather these other themes that you want to really explore. Yeah. I I suppose what I'm trying to ask you is what your criticism generally is of the memoir biography genre, since I know you have said some things before, nothing too bad, but I just think there are too many of them.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

Too many of them, or too damn many and not damn good enough.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Well, I see Kevin Peterson, Elise Perry, Ricky Ponting. You still read them, presumably.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

Well, they're the well that's that's work reading for me. Uh and and often often they're not really books as much as kind of contributions to the players' testimonial fund with a book as a receipt. Yeah. Have you surely have you been approached to ghostwrite biographies? I have, yeah, yeah. I've done um I did Wasimakram.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Oh, you did, okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Yeah, and I did um and I did a book with Daniel Christian, a diary of his year of T twenty. Right. So yes, I have done that work, yeah. And I have found it interesting and rewarding, if not altogether satisfactory. If I hadn't been asked to do those books, I probably wouldn't have done them. Uh memoir, well, look, that's that's a bit of a I mean I think my objection to that is um more in the nature of a kind of a family objection to making a fuss. We have always been a no-fuss, no frills family. We try not to spend too much time thinking about ourselves. We like to think of others, we like to get on with things, we like to soldier on. Very much my mother's attitude is you just get on with things. She's a born stoic, and uh and I've inherited some of those characteristics. So the sight of anyone sort of making a public exhibition of themselves is something that I find I'm a little bit squeamish about.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Yeah, but they seem to sell like commercially, they can attract big dollars. I mean, if you look at this the John Farnum book, one book of the year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Presumably ghostwritten. I don't want to slate his next.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

You know, and I've read some good ones. I've read some some really, really good memoirs. In fact, I recently had to teach a memoir writing course uh for Writers South Australia. I thought already I have gone through the looking glass here now having uh having disowned memoir as a genre, I'm telling people how to write it or or giving people advice. Uh but at the same time, um I think there are too many. I think they have a distorting effect on the world of non-fiction. Okay. How so? Uh it's interesting to see um I've actually got a rooted objection to the idea of nonf non-fiction as a description of books, uh defining something by what it's not. Uh I I think it's it's too it's now too baggy a definition. Kind of doublespeak. Yeah, I don't like literary awards that lump in memoirs alongside scholarly biographers, alongside works of history, um, alongside technical manuals. It's just it's undisciplined. Alongside narrative journalism. Yeah. And I think because of the emotional um response that uh that memoirs can elicit, uh they probably enjoy uh an unconscious bias among judges. Some of us respond some sometimes we respond to memoirs because we think, oh, there's that person telling our story. Wouldn't it be great if I had the opportunity to tell my story? Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Uh so And there's also the sort of salacious gossipy part of it. Yes, which you I mean, at least I very much enjoy. Yeah. For instance, if I'm going to read a memoir of someone who I might be interviewing or just for fun, is be like, oh well, that's a your name I recognise who was in your life, who you did this with. You know that's uh maybe maybe we uh we uh oversubscribe to actually what that does for us hearing an anecdote between doing other people just because we're gonna be.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

That it's um that it's as Will Rogers once said, it is where you definitionly self-serving, though, isn't it? It's where you put in all the bad stuff, put in all the good stuff that you wish you'd done and leave out all the bad stuff you did.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Yeah. Chris Hitchens was once asked about uh when he was being interviewed for his own memoir. Um, you know, Chris, is it true that everyone has a book in them? He said, Look, it's true ever there is a book in everyone, but in Sometimes it should stay in there. This is precisely where it should stay.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

See, I found he I found his memoir a bit disappointing because it's quite self-protecting. He doesn't he doesn't explore his personal life at all. I thought it was a bit disingenuous. If you're going to do something like that.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:55

I found that really a bit of a letdown, because I have a very high regard for Christopher Hitchens, and I would have thought as an expositor on his own life he would have been supremely gifted, but he seemed to lack that capacity for self-examination and genuine self-exposure.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

He he said in his last interview with uh Richard Dawkins, uh, who only got to know him much later in his life for the new atheism religious debates. They all wrote those books at the same time. Yep. And uh it's actually the very last interview Hitchens is very sick, his voice is is gone, and uh Dawkins just comments, um, you know, having only just discovered you, you you you you're so broad, you know, you seem to know everything. And then Hitchens said, Yes, uh, but I'm afraid at the cost of depth. Yeah, and and yes, uh through that lens, maybe I look at whether it's his memoir or the fact that he did have an opinion and a very well-articulated opinion on absolutely everything. But beneath it there there wasn't the depth. Yeah, you know, it was like a really shiny, fancy, beautiful turn of phrase and convincing argument. Yeah. But maybe on feather interrogation. Um I don't know it's it's kind of a deep rabbit hole for me, Hitchens and uh his new atheism and so forth. Yes. Because I I like you admire him greatly. But um, although he maybe convinced me to not believe in the god because of a lack of evidence, I now r review it and think as more of an adult, uh these arguments are nowhere near as persuasive as they used to be.

SPEAKER_02 21:24

It was a part of his genre that I never intersected with. I read everything else, but I just found there was a certain aridity to his discussion. What's aridity means? Just just there was a it just seemed like banging away at the same hobby horse. Uh I just and maybe maybe maybe maybe I was, you know, maybe I was already there. Yeah. Maybe my spiritual life is so um absent that I didn't need to be told not to harbour undue s superstitions. But I liked his literary criticism and I liked his political writing. Yeah. Oh amazing. Yeah, and you know, and his you know his capacity for touring a writer's erve uh and looking at at the um the themes and the intersections and the stimulations and the provocations of uh of of certain writers uh was always hugely entertaining. He was a fantastic reviewer of of books. I happen to be a great aficionado of book reviews. Absolutely. Very few people did it as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

So if we're not going to call it non-fiction.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

Fact. Just that gets wobbly straight away. You know, you know what there's you know about fiction? They make it all up. I find something really exciting about the fact that the that the things that I'm writing about actually took place. Yeah. That they involved real people, real lives.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

I'm assuming that you really like Norm MacDonald. Yeah, yes. Pete's Pete Lawler's more into him. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he's a great aficionado. But I don't know if you ever saw the autobiography that Norm did at the end of his life. Yeah. Um amazing. And he famously called it This Is Not a Memoir. Yeah. And then each chapter is probably a real story from his life, um, which you can kind of gleam through interviews that he maybe did in promotion of the book. But totally fantastical, very dark, yes, and funny. Yeah. Um, but it's like a really original way. Is it fact or is it fiction? Yeah. He's sort of grappling with that same problem that you have, and a lot of people have. Yeah. Of that just don't want to be so self-serving. Norm could have written a memoir that mentioned all Hollywood's elite throughout his time, yes, gambling, losing all his money, all this sort of stuff, and never even shows up.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Yeah, there's a there's a lovely book that I was referring to yesterday in a communication with someone called uh Something for the Pain by Gerald Monane. It's about his life and horse racing. Now I have no interest in horse racing whatsoever, but he writes about it so uh interestingly and differently and uh uh uh makes it look a b like a whole world, a world unto itself, a mysterious world, an arcane world. And you know he's um he's an incredibly original thinker and a wonderful writer of fiction, but I don't think he's ever done anything as good as this book on horse racing. Yeah. And it's and it's not it's not um chronological, it's not comprehensive, it's full of vignettes, but sometimes the vignettes are hilarious and sometimes they're incredibly moving, but all done in the same kind of very restrained, um, very uh idiosyncratic way.

unknown 24:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

So you clearly admire the way he writes or at least there you also mentioned he's an incredibly original thinker. Yes, be curious to know, for instance, what what does pop to mind? What what what do you classify as really original thinking?

SPEAKER_02 25:01

Probably it's easiest for me to think about that in terms of music. Like I've always been uh uh I have very esoteric musical tastes, but I have a partiality to bands that only sound like themselves. That you hear a song by them and you go, oh that's them. Right, right. Yeah, often you can pick it up in a few bars because there is a particular consciousness, a particular sensibility about them, there is a particular courage about them to go their own way. Um, you know, the great musical influence on my life has been the fall, Marquis Smith and um and his fifty or so musicians who've who've cycled through that band, and they are, as as John Peel said, always the same, always different, constantly reinventing themselves and yet somehow immediately identifiable. The minute that I heard the first bars of the first full song I ever heard, I went, Oh, this is for me. Really?

SPEAKER_00 25:56

This was could almost have been written with me in mind. You mentioned very esoteric, eclectic music tastes. Clearly, you have that in writing as well. Yeah, yeah. Is this is this an observation people have always made about you? I think people have bothered making observations about me.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

I'm sure. But I'm certainly I'm certainly conscious of of being a sort of a a serial monogamist as far as my interests are concerned. You know, I get very, very obsessed with one particular thing, and then I finish it and I move on to to something else. What's your obsession right now? Uh the book that I'm writing at the moment is uh another book for the Archives Liberation Front about a a man who was um incarcer he was the world's oldest prisoner.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 26:42

He was incarcerated until his death at the age of 107. Um he was kept at the governor's pleasure in the state of Victoria for 62 years, having shot a man in a dispute in a cafe in 1925. And I came upon this story because my daughter one day said to me, Dad, who's the world's oldest prisoner? I didn't know. So we looked we looked him up, and there he was, and I thought, My God, this man was in Victoria. This man was in my state, and his and his his life span overlaps with mine, and I knew nothing about him. So I need to know more. I've spent about two years working on various aspects of his life, and currently I'm surrounded by folders and papers and stuff to do with various aspects of his of his life and his family. Uh he was he never said anything about his background, he never said anything about why he did what he did. Uh the psychiatric superintendent at Aradale Mental Hospital said that he was the profoundest case of elective mutism he'd ever come across, a man who said nothing, but only because he didn't want to say anything. Yeah. So I thought I need to know more about this story. And the way in which I will find out more about this story is by writing a book about it. And it's that's often the way that um I get curious about something, and the way to gratify that curiosity is to write a book. And then once it's done, is it sort of out of mind?

SPEAKER_00 28:12

It's put up on the shelf, and I can and I can move on to here we've got the fold on, which isn't on the camera, but it's hundreds of the folders.

SPEAKER_02 28:21

There's there's more over there. Uh yeah, and there's full file after file after file in the floor.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

You take like a genuine pleasure out of the grind. Enormous pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

Yeah, yeah, putting it all to together. I mean it's like a it is like a jigsaw. You're also conscious of the fact that there are pieces that you will never find that have fallen irretrievably into the past, but that's where your imagination can elide things, can can conjure things. Uh yeah, that's the that's the gift. That the the record is if the record spoke for itself, then it wouldn't need interpretation.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Are you ever tempted to take one of these grand stories, whether it's archival or not, that you discover and create a fictional world around it? No. Just because it defeats the enjoyment part of looking for it.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

Yeah, yeah. People who can't be bothered. Um just Yeah, there there are plenty of ways somehow the people seem to regard that as more imaginative. I don't think that's more imaginative. I think that's that's phony.

unknown 29:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:28

I think that's inauthentic.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

I think, yeah. I I wouldn't go I wouldn't agree with you on that. And arrogant, too.

SPEAKER_02 29:34

I I I But where's the arrogance in it? Um because you're trying to you pretend no things that you actually don't. I like I like But you're not presenting. A good a good historian has a has a strong dose of humility in their in their personality, knows that they can't tell the whole thing, but he's prepared to do their best, is prepared to pursue perfection in the knowledge that it's unattainable. Who uh the great historians you have in mind? Uh well I've been fortunate to know some of them. Um I Jeffrey Blaney's a very good friend of mine, has been for thirty odd years. Uh and I'm not but I'm here I'm not simply talking about his history, I'm talking about him as a man, uh, who I like enormously, um, and whose company I find endlessly stimulating. There isn't a subject under the sun that Geoffrey doesn't know something about. That's interesting, yeah. That doesn't have something to add, some uh little provocation, some little thought to make you go you you you can walk away from a conversation with Jeff thinking that thing. He's right about that thing. I haven't thought about that thing, or I haven't thought about that source, or maybe I should turn it round, or maybe I should turn it inside out. He's he's got a fascinating, endlessly curious mind. And Jeffrey's now in his mid-90s, still active, still working. Uh he's a he's an exemplar of the of the historical craft.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

And he's Australian?

SPEAKER_02 31:10

And he's Australian, yeah. And he's and he's authentically, deeply, profoundly Australian. I think he almost could not have originated in any other culture. Is he writing history about Australia or the whole world? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. But he's also written a fantastic history of the world, which is one of the best uh most fascinating accessible, discursive Jeffrey Blaney.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Jeffrey Blaney, yeah. Yep. Your book on Warren was 2012. That's right, yeah. And Warney famously never read a book in his life, even his own autobiographies. But do you know once he was given a copy of yours that he maybe flicked through it or did he ever speak with you about it?

SPEAKER_02 31:49

I don't think he ever um I don't think he ever would have opened it. And there's no need for him to to open it, frankly. Uh I did hear that um that people encouraged him that uh in the belief that um it was a it was a it was a sympathetic read or a or a or a perceptive read, that it had useful things to uh to to say, but I can't imagine that it detained him very long. He s strenuously objected, of course, to the idea of anyone writing a book about him without his permission. Uh and he actually said that it should be illegal to write books about people without their approval. And I kind of I sort of get where he was coming from. Uh, you know, an awful lot of people made an awful lot of money out of Shane Warren without ever feeling any responsibility towards him. And I think in the end, you know, I was interested in Warren as a as a sporting figure. I didn't regard him as a moral exemplar. Uh and in some ways I think the way in which the public has come to see him is a vindication of of his perspective. I think people in the end did just like him.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Totally.

SPEAKER_02 32:56

Yeah, because he was just flawed, bore his flaws on the outside, yeah, had outsized appetites in certain aspects of his life, but there was a lot to like about him. There was a lot to like about him. I loved that he um he remained accessible, remained uh knockabout, remained approachable. Um he you know had the gift of sort of perfect superficiality. And he was a master of the civic virtues too. You know, he was what are the civic virtues? He had that um he had that suburban regard for courtesy. He was a very, very courteous man. I think it's an underestimated part of his makeup. He was always concerned to put other people at their ease. I think he tried really hard and successfully to treat everyone the same, which is a great Australian attribute, I think, for smoothing out differences, but didn't have particular tickets on himself. In some ways he was a good advertisement for fame. You know, he really enjoyed his fame. And he probably encouraged us all to think, you know, what would it be like to be famous? Gee, you know, it actually looks like fun.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

There's a fantastic anecdote. I think it was Michael Vaughan, uh, had warning over for Christmas. Yeah. And he ate nothing except three different sandwiches or bread filled with lasagna.

SPEAKER_02 34:31

I like the fact that he he once hired as a chauffeur a man who he met smoking outside, I think, the casino. Right. He just got to talking to him one night and and he just a guy who'd driven him around previously had had moved on, and he uh and warning asked this guy, Do you mind me smoking in would you mind me smoking in the car? And the guy said, I know. So he said, Well, you can be my driver. That's so good. How have you experienced cricket media specifically change in the course of your lifetime? I didn't actually start writing about cricket until 1989-90, when I spent a couple of years in London. Uh I was a business journalist originally, not because of any expertise or or background or even enthusiasm, but simply because I was posted to that section of the of the age, found that interesting, and decided to stay. Um it was once put to me that Australia was always one business journalist short, so you know, you'd never want for employment opportunities. And it was a complex world with its own set of intricate relationships, and I enjoyed unraveling them, looking to see, you know, what influenced what, what was connected to what, what were the outcomes, who really pulled the strings. I think more journalists should spend more time in business. It's a it's a different way of of looking at the world. Linger on that for a moment. What why why is that? Because you become conscious of the forces that shape our life in on on a day-to-day basis. You see a truck drive down the road, you think, I know who owns that truck. You go to the supermarket, you think, I know who owns this supermarket, I know where they how they operate, what their what their last EVIT was, what um you know, how they relate to the other um competitors in the in the market. Uh you get um a perspective on innovation, you get a perspective on newness, you can see industries expand and contract, you can see competitors rise and fall. It's very Darwinian, um, but it's all about people. You know, it's about people solving problems. Uh in my business journalism, and there is actually a substantial amount of it, I've always been fascinated by people being confronted with a dilemma and having to resolve it according to the technology or the expertise uh that that that's that's available. I wrote a history of um uh a bank in in Australia, and you know, it's it's the longest book I've ever done, and it was the most by far the most detailed and involved an enormous amount of work, I think more than 200 interviews, but I was absolutely spellbound by it. I became completely uh consumed by that world to be inside that world, you know. As a business journalist, I'd been outside worlds like that, but all of a sudden I was inside it, and I understood, you know, I I I I felt people's strengths and weaknesses come to the fore. I got fascinated by the culture of the organization, uh I got by the things that make a a workplace tick. Um, and I also I wrote a book in 2009, 2010 called The Office, The Hard Working History, because I developed an interest in workplaces. Well, why were workplaces distinctive? What was the history of workplaces? How had they evolved over time? Um, how do they call forth people's talents? What was the relationship between management and employee? Um, what was the realm of the chief executive? Uh a lot of it's to do with, you know, mythology and um a lot of it's to do with you know the the the fantastical qualities that we imbue leadership with, or that we that we that we associate with with leadership. Anyway, back to cricket. Um when I went to England in 89, there was an Asher series on um I was a big cricket reader. I was um I played cricket, I still play cricket. Uh no one was quite writing about cricket in the way that I felt it should be written about. And I thought, well, either I can sit around and complain about that or I can have a go myself. So I started contributing pieces to to cricket magazines and and and fanzines. When I came back to Australia, I wrote wrote a book called The Cricket War about Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket because it had been an important part of my upbringing. Um, that period in 1977 to 1979 when there'd been two games in parallel, the official and the and the unofficial. And I gradually I got drawn into to writing more about it. It's interesting how you know you write one book and you become a kind of an authority on things, and people ask you for your opinion, and uh you get a sense of uh change over time. Cricket is one of those games that is kind of constantly marching backwards into the future. It's got a particular relationship with its past, it's got a particular relationship to precedent. Uh every feat kind of reminds you of feats that have already taken place, and it's nice to know things about those feats. It's nice to hear the historical echoes down the ages. Um every venue has a history, every country has a history. Um there's tremendous amounts that the the different countries and the different cultures differ, but also that they share.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

The evolution of the national teams has an amazing history, which separates it from the club sports that people get behind.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

And it can also tell you quite a lot about the country as well. Yeah. So it's one of those subjects that um I've made a huge intellectual investment in, so I'm anxious to ensure that uh or every new fact that comes along somehow integrates with a with a with a with the body corpus.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

Are you afraid some of them slip out as new ones come in? Or are you confident you've got that locked up?

SPEAKER_02 40:44

I'm always worried about that. I'm always worried about that. But I mean that's that's that's partly getting older. Uh so I mean, you know my career's kind of been I I've always been anxious not to get completely consumed by cricket, not to become that cricket guy. So I've taken precautions to ensure that I have a balanced writing diet, that there are periods where I go away from cricket or apportion it a lesser role in my life in order that I can write other things. It's like, you know, I I know a a lot about a little cricket and a little about a lot, all sorts of various subjects that I've written books about.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Totally. Of such an eclectic nature. What were you not seeing in cricket writing at the time where you thought my my worldview, my particular analysis of what's actually happening between these two countries might be relevant.

SPEAKER_02 41:44

Maybe a historical consciousness, uh, maybe a a uh a tendency to recency. That's always a risk. There's so much cricket being played at any one time, it's it's hard to keep up. Now I think it's almost impossible to to keep up with in a in a in a in a thorough sense. So you you you kind of have to pick and choose those aspects of the game that you uh give priority to. Um I think also cricket can become very, very self-focused. It can be very, very inward-looking. It it its relationship to the world around it, um to the countries that it that it takes place in, to the particular personalities who pass through it, uh is always worth revisiting, is always worth exploring.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

Uh I just sorry for jumping around, but I wanted to hear more about that bank example. What was the bank that you went deep? Bankers Trust Australia.

SPEAKER_02 42:43

And are they still around? No, they were taken over by split up actually. They were owned by an American uh money center bank in the US, Bankers Trust, and the the that parent got into trouble and the Australian subsidiary was sold to Macquarie Bank and to West Pan. You followed all that through and then went to bed. Almost it happened almost exactly as I finished the history. Okay. Yeah, it was kind of fascinating. It was um I I was literally almost there as the lights went out on it. I studied the totality of the history right up to the end point.

SPEAKER_00 43:17

Did you discover money laundering, malfeasance, did you discover interesting connections that they might have had with Indonesian banks or with Papua New Guinea banks? No, but I'm just I'm just imagining once you get that deep into the wheeze of a financial institution that has a million branches, there could be extremely fascinating things under the water.

SPEAKER_02 43:36

What I found was an amazing focus on what was immediately in front of people and a tremendous forgetfulness about where the bank had come from. People lived in a kind of a permanent present. Right. Constantly advancing. They're all about the next deal. And because what was because because what was the point of worrying? About money that they'd already banked. It was it was it very much like a shark, you know, having to keep moving in order to survive.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

You know, that I mean, uh that that wouldn't be unique to banks. No, that's that's inbuilt into any business. Like it has to constantly be growing. If you're not growing, you're dying. Yes. And that is part of the hollowing out of the meaningfulness of maybe working for a place. You do this amazing thing three months ago, and it was great for the company at the time, but now it's like, well, what do you have for me now? What are we doing now? What is happening next? You know? Now now we've reached this new benchmark, nothing can fall below that previous benchmark.

SPEAKER_02 44:37

But it was quite a brutal and an unsparing um and quite austere culture. It was not a bank that spent a lot on itself. It had a real pride in running in a very Spartan fashion. Okay. It was uh it liked to pay itself lots of money, but didn't like to spend an awful lot on the accoutrements, and it tended to be a little bit indifferent to its relationships. There are you know there are there are different ways to to to manage a financial institution. One is to focus on long-term relationships, long-term greed, if you like, and one is to be very, very transaction focused. And Bankers Trust was definitely in the latter category. It was supremely expert at executing, mobilizing transactions and capital, and then moving on quickly to the next thing.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

Yeah. Uh this is just m an aside, something you might be interested in. Have you heard of Gareth Gore? He wrote a book called Opus recently. No, no. He's a business journalist, uh British fellow, um, and he was covering the collapse of Bunk or something there. Oh, yeah, right. Yes, yeah. And he was a business journalist. Yeah. Uh he has obviously, like most journalists, eclectic interests and and everything, always hunting for a good story. But in the rubble of this collapsed bank, he discovers that about $200 million are unaccounted for. And through the sources that he that now this bank has collapsed. There's a lot of people quite desperate, you know, want to tell their story, maybe get something out of it. He discovers one of the uh uh supernumeraries of Opus Day and then unravels this incredible story back to Jose Maria Escriva, yeah, who founded this cult all the way up to now Project 2025, and Kevin Roberts, who's right up there with the upper echelon with Donald Trump, as the leader, essentially, not the leader, but the most powerful financial branch of Opus Day, and Chris J.D. Vance's Opus Day. It's just an aside, but it's like it made me think of that because here you are going into the bottom of this bank as um Gareth was doing with Banco Satan there.

SPEAKER_02 46:45

Interesting, I had a I had I'm friends with a guy who used to work in the in the what was called the bad bank. Okay. Banco Santander, which was which was basically working out the loans, the the the dysfunctional. From Australia. No, he lives in in London. Okay, okay. Yeah. He's moved on now, but um, but he was yeah, this was about you know disposing of junk assets um which you know after the after 2008 there were a lot of.

SPEAKER_00 47:11

I asked you about the evolution rather, or how you've experienced cricket media change. So we went through the business into into cricket, but uh book four, because this is leading up to the new media, cricket out. You know, so I sort of want to get th through to that evolution and then what the impetus was for you to start this podcast.

SPEAKER_02 47:29

Well, I mean I haven't had a conventional career by any means. You know, you most cricket journalists begin in newspapers and then work their way up to writing books. I wrote books at the very start of my career and backed into daily journalism. You know, I I started working for The Guardian as a as a contributor in 2001. I from the 2001 to 2008, I think it was I wrote as a contributor on Australian test matches, I covered multiple Asher series. Uh I then started contributing to The Times in in 2009. Um I got a job at the Australian or I became a contributor to the Australian in 2011, I think it was. Uh I was never on staff, I was always um uh a freelancer. Uh in fact I've been a freelance journalist since 1995. But uh so I preserved my my autonomy and my uh freedom of lance. But uh and I'll I'll do I'm just about to go after the World Test Championship um under the auspices of our new venture, Cricket, Cricket et al. Uh so I'm not a representative sample by any means.

SPEAKER_00 48:54

But you've still at least observed I've certainly observed the how whether covering media or really what I'm getting at the influence of new media, these podcasts, the great TGC, yeah, yeah. Um how it's a a a different flavour, but nonetheless there's a hungry audience for it of covering cricket and talking about cricket, which eventually leads to you and Peter starting a podcast.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

Well, I mean the I mean obviously the economics of of our uh trade have have changed a great deal. Um legacy media is in decline, long-term decline. Uh it doesn't have the resources to uh to to cover cricket the the way that it used to. Uh what's also changed is that the barriers to entry in the industry are lower. It's easier to start things than it used to be. It's probably harder to make a living from them. But but getting started is not difficult. So you can you can explore the potential.

SPEAKER_00 49:54

Like you could conceivably write and publish to any number of online blogs. Yeah, you may and not get paid for it. Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So that's the low barriers entry, but the inability to make it a career.

SPEAKER_02 50:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The inability to uh to to to monetize. Now our um evolution is like a lot about my career, pretty accidental. Uh 2023, I sort of got the shits with the oz and I just couldn't couldn't hack working there anymore. So I took some time off, thought I'd work on some book projects. Uh Sam Perry from The Grade Cricketer. Uh we had lunch one day and he said, you know, are you gonna do any writing? I said, Oh, I don't know. Um he said, Well, what about a Substack? And I heard of Substack. I did not really kind of explore it, didn't know anything about it. And he said, Well, I said, Well, uh, if you set up a Substack, I'll write for it. I'm not prepared to do any work at all. I'm not prepared to delve into anything I don't understand. I just want to produce words and put them somewhere. He said, Okay, well, let's let's do that. So we started in at the end of 2023, and the idea was that it would be, you know, I'd be write something every couple of weeks uh just to just just just to kind of keep my hand in. Pete had stayed at the uh at the Oz, but I think Pete would uh Pete would corroborate that once I left he kind of it wasn't funny. He missed his mate. So he took a redundancy from um from the Oz in early 2024. We'd had a podcast at the Oz called Cricket, etc. Which we'd done for two and a half years, and we really enjoyed it. Uh but we had to discontinue that when I left the Oz because the Oz wouldn't let me continue with Oh, and they own the IP for it too. Yeah, well they owned that they owned the name. Yeah. But as I pointed out at the time, very subtle change you did. They didn't really own anything. Right. If we weren't there, they got an empty box. We did actually try to I I did say, you know, why not I come back as a contractor and just do it? Or you could you could sponsor cricket, etc. But we would we would own it. But the the the attitude of the Oz is if they can't own it, they want to destroy it. So um basically they killed it.

SPEAKER_00 52:28

If they had had maybe a little bit more foresight or not that attitude, it it could have been a very maybe not profitable, but at least a super high quality cricketing arm that they could maintain cost.

SPEAKER_02 52:41

But there is a sort of a mindless negativism about about legacy media.

SPEAKER_00 52:45

Mindless negatives. Yes. I struggle to keep up with a lot of your terms of phrases, apologies. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 52:52

Um just sort of a if they can say no, they will. They like saying no. So not good for a dying business. So Pete Pete um left and he we started doing the podcast again, and I said, Well, why don't you do some writing? So he started contributing to to Cricket et al, the Substack. So we've got these kind of two silos. We've got the the podcast over here, which I do with with Pete, and is produced by the Patuda Advocate people, Diamond Tina Media, and the Substack over here, which I have with Pete and Sam when he can contribute. And we've also got um uh Dan Toomey, who does our graphics for us, um, who runs the little sort of art art house of of Fisher Classics. It's all very informal. We haven't really we haven't signed anything. We we're you know, I know that's sometimes foolish, but frankly, the sums of money are so small. What's there to sign anyway? What's there to sign, exactly? Yeah. And you know, if we're not having fun, we're not gonna do it. Right.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

So we're we're doing it mostly because it's fun. So you say it's quite small. Are you prepared to say, and forgive me if you don't want to say it, but for instance, like how many subscribers you might have and what the viewership might look like?

SPEAKER_02 54:06

We've got about eleven thousand subscribers on the on the sub stack, about two and a half thousand of those pay. Different different sums of money. How is that not substantial? It's okay. That's great. It's okay, yeah. Yeah. It it will fluctuate, of course, according to the season.

SPEAKER_00 54:22

That's also a really high percentage of overall readers who subscribe. Right, I I wouldn't have a clue. Without a doubt.

SPEAKER_02 54:28

Yeah, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:29

Well, it's going okay. And for a freemium model to get about 15-20% to be paid is Okay, well, I'll take your word for it.

SPEAKER_02 54:38

Um I have I have no uh comparative data to work from. I just do the words. Yeah, I just do the words and sometimes I do the pictures too. The words and the talking. Quite enjoyed taking photographs for it. Uh and it's it's amazingly empowering to realise that you could just write something and put it straight up.

SPEAKER_01 54:58

Right.

SPEAKER_02 54:58

And not need an intermediating entity like a like a large media group. It it lends itself to a very strong sense of community. I have lots of direct interaction with the readers, and I really enjoy that. Uh there's a uh you know, we've we've got merch. We've got merch.

SPEAKER_00 55:19

Uh we've uh you're reading EC muds. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:24

Yeah, look, you know, um it's I I I've I've I've done the I'd done the big media. I've for for 40 years I've been inside and outside of big media. I'd kind of looked at it for from every aspect, and it wasn't getting any more interesting. And it wasn't, it's I think the mentality in the legacy media now is extremely defensive. They're desperately trying to hold on to those consumers that they already have and they're trying to gratify those itches in the readers that they identify. They're obsessed with looking at their Google Analytics and you know, this popped, so let's do more like this, or this has this hasn't worked, let's throw that away. I just think that if you gratify your own curiosity and you do work that you're enthusiastic about, I would like to think that readers will respond to that.

SPEAKER_00 56:22

With the new media, like zero barriers to entry, with zero running costs. Yeah, yeah. You know, authenticity is guaranteed at the end of the day because you aren't paying these high fees to maybe shift your authenticity. If you decide to do some very obscure eclectic piece that just touches on cricket, you can still post it there. No one's gonna tell you, you know what, that that has no no business here. This is only cricket.

SPEAKER_02 56:45

Well, my most my most esoteric piece was um was about the Murtoa stick shed. Okay. I did that. I don't know whether you read that. That that must have been 8,000 words, and lots and lots of pictures, and a ton of research in public records, and I just did it because I was absolutely fascinated by this story, but I couldn't have done it for a newspaper, and it wasn't a big enough subject to turn into a book, so the Substack medium was absolutely perfect for it. It allowed me to write as much as I wanted and to reach a kind of a like-minded audience at the press of a button. They didn't have to read it if they didn't want to. I actually put it at the top of the post, if you're here for the cricket, this is not to move on. That's okay, that's uh that's that's at your discretion. But I had a great time. Do you want me to tell you about it? I'll tell you all about it. Go on. So a couple of years ago, my mum went up to Motoa um and she came back and she said, You've got to go and see the stick shed. I said, What's that? She said, It's a giant bulk wheat storage that was built during the Second World War when Australia could not export wheat overseas. And it's still in use. But it's basically untouched since it was constructed. And it's made basically of six hundred poles of mountain ash, uh, some steel, some fabricating steel, and corrugated iron. And it's just like this a temple to wheat, and it's extraordinary. So I thought, okay, if my mum says that, then I've got to go. So I went up last year and we stayed overnight at the pub, and we walked in there, and we walked into the stick shed and we went, oh my god. It's awesome. It was almost an out-of-body experience. It was almost spiritual. Uh it's so beautiful, it's so brilliantly Australian, it's so incredibly improvised and spontaneous and unique and custom-made and full of history. Full, absolutely full of history, full of great stories. And it's just it started a fashion. There was there was a um stick sheds were built all around Australia. This is the last survivor of this particular genre. And I just thought, what could be a more authentic Australian building than this? So I wrote a piece called, you know, These Are the Reasons Why the Motoa Stick Shed is the greatest building in Australia. And uh and I won't exactly come into the subject. It's a free post if you if you're not a subscriber to Cricket et al. I wanted to share it with m as many people as possible.

SPEAKER_00 59:44

Amazing. And obviously it's up to yours, Pezzes, and Peter's discretion how cricket atel grows. Yeah. But if you if you project three or four seasons down the line, you keep doing the work, you keep accruing all these subscribers, like it it it will become a business. It will become Yeah, at that point I'll probably lose interest in it. You know what I mean? Like all of a sudden, wow, look at these subscriber numbers. Who's gonna knock on your door? Yeah. Your advertisers, yeah. People are gonna be writing, I want to contribute to this. You're gonna be asked to do a lot more podcasts.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:15

I don't think that far ahead. I really I'm living very much at the moment. I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do for my next post. You know, I published one this morning, what am I gonna do next? It's a hungry beast, you know. It's um it requires um you know, it's it's it it requires constant replenishment. So um you tend to proceed pretty much with your head down, thinking about you know what you know, what else might delight readers. I'm interested in delighting readers, I'm not just simply interested in informing them. Plenty of sources inform. And I'm not interested in doing what everyone else is doing because that you know, the reporting on cricket now, it's a big and complex and mature uh industry that uh that people have access to. They're never going to turn to us for news, I think, although they will respond to um Pete's newsbreaking skills because he's a fantastic newspaper man. But I I'm only interested in adding to topics.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:15

But it's your creation and style over whatever the narratives that are happening throughout cricket, which is at least for me what is most of the. I think so.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:23

I mean, I think I it's encouraged me to write in a different way. I I think I write in a more conversational and just discursive fashion than I used to for newspapers. Yeah, the the the newspapers tend to mass produce 800 to 1,000 word columns of opinion with a beginning, middle, and an end, and a comment section after them. And I I did that, I've done that for a long time, but I and I was good at it, but I wasn't getting any better. And and it's important to me to feel as though I'm getting better year on year, just a little bit better than I was last year.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:58

Does conversational mean it's more essayistic? Yeah, maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:03

It's got a more lively voice, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:05

It's got a like there's a point you're trying to make.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's um and it aims, it does aim to connect directly to people because I s I know those people now. I know them in the comments section. I know all their names. I know everyone who's reading me. It's absolutely fascinating. Having written for this vast, impersonal, very remote, um, very abstract audience. I'm now writing, you know, it feels much more particular, feels much more personal.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:33

Yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible. I'm a huge, huge fan. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. And also because of the Great Cricketer is uh probably how I discovered in the first place. Yeah, right, right. You know, I think maybe you being a guest on one of their shows. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um and they are as well, absolutely incredible. I saw their live show in in London.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:49

Yeah, right, two years ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:51

Graham Swan as a guest. Yes. Oh, that would have been great. Just salacious gossip. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:57

Um, I met the Grey Cricketer boys at the very outset of of what they were doing when they were basically a Twitter account, and I think they just released their first book. And um I invited them to the Yarras to my cricket club, and um I said, I'll I'm happy to interview you guys, but you've got to play a game. Nice. So uh so I I I got them in for one game. Yeah. Um isn't Higos really good? Higos didn't play because Higo is it was in Sydney, and this was with Sam and with Dave, the uh the the original third name. Yeah, He Who Must Not Be Named. Yes, yeah, yeah. So look, and uh and I really like what they do. I think their books are really good. Um I think I'm full of admiration for their energy and their enthusiasm, and they're great guys too, really good company.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:46

You got this great quote that the connection between headlines and articles is often quite tenuous to this point that it's just the same metric is how many people clicked on the page, therefore how many ad impressions did we get.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:59

The the economic model is broken, which tended to make people more defensive, more inward-looking.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:04

Um less more risk-averse.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

More risk-averse, yeah. Uh I always thought journalism was a great vehicle for curiosity, but I also rec recognise at the same time that there has been a uh I think Desmond Hackett is a famous journalist at the Daily Express, is that you get the headline and you draw the facts towards it. I think there's a lot of that now. Journalists are given a headline and told to get out, to get out there and to tell that story. Yeah, the the the stories are are are retro-engineered.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:38

Yeah. Yeah. Alright, so you feature in this documentary, this great documentary called The Death of a Gentleman. Yeah, yeah. Right, so this is introducing India, the IPL, the corruption, and so forth. What what was this documentary about?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:49

Uh well once again that was a personal connection. Like Jared Kimber, um, I met back in 2008, I think, when I um when I was a reader of his blog, uh Cricket with Balls, and I wrote the introduction to his first collection of journalism. I think he's a really, really good writer. And he suddenly had an idea to do a documentary about the decline of Tess cricket, and it so happened that that documentary kind of coincided with the first big three push to um concentrate power among the three biggest nations in in Tess cricket. Yeah, and so they asked me to be a talking head on it. Um the scenes I think the first scenes that are shot with me are actually at my home ground, uh Como Park, my place where I've played cricket now for thirty two years, and w which is kind of my if I have a spiritual home, that's it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:49

There's a point of the documentary where they ask you a question, you're like, Oh, actually, can we turn that off? And then you can answer it. Yeah, but because naturally you were covering all of these Corruptions over time. Um and I just got distracted. I saw you got Prashant Kidambi cricket country there.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:06

Did you see the email that I read to you about that? Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:09

Yeah. Um do you agree with I reviewed that book and um I've interviewed him and I like his work very much.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:16

Do you agree with the thesis that the first time India's a geographical expression actually was happened was via the cricket trick?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:22

True of Australia, too. Isn't that a fact? Well we had an Australian cricket team in 1877. We didn't become a nation until 1901.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:30

Is that so the first time Australia represented itself as Australia was in a sporting fiction it was cricket, and it was against England, presumably. Yep. That's so good. Uh the the meta-narrative of the of the colonies like coming back up against it. Are the main corruption charges against the IPL the various fixing scandals, or does it go much deeper than that?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:51

Oh, it goes much deeper than that. I wouldn't want to define the IPL by um the taint of corruption. I mean, we all know, as Thomas Jefferson once said, that strictly speaking, the more money, the less virtue. You can almost take that for granted. I mean what the IPL has done, of course, is to turn cricket on its head. Uh international cricket is now struggling for viability, vis-à-vis, franchise cricket or uh or or club cricket. Previously domestic tournaments, we used to think of them as rather old-fashioned, rather fusty things, Randy Trophy, Sheffield Shield. Well, the IPL has shown that um that with uh aggressive marketing, private ownership, uh, huge television reach, you can uh harness people's parochialism and their identification with with their urban settings and monetize uh sport that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:53

Has that uh parochial identification with their urban setting has that reduced the fever they would feel towards India being represented internationally as well? Or do they sort of lift each other?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:04

Uh well the the theory is that they lift each other, but I don't think it is. I think I think all all fans have a finite bandwidth and to some degree they can get about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, because th the the the the cricket market is now so hugely oversupplied certain things will be eclipsed in importance, and I think the the the obvious one is bilateral cricket. Uh, you know, England playing Zimbabwe last night, but really did it matter all that much? Probably not. Uh, but more people would have been watching the IPL. Many, many more people would have been obsessed with the outcome of last night's IPL match.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:45

So is it because of the success of the IPL that it has meant the sort of steady decline or some of these other great Tess nations who maybe used to routinely tour the world, whether it's South Africa or Sri Lanka or Pakistan?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:59

Well, it's not the only game in town. You know, international cricket used to be the only way that you could earn an even halfway decent livelihood as a cricketer. You had to work very hard to get to the top and be among the eleven best players in your country on any given day. Nowadays there are lots and lots of different career options. You don't have to be as good as you used to have to be.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:18

Isn't there just an inevitability to that trajectory? I dare say.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:23

I dare say.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:24

Right. Yeah. There are more eyeballs and better TV deals for the IPL.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:28

Well, it's obvious that India is going to be is the natural gravitational centre of cricket. That's simply a demographic inevitability. You you can't beat mass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you you also can't beat the fact that in India cricket has a unique cut-through as far as um the society is concerned. You know, India is hugely ethnically, religiously, culturally, linguistically, uh socially diverse, and yet cricket cuts across all those divisions. It's got a unique grip on the Indian imagination. So if you're a consumer goods company, or if you're a broadcasting company and you want to ask access a mass audience, the way in which you do it is through cricket.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:18

What's the best explanation you've heard for that? How cricket, this sport, managed to be so effective at cutting through all of those other barriers, which other sports wouldn't have been.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:28

I mean, Arshist Nandi's famous line was that uh that cricket was an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English, that it does suit particular aspects of of Indian culture, it does resonate with particular aspects of Indian character. Uh patience requires patience, and life in India often requires a great deal of patience. Uh resilience, because you have to be very resilient to uh to to get by in India. Uh it provides stars and Indians, well, like a lot of cultures, but I think particularly India likes stars, likes gods. It's a it's a it's a it's a nation full of gods, and uh and some of them play cricket. Yeah, yep. Um I remember Nandi argued that uh that it also resonated with the Indian belief in reincarnation in the test test matches had a second innings. How about that? Okay But in part it's big because it's already big.

unknown 1:11:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:28

Yeah, and and you know, appetite grows with the eating. Do you what about with Australia?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:33

Because we have so many sports.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:35

You know, so we don't have many national sports, do we? Yeah, we've got um or sports in which Australia is represented. We have the Olympics every four years. Uh yeah, we have the soccer roos and the matildas, that's for sure. But it's not it's never quite clear when they're playing. There's no there is no season in which they play. We do have a season for cricket. We do have things that are firmly embedded in the calendar and that people can set their watches by.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:02

Do you think that the Australian powers at B have the appetite to host a multitest series between India and Pakistan in Australia? I think so, absolutely. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:12

If they thought there was a buck in it. There's obviously a buck in there. There's a huge buck in it. So wh why why hasn't it happened? I I thought that they would maybe too squeamish about all the Well I mean, it's a it's a it's an awkward time to ask about that at the moment because you know, Gautam Gambia, Indian coaches saying that India and Pakistan just shouldn't play at all. Never again. Not even not even at a neutral venue. Yeah. Um, you know, the relationship between the two countries have have sunk to have sunk to uh well not an all-time low because they've been pretty bad and they've actually been to war with each other, but after the Behelgum massacre, uh it's pretty clear that there's enormous distrust at very high levels of government. Uh there are in in the world of propaganda and and deep fakes, it's very easy to rile up the national impulses in in both countries. W what what does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:08

Have has that been occurring?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:09

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of misinformation about the conflict between the between the two countries. Very difficult to get to the bottom of exactly what's happened. Uh and it's a convenient drum for for both parties to uh to be. In some ways, you know, India and Pakistan have become sort of mirrors of one another. India has become a uh Hindo uh a Hindu ethno-nationalistic state and to as a as a match for Pakistan as a as a Muslim homeland. So And both completely cricket obsessed. Both completely both completely cricket obsessed. But but but India, of course, now having enormous pride in its uh its ownership of the of the capitalist apparatus round round cricket. You know, it's its sense of an economic stranglehold over the rest of the game. And in fact, it's possible for India to punish Pakistan for its transgressions by exercising a kind of an economic veto over them.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:15

Can you you talk a little bit more about the role that cricket plays as a political weapon in India?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:22

Well, I mean, just in recent years, uh Indian cricket governance has been completely pervaded by the by the BJP to the extent Which is Modi's party. Yeah, which is Modi's party, and you know, Jay Shah, who is the secretary there and is now the the chairman of the ICC, is of course the son of the Indian Home Minister. Uh it's the the the links between politics and cricket uh have never been deeper and never more intractable than than they are now. Uh and in some respects the uh the refusal to play against Pakistan on other than neutral territory and and now at all is an extension of foreign policy by by uh another name. Imran Khan became extremely popular. And Mosan Nakvi, who is the chairman of the of the PCB, is also the um the home minister in um in in Pakistan. Uh I think the head of the PCB, it's been the gift of the president of the uh of the country to to a point. Um you know it's it's all very well for us to argue that it's important to keep politics out of cricket. They've always been inextricably linked to to a greater or lesser degree in in South Asia.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:41

Well, in m potentially most countries, if it's the source of national pride, uh politics is going to want to weave itself as deeply into that threat as they can. Why haven't we seen in India cricketers rise up through the political ranks as just take advantage of their celebrity, they've got political ambition, and it's like here's a good point. You all know who I am.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:04

I guess quite a few of them would have had the option of of doing that. I think some of them have sat in the in the Loch Sabah, um, but only in a sort of an honorary capacity. They've never been uh they've never been conspicuous political presences. But don't forget that Gautam Gambia was previously a BJP politician in Delhi and resigned those offices in order to take on the job of the Indian coach.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:28

Okay, so maybe he's gonna make a return.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:30

Well, it certainly well, it certainly didn't hurt him to uh to have this this this political background, and I dare say that his role as Indian coach will not hurt him should he wish to return to politics. And the BJP also wanted Suref Ganguly to run in Kolkata. Uh they placed quite heavy pressure on him to uh to step up as a potential chief minister, and he resisted those blandishments, and as a result he f now finds himself on the outer in Indian cricket governance.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:00

Sashin or Virat, which one is a largest star?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:07

Different sorts of stars, and very, very suited to their to their periods. Um I I tend to think of Indian cricket as being defined by Gavaskar, the master of Test cricket, Tendulka the master of Test and One Day Cricket, and Coley the master of of all three. Uh the relationship to their celebrity is is different. Um Gavaskar is kind of venerated, but he's quite a remote god now because his um his period of of precedence is is somewhere in the past. Tendulka was very resistant to the embrace of of fame. Uh he found it inhibiting, um, and uh he was loath to to surrender his privacy altogether. You know, he was a he was a virtuoso cricketer who um who was very good at benefiting by his uh his fame commercially, but didn't really wish to cultivate it by any other means. Coley is of a completely different generation because the Indians of his generation are different again. They've grown up in the in the post-1992 political and economic dispensation uh foreshadowed by Man Mahan Singh, uh, where invisible hand has been unleashed in Indian society. Uh there's a feeling that their inevitable superficial There's a sense of destiny about uh about this particular generation in India. And more confidence than Yeah, yeah. And and and and and confidence abroad, too. That was something that Kohley definitely brought to his job. He saw absolutely no reason why India could not be an all-conquering side away from home. And he imbued his team and his generation with it with a confidence to uh to bring that about. For instance, you know, he embraced the DRS. Uh he he whereas, you know, Tendorka and Dhoni had always had reservations about it. And he was prepared to say, you know, we're good. We're good, and we can win, come what may. We don't need we don't need favoritism, we don't need advantageous conditions all the time. In some respects, since Coley ceased to be Indian captain, Indian cricket has fallen back on old devices. Touring team after touring team has gone to India and been, you know, put to the sword on on ranked turners until last year, of course, when New Zealand knocked them off 3-3-0. Uh I think that's been a retrograde step for uh for Indian cricket. They're a better team than that. Um I I'd like to think that the next that the successor to Rohit Sharma, whoever he may be, uncertain at time of writing, will partake somewhat of of Verat's spirit because they're an incredibly exciting team. It was incredibly exciting to see them win in Australia in 2018-19 and 2020-21. Um, they were fantastic series with with the right outcome, frankly, because they were the better team and they proved it to Australian audiences. Uh they didn't look anywhere near as convincing last summer in in Australia, perhaps I think because they had begun again to rely on tailor-made conditions.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:28

W what's your favourite thread of cricket in India to to write about? Something that you like to return to, something that excites you most?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:36

Well governance is governance has been a subject of great interest to me since the since the early 21st century. I I began to think, you know. Institutions. Yeah, institutions. So though, well, you know what, we don't really write very much about governance. Uh uh It would be worth knowing more about. So I set myself to to better understand its its history and its and its relationship to the to the different countries. I wrote the official history of of of Cricket Australia. Uh I've written a lot about the ICC. Uh I've ended up writing a lot about the BCCI and about the uh about the IPL. I like to you know see who's pulling the strings. Um have you gotten close to that answer? No, every time I every time I get close to the answer, they change the question. Uh but you know when it comes to writing about cricket on the field, I just love Coley. He's just a fantastic subject, a bottomless subject. You know, whenever Pete and I have this joke that, you know, if it's ever a quiet day on the cricket field, all you do is you look at Coley. Because he'll be doing something. And he'll be doing something really interesting and exciting and new.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:48

When you first saw 2020, did it feel at that moment inevitable? Like this is the direction that cricket, at least financially, is going to go?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:00

I think I saw my first game of T-20 in 2005. I was over in England, and we didn't have a T-20 competition in Australia at that point, but I sensed that there was something brewing. So I went to the Oval and I watched a God, it ended up being a triple header. Um, two semifinals and a final on the same day. Jesus, it was a it was a fucking ordeal. And people got really, really pissed, you know, in that way that the the English are wont to do. And the game was chaos, you know, it wasn't very skillful, it was a mess, but it kept the crowd entertained. And I thought, wow, you know, there's there's there's something to this. I don't really like the game all that much, because I don't think it's all that skillful. And I I actually think that the game's the game is oppressing the players here. The game is kind of it's uh the game is the boss. And I think the best cricket is played where the players are the boss. And that's where test that's that's why I love test cricket, because the it allows the maximum of opportunity to see a cricketer in the round to practice all their skills in the greatest variety of conditions. That's why I have a uh uh a perennial bias to uh test cricket as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:18

Enough iterations that might eliminate what luck could do in shorts.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:21

Absolutely, yeah, yeah. But you know, and I and I didn't really like T-20 when it first came to Australia. I thought the uh I think the Big Bash was a bad competition. When it became the Big Bash League, I think in the early years, when they stretched the six states over eight franchises, I think that that significantly diluted the quality of the of the cricket, certainly in the early stages. And I wasn't going to say that it was great when it wasn't great. So I was quite critical of the uh of of the Big Bash League early on, but I'm bound to say the players have radically improved. And it's become a really terrific game to watch when it's in balance. And I think when the balance becomes so skewed to the bat that the bowlers might as well be robots, it becomes almost unwatchable. And I think they're not this season so much in the IPL, but I think the previous two seasons, particularly last year, when the when the impact player was was first unleashed, I just I felt it did become very, very monotonous. I can't measure cricket by the thickness of the sixes. I really think that's that's a reductio ad absurdum of cricket. It's got a low ceiling, got a low ceiling, and ultimately it's just content. It's just it's just the commodity, it's just it's just commodity fighting. Yeah, yeah. And if you don't have an emotional connection to the team, which I don't really in uh in India, uh I I I found my interest waning in it. I'll watch it because it's cricket, you know, I love cricket, but it's not it doesn't occasion a romantic love.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:09

No, no, it's a carnal love, if you like, but not but not a romantic there's something about the investment required to get into Test cricket that really sinks you into it. Yeah. Um, which is why it's so impossible to introduce to new people.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:24

Yeah, my girlfriend went to her first days of Test cricket last summer and really enjoyed them. Okay, but that's there at the ground. Really enjoyed the crowd, yeah, really enjoyed the the event, the sense of ceremony, uh the slow unfolding of the day, the fact that you know there were there were periods of lull, there were periods of intense activity, uh like the rise and fall, the the ebb and flow. But yes, you're right, that that's that's the live experience. I think if you were introduced to it on television with you know loud voices talking endlessly to a to a um to a community that already knows something about the game, it's not very welcoming. Totally.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:07

But the to the core of the question, when you first saw or can remember watching the the T20, did you instinctively feel like this is the direction the game is going? And could you start to project how it was going to influence you?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:18

I think um I wrote a piece about it in um in my book on the Ashes series of 2005. I said, personally, I didn't mind it, and I have no doubt it will sweep the world or conquer the world. Yeah. I didn't I don't think I foresaw it sweeping it as comprehensively, but I understood that as a as a kind of a killer app of cricket, a a 20 over condensed version of it had potential in a way that other variants had not. Yeah, people had experimented with varying the number of players. Um they had experimented with producing different run outcomes for according to where you hit the boundary, the the the cricket supermax 8 concept they had in New Zealand. Uh there'd been things like double wicket cricket, there'd been Sixer side cricket, the the Hong Kong Sixers tournament. It's amazingly elastic game cricket. Interesting, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:12

Yeah I totally didn't realize it.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:13

T twenty because because it was simple, because it was twenty overs, maximum of four for each bowler, um some field restriction circles and and you know the the the the the power play but not too many otherwise it's again complicating factors. I think that's the problem with the hundred. I still can't quite get into the hundred because I just find too complicated. I I'm I'm too busy concentrating on the rules to concentrate on the cricket. Whereas with T twenty you can kind of relax and let it wash over you. Why has cricket not globalized like football has? I think part of the reason why it's not doing that right now is because the Indian market is. Just so damn lucrative. They haven't got to the bottom of how much money they can make out of it. And it's easier to make money out of India than it is to make money out of new markets. Which would require which would require the expenditure of some money before you before you earn.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:15

Yeah. Would is there an economic case to be made for the IPL to try and expand, even though they are making so much money there with some of the excess cash?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:25

Like maybe for the Well, I mean, of course they've they've started to do that, haven't they? They've started to the the IPL sides, the IPL franchises have begun to invest in franchise tournaments around the world. The IL 20, the SA20, the Caribbean Premier League. Of course, they've all they've all pitched money into the into the hundred, I dare say. When private ownership comes to the Big Bash League, Indians will be at the front of the queue to to invest. They're heavily involved in the Major League cricket in the US. But frankly, compared to what they're earning out of India, it's chicken feed. India is where it is, it's where it's at. There's a reason why they're talking about expanding the IPL in a couple of years to uh to 94 games. Uh you know, they're going to test the limits of that of that market. They haven't found them yet. They keep building more cricket and their and the appetite is growing. It's endlessly ravenous.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:19

D do you get a sense for the percentage that the players get paid, um, according to the TV rights, versus something like the English Premier League or the NFL in America?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:30

Well, I've certainly seen uh economic figurings which I which I haven't delved into that it's it's a fraction of the fraction, right? Yeah. It's 12 to 15% accrues to the players out of the IPL compared to 50% in the in the Premier League. Uh you know, they're different sports and they're they're structured differently, and um but yeah, it it is possible to argue, and there are people who are arguing it, that the players should be anywhere earner um should earn a greater proportion of the overall take.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:01

And we can expect as this relatively new tournament matures that will take place and we'll have guys like Mitch Stark earning a hundred million dollars a year.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:10

Possible, yeah. Yeah. Because you know, all bets are off if the Saudis should stick an oar in the water as they're showing signs of doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:19

How do you how do you feel about that?

SPEAKER_02 1:30:21

I don't feel good about it. Why is that? I do feel as though there are cricket does need to reflect on where its money is coming from rather than always where it's going.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:33

What what makes Saudi money so much worse than Indian money?

SPEAKER_02 1:30:40

Well, let me count the ways.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:42

Well it's it's kind of it's kind of provocative, um, but I I I do still kind of mean it. I I think we have a I think we maybe judge Saudi Arabia too harshly.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:55

Well, of course, the Saudi Arabians crave cricket because it gives them a credibility and it gives them it it it glosses over their um the excesses and uh the cruelties of of of their regimes. You know, that they they don't want it for altruistic reasons.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:15

You think it's a measure of sportswashing? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. It's I'm I'm not fully formed, actually, how to explain what I'm thinking about it. But I'm thinking I'm not fully formed either.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:26

But it but it is interesting that we have had this moral argument about whether it's appropriate to play cricket against Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:32

You know what I mean? Which I mean, yeah, yeah. Of course we can play against Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:36

I do, I well I do too. But there are also plenty of people who say that you know it's an unacceptable regime that practices gender apartheid. Um we need to send a message to the Taliban.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:48

Yeah, but doesn't send the message. Does the Taliban give a fuck? You know, Taliban doesn't give a fuck.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:53

And the reason we can take a moral standard is because there's no money at stake. Right, exactly. Exactly. Whereas in Saudi it's a much more hard question because there is money at stake. But at some stage, cricket will have to make some choices about those sources of capital that it that it accesses. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:10

But when you say cricket will have to make the choices, it's like cricket isn't making any decisions. And this in Australia where we're we're very fortunate to be in a situation where we can just play domestically if that's what happens and have two teams come over here if the rest of international cricket decides to look at. We live in a fool's paradise here, no doubt about it. Okay, what do you think the most fun job in cricket is?

SPEAKER_02 1:32:33

Well, I play cricket for fun. I've played cricket for fun for 50 years, um, starting with my first club in Geelong, uh, and up to the present day when um I'm having a hit tomorrow with my friends from my cricket club here. We like to stay in touch over the course of the winter. Um probably trying to organise a cricket club, which is something that I've done at uh at the Yarrows for the for the last 30 odd years, is the most rewarding part I've found of cricket. When I was a kid growing up, I always took it for granted that there'd be a club for me to play and a game for me at the weekend. When I joined the Yarrows, I thought it's probably about time that as an adult I made some contribution to the provision of that amenity to uh to my community, and I've found it very rewarding. Very rewarding, a lot of fun. Introduced me to lots of people who I would not otherwise have met. Uh one of the things I have always liked about cricket is that everyone has their turn and um other people's needs have to come first at times. It's not a wholly selfish sport. Um yes, it's an individual sport in a team environment, but no one succeeds all the time and every dog has its day. That's maximized or um or pronounced when you're involved in the in the running of a place. And I'm constantly inspired by the guys who I sit on my committee with. The the ways in which in a society that we're frequently told has never been more selfish, um, has never been greedier, has never been more egotistical, are capable of looking after other people for no other reason than someone has to do it. And they get a lot of satisfaction out of it, too. So yeah, I mean, playing cricket at grassroots level has been such an important part of my life. I certainly wouldn't be writing about cricket now if I wasn't able to play it. Okay, if I wasn't able to be reminded on a regular basis, what a great game it is. There is just no better game for companionship. Uh, there is no more frustrating game for luck. Uh, but there is no more rewarding game when it does go your way. In some respects, I find playing cricket to be a bit of an emotional ordeal. I'm very sympathetic to players who say that it's a very, very stressful occupation because it is even for me. But it's like Dorothy Parker once said about writing, I hate playing cricket, but I love having played it. Where do you bat?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:38

Where do you bowl?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:39

Uh I've actually for most of my life I've been an opening bat. Last summer I went down to number three. Uh a reverse lava chain. Reverse labochine. Um I've done a bit of bowling. I used to bowl off spin, I bowl medium pace now.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:54

Um most people make the reverse. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:58

My mission has always been to get faster as I get older. But I think I might have I might be I might be starting to taper now. Look, it's just my my whole my whole summary is based around what I'm doing on Saturday. Oh, that's great. Yeah, yeah. The the practice selection routine over the course of the week, the organizing of the social functions, the just the making the place tick over. Uh and I've just met great people, great, great long-term friends, with whom thanks to cricket, I already have an enormous amount in common at the very moment that I meet them. Totally. Totally. Great filtering mechanism.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:41

Yeah. I guess just a few more for you. Uh I imagine you have at any given point lots of tabs open of potential books or projects you want to be writing for. Which is the one that you just can't crack? It's been on there for maybe years now. It's a good question.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:57

Um look, I don't have a lot of ideas, or I don't I think I have an average number of ideas. What's different about me is that I tend to do them all. I've always been slightly irritated by that person of whom it is said, oh, he's got a million ideas a minute. I just think, well, what's the point of that? You can't possibly see any of them through, and that probably means that most of them you never start. So I have a steady supply of ideas, one or two at a time, and I set myself to finishing them, and then when I finish them, I move on to the next task. It's a bit boring, but it's methodical and it seems to get the job done.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:39

But in the trove of unfinished tabs, is there one project you can't hit the you can't crack?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:46

No, but I can spend a lot of time thinking about a book before I get there. You know, my book The Office, A Hard Working History, is a book I thought about for 20 years before I got around to doing it. I'd always had an obsession or a fascination with how people work and the places that they work and how they interact and how work can be to very different ends but feel the same. There are certain sort of common characteristics of office work that we automatically recognise. But when we begin to subdivide it, we can see that it has lots and lots of different varieties and lots of different personifications. So I thought about that for a long time before one day I just decided, you know what, I'm ready to do it now. I'm ready to do it now. I'd done it.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:31

It's kind of an obscure thing to bring together. I can imagine.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was a book. It was one of those books that I wish existed. That I thought I would like to read a book like this, and there wasn't one around, so I thought, well, I might as well do it myself. Do you have one like that that's swelling around at the moment? Probably not. Probably not. Because the because the website is so consuming. Right. The the website is pretty relentless in its demands, and there is a limited amount of time in a day, and I'm the father of a 15-year-old daughter, uh, and I'm enjoying her discovery of the world, which um which I'm uh hoping to uh enhance and and abet. Uh I've got a cricket club to to maintain that that requires a lot of my time. Uh I've got a relationship to to look after. Um and you know, every so often I like to have some time to myself. Um I recently took a uh a four-day break down the coast, and that seemed like the most obscene luxury to actually have four days away from this thing here with um but the you know the minute that I got back to it, I got straight back in.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:53

You you must be really um efficient's wrong word, because you're prolific in your output. Yeah. For instance, and I would listen on a podcast, you don't have any particular routine.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:03

No.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:04

Um but I imagine I mean, what do you between two and three thousand words a day? No, no, no, nothing like that. Nothing like that. No.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:12

I mean there are periods, there are long-term periods where you're doing a lot of research, which which doesn't have an obvious outlet. But you know, for instance, I sat down yesterday and I think I wrote 2,000 words for a post for the for the for the for the website. But today I probably will do a little bit more on my book, but not all that much more, because when you're writing a book, things tend to move in a kind of an iterative loop. You write a bit, then you go, ooh, okay, I don't know about that. I need to go back and fill that that gap in. It's you know you're constantly sort of going forward and and and marching backwards. You're writing and editing, and gradually over the over the over the course of a period of months, something evolves that you then that you then begin hammering at and pulling apart and putting back together.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:05

Gids you've been exceptionally generous with your time. So just two quick ones to finish up on. If you were to write a novel set in the world of cricket, yeah, the protagonist has to be a player alive or from history. Who is most intriguing? Oh, I'd probably do Chris Taveray. Never heard of him.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:23

Chris Tavere, the um tormented genius of cricket, a notoriously um obdurate uh England batsman of the of the early 1980s, whom I had a strange sort of emotional kinship with. Uh if you if you know the name, you can already conjure up the image in your mind, this sort of slightly ungainly, um uneasy, nervous, but dedicated um and doer, uh resister of opposition bowling attacks, whose unease in the world in some respects kind of resonated with my own, a sense of not being quite in but not of. I've always felt of myself as a bit of an outsider, and I think Chris Taveret was the sort of the quintessential outsider in cricket. Never you never watched him feeling comfortable about his game, but but in that I felt a pang of of sympathy for him, personal sympathy, but I don't think I've probably ever felt for any other cricketer.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:36

Amazing. Beautiful answer. Final being, final question rather. What is the role that serendipity has played in your life?

SPEAKER_02 1:42:46

Oh well, I mean, everything's been accidental, really. Everything's been every book has been a chance discovery. It's not like I set out with the objective to write about this, this, and this. Uh but uh, you know, I'm very sort of McCauber-esque. Something will turn up and after forty odd years, I'm not quite sure even what I'm going to do today. But probably something will pop up in my inbox that I need to respond to that will that will direct my efforts in a certain way. Or there'll be something, there'll be an open tab sitting on my computer that I think I need to have a bit more of a of a look at that. Uh it's yeah, there's been no planning at all about my career. I I don't even think of it as a career because I've just a life. It has yeah, it hasn't been a quest for advancement, it hasn't really been a quest for wealth, it hasn't been a quest for prizes or or recognition. It's been a quest to gratify my own curiosity. And journalism has been a fantastic avenue for doing that. It's a great excuse. Pete was saying this the other day on the on the podcast. It's just amazing that when you have a pattern pen in your hand, what people are prepared to tell you and the license that it gives you to explore other people's lives. And he's absolutely right about that. Um I was in some respects my whole uh choice of vocation is an accident. I had no particular I wasn't obsessed with newspapers when I was growing up. I wasn't a particularly avid consumer of media. Uh the only reason that I went into newspapers in the first place was because I was keen to move out of home. Grew up in Geelong. And I didn't want to go to university. And in those days it was possible to get a job as a journalist without having gone to university. I think in some respects it's better if you don't. Uh university can limit your horizons, can kind of constrain your interests. It can, yeah, it can lead to premature overspecialisation. So I thought I'd go into journalism for a while and just see if it suited me. And I was lucky I got it right first time, and I've had no reason to think about doing anything else.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:20

What a wonderful response. Thanks, Ryan. Thank you so much for your time, mate.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:24

It's been fun. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:26

Pleasure.