‘It was like lotto’: Commentators share their stories of listening to the cricket on the radio

What are your memories of listening to cricket on the ABC?

Do you remember which voices filled your summer for years on end? Or perhaps simply the sounds of cricket hummed away in the background across your holidays?

If you closed your eyes the descriptions took you to the MCG or the SCG, and even the more exotic grounds of Australia’s overseas tours.

Chairman of the Chappell Foundation and co-founder of the LBW Trust, Darshak Mehta, can place himself exactly in that moment when listening in Mumbai in the 1980s.

“Half the excitement — or the problem — was would I be able to get reception off Radio Australia on whatever frequencies that I thought I could access? And when I could it was like lotto, I’d hit the jackpot,” he told ABC Sport’s Everlasting Summer podcast.

“There would be by the time it got to a decent hour, say 7.30 in the morning, there would be at least a cricket team full of people congregating around a large transistor radio, which was quite powerful and had a long antenna, on the lawns of the Cricket Club of India.

“So there we were at 5.30 or six in the morning, sitting on wicker chairs, the radio in front of us on a table, with either coconut water or tea. And absolutely enjoying the conversation that was taking place on air.

“To be able to tune in and listen and argue and also sometimes miss words because the Australian accent to me and to others in India was not very easy to understand or follow. But we sort of got the hang of it eventually.”

As more nations began to tour Australia, and Australia was heading abroad more often, there were new challenges to bring the game to an expanding audience.

Jim Maxwell is the voice that has been reaching ABC audiences for nearly 50 years, and he said introducing new commentators who represented the country Australia played was integral to providing balance.

“That was one of our problems until we managed to sort out either a former player as an expert — we probably pinched him from television — or a ball-by-ball commentator like Harsha Bhogle, to give it the flavour it required to make it sound like we were being at least fair to both sides by having a voice that represented that country,” Maxwell said.