Hooked on Cricket

Ken Piesse | September 15, 2023

I've been hooked on cricket ever since I was 10. Mike Smith’s MCC had arrived in Perth for a stopping-all-stations summer of Ashes cricket, involving all the major capital cities, coast-to-coast. Every second day in the Melbourne Age, Percy Beames would profile a tourist from returning champions like Ken Barrington and Colin Cowdrey through to first-timers David Brown and Jeff Jones. It inspired my lifelong habit of keeping newspaper clippings. Later I was to work with Perc.

The very year I was born, 1955, he broke the biggest story of his career, when the Melbourne Cricket Ground’s pitch was watered mid-Test before ‘the Typhoon’, Frank Tyson decimated Australia with seven for 27. One of Perc’s old footy mates had tipped him off. For 24 hours he’d sat on the story, believing its publication would be detrimental to cricket’s good name.

I still have my much-thumbed 1965-66 scrapbook. At the front, immediately after Perc’s erudite profiles is his report of Dougie Walters’ fairytale 155 on debut at the ‘Gabba. The ABC showed the final session. Never have I forgotten Doug’s sparkling footwork and effortless punches wide of mid-on against distinguished English spin pair Freddie Titmus and David Allen. And he wasn’t even 20.

That memorable summer my dad and I went to most days of the two Melbourne Tests, the first starting just before New Year’s and the second in early February. For years Melbourne and Sydney shared an additional Test; faraway Perth wasn’t on the radar. And Hobart was just a country town.

In the second of the MCG’s Tests, Bob Cowper, one of my heroes from my dad’s old school Scotch College, made 307, still the highest Test score ever at the ground. And to think he’d been dropped just weeks earlier, selection chairman Sir Donald Bradman telling him he wasn’t fit enough! I counted all his ‘3s’. There were 27, an unprecedented figure in the rich kaleidoscope of Ashes battles. 

Dad and I would find two seats in the members, he’d arm me with a Four’n Twenty and a can of fizzy drink – taboo at home – and I'd absorb myself in the game, scoring it ball-by-ball while he’d slip away for a time catching up with his old army mates in the Cigar Stand, directly behind the bowler’s arm. Cricket was at its most compelling when England toured. 

Now I write full-time about cricket. My new book David Warner, the Bull is the 67th I have written, edited or published. A limited-edition hardback is available from me at www.cricketbooks.com.au