Life inside the scoreboard
Peter Newlinds | May 26, 2023
‘John Dyson’s catch.’
Those three words, mentioned to anyone who was a cricket fan in the 1980s, will bring back immediate memories.
It was 5 January 1982, the fourth day of the second test between Australia and the West Indies. Deep into the West Indies’ second innings, Bruce Yardley was bowling from the Randwick end to number nine batsman Sylvester Clarke. Swinging across the line, the muscle-bound Barbadian connected with the ball very cleanly, sending it high and long towards the deep mid-wicket boundary. Time froze as everyone – the players, the crowd and the television audience – waited and watched as the ball traced its arc.
Standing about thirty metres in from the fence, Australian opener John Dyson found himself tracking the flight of the ball more closely than anybody, hoping for a catch rather than a six. He back-peddled, light footedly scattering a group of seagulls as he went. Realising he was too far out of position to reach the ball in an orthodox manner, he threw himself backwards and slightly sideways, arms and body at full stretch … then at even fuller stretch. Completely airborne, he caught the ball cleanly with both hands then softened his fall with a perfectly executed gymnast’s roll, the catch secure. A combination of relief and disbelief was clear on his face as he rolled over and lay for a few moments face-down on the turf. Then he stood, gathered his cap and ran to join his ecstatic teammates while the SCG crowd rose in applause. Dyson’s grab would come to be called the ‘catch of the century’ and even all these years later, with all the enormous advances in fielding skills, it stands out as a singularly remarkable combination of judgement, timing and skill of a type unique to the game of cricket.
I was at the SCG that day, and I like to think I remember that catch as vividly as anyone who was there (players included). That’s because I had the perfect view of it: Dyson’s catch took place right in front of the SCG’s wonderful old sentinel – its scoreboard – and I was inside that scoreboard at the time, a seventeen-year-old getting paid to witness history.
One day midway through 1980, my Year 10 cohort was assembled for a briefing by a school careers advisor. He got straight to the point.
‘Some of you are under the impression that you’re going to have careers. Now is the time that you need to think about what it will be.’
What is a career? I thought to myself. The best I could come up with was that it was something you do every day for a long time. That idea didn’t seem very appealing to a fifteen-year-old, apart from the idea of getting a regular pay cheque.
Our homework from this session was to think of something we would like to do as a career, then write a letter to a matching person or organisation requesting three weeks of work experience.
What would I like to do? I really had no idea. Where would I like to be? The answer to that was easier.
I was growing up in a nation and a time where for young boys, cricket was a ticket to ride. If you could talk about first-class cricket with confidence over half a pint of milk, come recess you could be king of the playground. At high school I’d select World XIs during divinity class and write them down in my exercise book. Religion – mine was cricket.
I sat down that night and wrote a letter to the president of the Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust, the people in charge of the Sydney Cricket Ground. I told them about my home-rolled cricket pitch and that I was interested in ground curation. It seemed as good a way as any to spend as much time as I could at the SCG.
The SCG had had me entranced since my first visit in early 1977. My brother, a neighbour and I had travelled in from our homes in Duffys Forest, a sparsely populated bushland suburb in the northern reaches of Sydney, to see some of the test match between Australia and Pakistan. Arriving after lunch on the first day, the ground was nearly full. I stood behind the picket fence, just beside the sight screen at the Randwick end and not far from the large, mythical, grassy bank known as the Hill. The crowd on the Hill were already well lubricated, the smell of lager, sweat and coconut oil permeating the atmosphere. They were in full voice too, cheering for their hero, Doug Walters. (They weren’t going to let the fact that Walters had been dismissed earlier in the day, after scoring just two runs, temper their mood.) Over the fence, Gary Cosier crashed a half-century with his combination of blacksmith’s forearms and marksman’s eye, while another cult hero, Gary Gilmour, held down the other end. Kerry O’Keefe made just one, top-edging the attempted hook off an Imran Khan bouncer to Asif Iqbal at short backward square leg. Imran cut a vivid image as he and his flowing hair charged in from the far end, the Paddington end of the ground. His run-up was very long and slightly angled; the leap into his delivery stride was dramatic; his flailing windmill action was beautifully grooved, generating outer worldly pace. He would take twelve wickets in the test, and Pakistan would win by eight wickets. We didn’t stay long that day – probably only a couple of hours before setting out on the long return trip home. But some memories never leave you.
My next visit to the SCG in late 1978 was quite a contrast, but no less memorable. My father, an SCG member, took me in to watch the first day’s play of a tour match between the Marylebone Cricket Club (the MCC) and New South Wales. The game was very much of its time, when the cricket season had a different rhythm. The MCC team, complete with their egg-and-bacon coloured sweaters, was on a meandering month-long build-up to the first Ashes test in Brisbane. The touring party had already played games in Renmark and Leongatha and would head to Bundaberg after this stop-off at a test venue. The mood of the ground on that day was much more restrained, and the crowd a lot smaller than it had been at the test match the previous year. But it’s probably fair to say there was a higher degree of focus on the cricket. It really was a cricketing Arcadia: an establishment game, ahead of six Ashes tests, being played in the eye of a storm called World Series Cricket. My parents disapproved of Kerry Packer’s breakaway competition that had splintered the cricketing world in the previous twelve months. They made sure I was reminded often of its unethical and crude commercial nature. Perhaps the trip to this match was part of a strategy to ensure I would fully understand and appreciate ‘real’ cricket. If that was the plan it worked, though in truth there was never much risk of it not being the case.
I arrived at the ground that day in high anticipation of seeing Ian Botham in action. He had announced himself to the world of cricket the year before, taking 5/74 on debut against Australia at Trent Bridge. I remembered the first of those wickets – Greg Chappell clean bowled – which I had watched on our newly leased Rank Arena colour TV in the very early hours as a twelve-year-old pushing the limits of sleep deprivation. Here was a chance to see Botham in the flesh, in his first match of the tour after recovering from an injury. As it turned out, on this day Botham would make his impact with the bat. There he was, standing up straight and walloping back-foot cover drives to the fence, the ball making the sound of a rifle crack as it flew off the bat. There was a flourish, a presence, a magnetism to Botham’s game that held my attention and burned its way into my memory the way Imran Khan’s bowling had done the previous year. There were plenty of other big names and big names-to-be who played that day, including David Gower and Graham Gooch for the MCC and Allan Border and John Dyson himself for New South Wales. But it was Botham who made the greatest impression. Plus the ambiance of the whole day – I just soaked everything up and by stumps I was more hooked on the SCG than ever. I remember falling asleep that night wishing I could relive the whole day.
A few weeks after I wrote to the SCG’s trust president, I received a reply accepting my application for work experience. I was in! I was asked to turn up at 9 am on 27 October 1980. I would work with the ground staff for three weeks, including helping out during the two matches scheduled for that period if I chose to do so.
Sensing that I had been dealt one of life’s breakthroughs, I could not wait to start.
Day one coincided with a train strike across Sydney, so in the wee small hours Mum, in a typical show of support, drove me the fifteen minutes downhill to Mona Vale on the coast, from where I was able to catch a bus to the Manly ferry terminal. To make up time I paid a little over the regular fare to travel on the ‘Fairlight’, a hydrofoil, for the trip to Circular Quay. The sun was just rising as the ferry passed between the heads. I sat on the back deck with the wind in my hair, Icehouse’s ‘Sister’ running on repeat in my mind along with distinct feelings of renewal and liberation. I was on the way to something not entirely certain, but my instincts told me it would be good.
I arrived at Circular Quay at quarter past eight to peak-hour chaos and with no idea which bus I needed to catch to get to the cricket ground. Terrified that I would end up going the wrong way and be late – I am not late for anything – I decided to draw on the running stamina I knew I had. I threw my schoolbag onto my back and jogged up George Street, in the general direction I knew I needed to go. Following my nose, I crossed the city to Oxford Street, then right into Anzac Parade. Finally I could see the shape of the SCG in the distance, the green roofs of the nineteenth-century Members and Ladies Pavilions maintaining their grace within the circle of six very twentieth-century light towers – ‘Kerry Packer’s cigars’ – which were still a new addition. I ran across Moore Park and, sweating and out of breath, was knocking on the workers’ entrance door at two minutes past nine.
‘I’m sorry I’m late. I’m here for work experience,’ I told the person who eventually answered the door, receiving an entirely blank look in reply. ‘I wrote a letter,’ I continued, ‘and they told me to start today.’
I was asked to sit down and wait. I waited. After about fifteen minutes I started to think I would probably need to turn around and go all the way home, but finally a nice guy called Graham Boyle (it’s interesting how clearly I remember these names) came out – he was wearing a ‘Legalise marijuana’ T-shirt – and took me under his wing. He took me around to the tearoom, in which sat a bunch of true-blue working men. Cigarette smoke hazed the room, adult magazines lay casually spread about the tables and a level of language filled the air that, well, was not quite what my fifteen-year-old ears were used to. There was a bundy clock on the wall with a rack for time cards on either side.
For the next three weeks I helped clear the scoreboard after matches were finished, I drove a small tractor around moving whatever needed to be moved, I spread fertiliser by hand on the SCG No. 2 ground (on the site where the Sydney Football Stadium now stands) and I did whatever else needed doing. It was like being on our farm while taking part in the magical world of cricket at the same time. The head curator was Athol Watkins from Ulmarra on the Clarence River, a bespectacled man with a quiet authority who knew his ground and the value of its precious Bulli soil. We’d share stories of our connection with the big river while he tended his beehives in a corner of the practice area. Some afternoons I’d see the former test opener Arthur Morris playing tennis on the grass courts behind the old M.A. Noble Stand. I listened as my workmates talked cricket and work and politics during smoko, and I played cricket in the nets with them at lunchtimes. In an surreal twist, I found myself wearing a giant pair of maroon-coloured pads for these games – awesome pieces of equipment that none other than Clive Lloyd had left behind the previous summer.
For all the age and social differences between me and my temporary colleagues, nothing mattered more than that I was as close to the world of cricket as I could hope to be. At my school there were subtle unspoken pressures to toe the line, to follow an expected path. I had identified a way around those expectations and found myself in a promised land where the hobby had become the work.
After we all bundied off at five o’clock each afternoon, I would walk to Central Station via Surry Hills to catch the train home. At this time in the early 1980s Surry Hills had a different feel from today. Its inner-city air felt grimy, certainly compared with Duffys Forest. The pubs, of which there seemed to be one on every corner, were workers’ establishments serving Tooheys New and Tooheys Old and not much else. A few had those classic Sydney pub mirrors, perhaps featuring a stylised tennis or rugby league player. I’d pass a few milk bars and the Sydney Trade Union Club, a pokies and music venue that operated on two levels and hosted just about every decent band of the time. One of those was fronted by the ‘suburban boy’ Dave Warner, long before that name had any cricketing context. There were rows and rows of two-storey terrace houses, most of which were past their prime and, for now, quietly waited for the renovations that would come in the next few decades. One of the few places suitable for me along the route – well before espresso machines took over – was Johnny’s Café in Foveaux Street. I’d stop in there and buy a hamburger and milkshake from the Greek owner. Feeling bohemian I’d take a few quiet minutes to read the afternoon newspapers (the Sydney Sun and the Daily Mirror) about the imminent Reagan/Carter presidential election. I also read about John Lennon being out and about in New York promoting his new album Double Fantasy; the world didn’t know it, but he had just a few weeks to live.
By the end of my three weeks of work experience all I wanted was for this combination of grown-up freedom and adolescent dream-world to continue. There was more good news afoot. Having proven myself as a good, reliable worker, I was offered some ongoing part-time work with the ground staff.
The highlight of that Elysian summer was working during the first test between Australia and India in early January 1981. For this game I was on regular ground-staff duties, among other things standing by ready for action in case it rained and the covers had to go down. Greg Chappell made a typically majestic double century, while for one last time (though they didn’t know it) the SCG faithful had a chance to appreciate and applaud Doug Walters as he put together a score of 67. It was a fitting farewell innings on the ground that was his as much as anyone’s. Kapil Dev, like Imran Khan and Botham, another of the great all-rounders of his time, took five wickets for the visitors but it wasn’t enough. Australia won the game by over an innings inside three days.
Before play on the first day I went out to the middle with my workmates. It was enough just to stand out there in front of the early crowd of 15,000 or so, but when a stray practice ball happened to roll my way and I was able to underarm it back to the nearest player – to a cheer from the crowd – I felt that I was pretty much an integral part of the action. Later, during the lunch break, I was asked to repaint the crease lines onto the pitch so I headed out to the middle with a wide paintbrush and bucket of chalky white paint. This job isn’t as easy as you’d think. By now the crease area, pummelled by the fast bowlers’ front feet, incorporated a crater about half an inch deep and with no solid bottom. The more rubble I swept away, the more there was. In the end I just painted as best I could across this ditch, but the line didn’t look very straight. One of the umpires appeared beside me in his black trousers, white shirt and big white hat. He looked down at me, smiled and asked how I was going. I said I wasn’t sure if what I’d done was good enough but, in this pre-DRS world, he seemed satisfied.
There was an incident on that first day that still stops me in my tracks when I think of it. Indian batsman Sandeep Patel was 65 not out and facing Len Pascoe bowling at great pace from the Paddington end. Pascoe bowled a short ball that Patel tried to hook. However, he misjudged his shot and was hit on the lower side of his unprotected head, falling straight to the ground. After receiving urgent medical attention he was able to walk off for further treatment, unsteadily holding a towel to his head. He recovered well, going on to make 174 in the Adelaide test later in the month. Before the advent of helmets, incidents such as this were all too common and always unpleasant, however this one has an eerie symmetry (similar score, same ground, same end) to the shocking death of Phillip Hughes thirty-three years later. There’s the finest of lines between drama and real tragedy.
Before play on the third day of the game I was out in the middle again when Greg Chappell came out, followed by Allan Border wearing shorts and thongs. I have no memory of what they were discussing, but what I do remember is that I’d never heard language quite like it. I had become used to swearing amongst the ground staff but these two raised the stakes a couple of levels. They were friendly, though, Chappell turning to me at one point and asking how I was going. I was too starstruck to answer properly.
The old SCG scoreboard was one of those grand structures unique to the game of cricket. For most people it was the first thing they looked at when they walked into the ground. It was a storyteller, its imposing presence at the Randwick end of the ground keeping spectators and players up to date with the state of play for close to sixty years, until it was replaced by an electronic board in 1983. Any photo that you see of it now is perfectly stamped with those clear white name boards spelling out the essential story of a game at a moment in time. Manual scoreboards still operate at major grounds around the country, and they are quaint and really nice to look at, but for me they don’t evoke the purpose and clarity of this beautiful building on top of the Hill.
It hadn’t taken long into my time with the ground staff for everyone to work out that I was a pretty keen follower of cricket. More than that: I was all over it. In the way of the keen teenager, I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game, its history and the players. Sometime during that 1980–81 season someone suggested that this passion for cricket, combined with my youth and agility, made me a good option to join the scoreboard crew. I wasn’t going to say no to a job that would basically allow me to watch days and days of cricket from one of the best seats in the SCG.
The scoreboard was essentially a two-storey concrete building accessed by a long staircase at its rear with a door firmly locked shut at the bottom. Inside it felt like the size of a substantial house, though I always felt it was more like a castle. The scoreboard foreman was Jack Bryson, an old-school operator who was strict but not unkind. The scoreboard was certainly his castle, and in regent style he was always stringent about who was allowed to breach its walls. Sometimes friends of mine would ask if they could visit but Jack was never keen on the idea, while on one occasion two police officers basically invited themselves in. Undaunted by the uniforms, Jack told them in no uncertain terms to turn around and get out.
The board was managed from two levels connected by a steep, narrow staircase, with most of the action taking place on the lower level. Its operation on match days was the responsibility of a team of about six ground staff, led by Jack. This group’s job included everything needed to maintain the board during play, including setting up and installing the players’ nameplates, updating the batsmen’s scores and the bowlers’ figures and, of course, keeping the current score up to date. It was a quiet, focused and industrious workplace, though there was plenty of ongoing cricket chat. The only time the pace really picked up was at a change of innings, when we had only ten minutes to move the long, narrow – and heavy – boards, each featuring a player’s name, from the bowling side of the scoreboard to the batting side and vice versa.
The top job in the scoreboard involved identifying the fielders. Each player had a light beside his name and when the ball was fielded, an operator would push a button to activate the relevant light. That, of course, required that the operator was able to identify each player, which is not always easy when everyone is wearing cricket whites. During my time this job was the domain of Peter Devlin (PD), who I had got to know through lunchtime net sessions during work experience. Peter was a very good first-grade cricketer for Randwick, and later went on to be the head curator at North Sydney Oval. He was the only operator allowed to do the job because of his accuracy and his focus; Peter didn’t talk much. My usual role was to maintain the current batsmen’s scores and total score. I also had to operate the lights indicating which batsman was on strike. This was a task that also required good concentration, if not at the same level as PD’s. You had to learn pretty quickly how to pick one batsman from the other for each partnership: a particular bat brand, subtle differences in mannerism or a certain gait were all useful cues. Other operators looked after the bowling figures, dismissed batsmen, overs bowled and so on. I would work for two sessions of a day’s play and have one session off. My downtime was spent on a long, elevated sofa directly beside the sundries total, which I kept updated during that time. The view was not only private but panoramic, straight across the ground to the handsome green-roofed pavilions of the members area and beyond to the evolving skyline of the city.
There was a telephone on the wall next to where I sat that connected the scoreboard to the outside world. One job I relished was to ring the dressing rooms before the start of a match and have the 12th man from each team give me the batting order. We also used the phone to check in with the official scorers to make sure all our numbers were in sync with theirs. (ABC Radio were always very willing to point out if a number on the board was incorrect.) Occasionally, in those days long before the internet, we’d receive a call from a media outlet wanting a score update. I remember a BBC producer ringing a few times, their very English accent coming down the line. ‘None for 10,’ I told them one day. ‘That’s 10 for none in your language.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ was the reply. And there were calls from sundry others; after Greg Matthews started playing his father would call from time to time for an update. I always loved taking these calls. On another occasion, Ken Sutcliffe and a crew from Channel 9 came up to do a news feature on the board. ‘Not a bad school holiday job,’ was Ken’s remark to me. Even he was impressed.
In a quiet corner of the bottom floor, just beside the fridge, was a cupboard with alphabetically labelled pigeon holes. Inside each pigeon hole were several neatly rolled up canvases; every player who’d performed on the ground had one. Before any match, the canvases of all that game’s players would be removed, unrolled and stapled onto one of those long boards for mounting on the scoreboard. For this young cricket fan, the most awe-inspiring thing about this collection was that it included the names of not only current players but all past players – going right back to 1924. Understanding what I did of cricket history, to look through these names – like Hammond and Hobbs, Sobers and Worrell, Benaud and Woodfull – was the best way to understand the significance of the experience I was having, not to mention the importance of the work I was doing. What more is there to do at a place as historic as the SCG than to ponder the people and events that have gone before? I was tempted to ask if I could take one of these artefacts home, but unfortunately I never did. I sometimes wonder what became of them. The only canvas with a known fate is that of Bradman himself. His canvas – which was missing when I worked in the board – is today framed in glass and hangs impressively at the western end of the SCG members’ bar.
Scoreboard life became a pleasurable and, for a sixteen-year-old, profitable routine. My earnings had a way of finding their way into the cash registers of record stores on the North Shore.
There was the subdued charm and subtle rhythms of Sheffield Shield matches, with great players occasionally imposing themselves. Rick McCosker, the New South Wales captain at the time, had always been a favourite player of mine with his polished technique and clean-cut country manner; I enjoyed watching him score a string of late-career centuries. Steve Rixon, immaculate behind the stumps, also has a place in my memory, as does the Kiwi Jeff Crowe, who scored a century in a session for South Australia, the only time I saw that happen in a first-class game. A spent Max ‘Tangles’ Walker, his joints worn out, played his last Shield game on my watch; he limped off the ground and on to a prolific media career one day in late 1981. Other players would make their first-class debuts in these matches, enjoying a brief moment in the sun and then disappearing back to the obscurity of district level.
The majesty of the SCG, and the work of the scoreboard operator, really came to life when the ground hosted international one-day cricket and test matches.
These were the relatively early days of the 50-over format, and games at the SCG had event value because it was, at that time, still the only ground in Australia that hosted day–night internationals. That meant very big crowds, and these matches would become memorable as much for what happened in the crowd as what happened on the ground itself. I’d arrive at the ground in the early afternoon, about an hour before the start of the game, to call the 12th men in the dressing rooms for the team lists and to help set up the board. Through the open slots in the scoreboard I could look across the ground and see the seats in the Members Pavilion and Ladies Pavilion filling in an orderly way. Directly below me on the Hill, the situation was very different.
The Hill was the last true ‘outer’ part of the SCG. Essentially a grassy mound, it stretched around perhaps one-fifth of the ground and offered the cheapest way to watch the cricket. It was a sociological and anthropological marvel, especially for this teenager who was able to watch its shifting moods from just a few floors up.
As the start of a day–nighter got closer, the Hill’s grassed surface would grow steadily more populated with spectators, eskies and the occasional picnic rug. The hiss of steel beer cans being snapped open could be heard as the early arrivals made a prompt start ahead of a long afternoon in the sun that would be followed by a warm evening. Where the dress code on the other side of the ground was neat trousers and tailored shirts, on the Hill it was almost universally very well-fitting Stubbies shorts with a T-shirt or singlet for the men and bikini tops for the women. By the time of the toss there wasn’t a patch of grass to be seen between the tightly packed bodies. A mist of beer, sweat and coconut oil – the cocktail I remembered from my first visit to the ground – rose over the throng. Then, as the game got underway, the flags and banners would come out, the crowd rising as one with every home-team boundary, batting milestone or bowler’s wicket.
After the innings break, the artificial lights would gradually take over, the crowd would swell even further and the Hill would feel even more like a mosh pit. In these early 50-over matches, the first half of an innings was typically played fairly conservatively by the batting side. It was all about keeping wickets intact. The crowd on the Hill, by now sun cooked and well lubricated, would be on the lookout for some form of entertainment on their side of the fence. On one occasion a bloke in a suit tried to squeeze his way through the mob – mid over – in a vain attempt to find a friend. All of a sudden, in a show of mob justice, a barrage of empty beer cans fired up at him from every direction, many with the accuracy of Viv Richard’s throw at the stumps. The poor man had nowhere to go, retreating with his arms over his head when the bombardment slowed. If we made a mistake on the scoreboard, we could become the targets of one of these barrages ourselves. With the lower level of the board not very high off the ground, we were in easy range of a well-aimed beer can, unfinished lunch or old sandshoe. The story goes that one night a whole barbecued chicken was fired straight through one of the viewing holes. If the level of ‘attack’ became too concerted, Jack would pull down the shutters until calm returned – which it inevitably did because a cricket match without a scoreboard isn’t much fun.
For all the spectacle and the scale of these early day–night internationals, as a rule the cricket doesn’t stick in the mind, apart from a few exceptions. In November 1980, during my first trial in the scoreboard, Greg Chappell made 138 against New Zealand, the type of innings that sets him apart in my mind as the greatest post-war Australian batsman (bar one). Then in January 1983, England played New Zealand in a 50-over World Series cup game. New Zealand posted a score of 199, which was competitive enough in those times, whereupon England, after being 2/10, polished off the run chase in the 43rd over. What stays with me is that, along with Allan Lamb (108 not out), the other protagonist in England’s runaway win was the arch blocker Chris Tavare (83 not out). After a watchful start against Hadlee and Chatfield the pair ended up scoring at eight runs an over, audacious batting from an unlikely pair.
For all the novelties of one-day cricket, it’s still the test matches that stand out most in my memories of my time working in the scoreboard. This is as it should be in cricket’s order of things.
In early January 1982, the SCG hosted the second test between Australia and the West Indies. The match was the sequel to one of the most famous tests of all – the 1981 Boxing Day test in Melbourne. At a time when the West Indian team was at the zenith of its power, the Australians had upset the visitors by 58 runs, thanks to an unbeaten century of singular brilliance by Kim Hughes and some spectacular, theatrical fast bowling from Dennis Lillee who took 10 wickets for the match. Now, after just a two-day turnaround, the teams were assembled again in Sydney to do it all again.
Somehow on the first day I misjudged the length of time it would take to catch a bus from Central Station to the SCG, my ate arrival earning me a rebuke from Jack. ‘First day of a big game mate, give yourself time,’ he said. Nevertheless I settled into work behind the names and numbers, along with the luxury of watching every ball of a test match. The West Indies batted first and made 384. Greenidge, Richards, Dujon and Lloyd all made runs, but it was Larry Gomes who stole the show with 128. It was an innings so understated that I remember very little of it. Australia trailed by 117 on the first innings, with only sturdy and resolute batting from Allan Border and Bruce Yardley saving them from ignominy if not obliteration by the fearsome attack of Holding, Garner, Croft and Sylvester Clarke. Late on the afternoon of the fourth day, the West Indies were well in control at 3 for 179, a lead of just under 300. However, the wicket was turning into a classic SCG turner, and off-spinner Bruce Yardley was just the man to take advantage of it. Bowling from the Randwick end, he prised out the visitors’ middle and lower order with a spell of 7 for 37. The Australians were back in the match and managed to salvage a draw the next day.
This match left me with so many memories: the aesthetic perfection of Dennis Lillee off his long run, Gordon Greenidge hitting through the on-side on one good leg, Bruce Laird blunting the Windies quicks. But the most vivid of all happened right in front of me: Dyson’s catch.
My dream existence as a scoreboard operator lasted until the end of the 1982–3 season, a time so long ago there were still rest days in test matches. The last major test innings I or anyone else saw from the board was that of the unlikely figure of English night watchman Eddie Hemmings. Eddie was an ageing, somewhat portly off-spinner who fell just short of the most unlikely of test centuries when he batted out time on the final day of the test in January 1983. That game never came to life the way the previous test in Melbourne had done, when Allan Border and Jeff Thomson got Australia within four runs of victory in one of the most famous fifth day finishes of all.
A few months after the close of that season I read a newspaper story about the impending replacement of ‘my’ scoreboard with a modern electronic alternative. It turned out that my last game inside the board had been the one-day match between Australia and New Zealand spontaneously organised as a fundraiser for victims of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. For the next couple of seasons I did a bit of stewarding around the ground. It wasn’t quite the same, though I did have a side-on view of Allan Border’s team taming the frightening West Indies in 1984, not by matching them with force but with guile in the form of two home-ground spinners in Murray Bennett and Bob Holland. This was Clive Lloyd’s last test match and the last match that Alan McGilvray would spend behind the microphone at the SCG. Both events created a considerable amount of hype and sentiment. As a last hurrah it wasn’t a bad one for me, either. By January 1985 I had stopped working at the SCG.
In the end I only had two and a bit years of work with Jack and the others in the scoreboard, but it was interesting, exciting and gave me a feeling of success. Perfection really. Of course, I was still a teenager and there were occasional times when I would ring in and say I couldn’t work, the chance to play cricket with a few mates being the more attractive option. But when I was at work I was getting paid to watch the cricket, while doing a job that was, in social standing, a good few rungs above those most other teenagers got to do. It was also important: a job in which every moment mattered – not just the memorable ones – as did attention to detail and accuracy. I didn’t know it at the time, but on this count alone the job was very good training for a future cricket commentator. I could get used to this life.
This is an extract from Peter Newlinds book ‘Around the Grounds’
To purchase Peter’s book – click here
About Peter Newlinds
I spent eighteen years covering cricket and major sport locally, nationally and internationally for ABC Grandstand. My memoir 'Áround The Grounds' was released in August and is available in book stores and on line at www.aroundthegroundsbook.com. As well as chronicling my career with a great broadcasting institution Around the Grounds recounts the story of of my early life and formative experiences in radio. It has strong themes of nostalgia and sporting detail. "Peter pens his memoir with an understated felicity which will delight every sports lover who goes on this stroll with him" Tim Lane.
Around The Grounds is my first book.
