CALLING THE SHOTS
NONFICTION Around the Grounds Peter Newlinds with David Brewster Finch Publishing, $32.99
The field of dreams where sports fans across the world gather to pay homage to sporting heroes usually have one sublime and unforgettable moment that rises above all others.
That moment came for Peter Newlinds, then aged 17, on January 5, 1982, when he saw Australian test cricketer John Dyson take a spectacular catch. That “grab’’ to dismiss West Indian batsman Sylvester Clarke was to not only become known as the “catch of the century”, it became a defining moment in Newlinds’s drive and ambition to carve a career embracing the game he loved.
Around the Grounds, in fact, starts with a description of that catch close to the deep midwicket boundary at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Newlinds devotes a page to such detail as the flight of the ball, the hush of the crowd and then the ecstatic applause as Dyson lies on the ground, the ball in his cupped hands.
The detail is not surprising. Newlinds had a grandstand view that day. He was helping out in the old scoreboard of the SCG, a schoolboy earning extra cash as a part-time worker.
Although the SCG might be Newlinds’s spiritual home — he hails from Sydney originally — he writes of sporting triumph and adversity across many a ground during what became a distinguished career in broadcasting after that initial stint working at the SCG.
His passion might lie in bat, ball and wicket, but this memoir features a range of other sports he covered for ABC Radio Grandstand, including tennis, swimming, AFL and even pistol shooting on the outskirts of Delhi during the Commonwealth Games of 2010.
Newlinds shines, though, in writing about cricket and especially that played at the Blundstone Arena in Hobart, a ground the author got to know well in the final 16 of the 18 years he spent with the ABC.
His description of not only the ground and its beautiful setting but the international cricket greats who played there, including Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar, are a joy to read for both cricket fans and those whose heart might belong to other sports.
He describes the scene with West Indian Brian Lara — “the best I saw from my side of the glass” — at the crease in December 2000. The first day cold and chilly, “the Derwent dark grey and flecked with white caps,” and Lara struggling to please the crowd. The next day of a tour match against an Australian A side, “the sun was out, the river was as flat and calm as the wicket and Lara is back at the crease”. Lara proceeded to put on a masterclass, scoring 231 runs, in the drawn match.
On a local level, Newlinds opens a window on the Tasmanian shield team and its players in its most successful years. There are the heroics and leadership of David Boon — carrying “the authority of a four-star general” — after his international career was over in laying the foundations for Tasmania’s later achievements. And, of course, there is the career of Ricky Ponting.
Peter Newlinds was there, working for a community radio station in Canberra in his pre-ABC days, when a “thinly built teenager from Mowbray, Tasmania” took the field at Manuka Oval, playing for an AIS Academy team against the ACT XI. Ponting made his shield debut for Tasmania two days later and Newlinds saw his career run its full course.
Around the Grounds takes us not only on Ricky Ponting’s incredible journey over more than two decades but that of the cricket fan who lived out his own dream – “for a daily salary, some lunch and a bit of afternoon tea”.
DON KNOWLER