I don't like Cricket, I love it!

Cricket.

I found a picture of the famous Gabba cricket ground Scoreboard the other day, which probably wouldn’t be remarkable for anyone who was a collector of pictures of cricket scoreboards, which I’m not, and so I thought it's existence bore more investigation.

In 1958, we lived on Thursday Island, which in those days equated in technological and accessibility terms to being about as far away from Woolloongabba then as the moon is today, so it didn’t take much effort to deduce that my father didn’t actually take the shot.

It did take a bit of deduction though, to confirm that the score shown is actually on the second day of the first test in 1958, England vs Australia when Australia were defending the “Ashes” once again.

Either that, or it was taken by my father in 1960 when we returned to Brisbane and the scoreboard time had stood still for a few years, an admittedly unlikely probability.

So I dug around a bit.

My father was a bit of a cricket aficionado, and so it turns out was his father, who perhaps fortuitously passed away before he could be disappointed in the absolute lack of cricketing prowess in any of his son’s progeny.

Grandpa, as far as we can recall didn’t own a camera, but it appears he did ask someone at the grounds to take this picture so he could post it to his son, who was living as has already been described in the farthest flung reach of the country, at a place where even radio reception was too sporadic to hear every ball bowled.

What moved him to do this one might wonder? Surely by the time the photo had been developed and parcelled and sent, the results of the match would long have been relegated to history, even on TI.

This was what we'd call a gee-up. He was quietly if not subtly telling the his son that he could have been there too if he hadn't been living a few thousand miles away in the middle of nowhere, and although I know he'd have preferred they'd been together, he was making the most of the moment.

Then I remembered this post from last year, and I broke out in a cold sweat.

It would appear that I have been born with a genetic disposition to torture and torment distant sons(in law) who can’t make it to the grounds for major cricketing events. It’s not my fault, it’s in my genes!

Grandpa would doubtless have chuckled as much at my post as he almost certainly did the day he slipped the scoreboard slide into it’s envelope.

It’s all very liberating really. It’s as though I’ve had permission to keep up the good work!

There's a cricket season just around the corner. I think I shall.