AI Summary
5 min readGraeme Innes has been blind since birth, and he has been following cricket since he was five or six years old, sitting in the front row of the ladies' stand at the SCG with his mother, a radio pressed to his ear to catch Alan McGilvray's commentary. Decades later, he is a member of the Order of Australia, a former Disability Discrimination Commissioner, and a man who once scored 27 runs in a blind cricket match — a score that, for a totally blind player, was treated as the equivalent of a century. In this conversation, Innes traces his lifelong relationship with the game, from listening to Sheffield Shield matches in the early 1960s to playing for Australia in an unofficial tour of Sri Lanka, and reflects on how cricket has served as both a personal thread and a metaphor for the equality work that defined his career.
Blind cricket: how the game is played
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What you'll learn
- 1 Episode 69 - Moving Towards Equality with Graeme Innes
- 2 (00:03) **Introduction to Graeme Innes** - Host introduces Graeme Innes AM, a human rights lawyer and disability advocate who received the Order of Australia
- 3 (02:19) **Early Cricket Memories** - Graeme describes being introduced to cricket at age 5-7 through radio and live matches
- 4 (07:25) **Meeting the West Indies Team** - A childhood highlight when Alan McGilvray took Graeme into the West Indies dressing room
- 5 (09:09) **How Blind Cricket Works** - Graeme explains the mechanics of blind cricket he played at school
- 6 (11:07) **Club and State Cricket Career** - Graeme started club blind cricket at 15-16, playing against Lions clubs and RSLs
- 7 (13:53) **First Australian Blind Cricket Tour to Sri Lanka** - Graeme played in the first unofficial Australian blind cricket tour in 1981
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Disability rights advocate Graeme Innes AM joins the show to talk about his introduction to cricket while growing up as a blind kid in Sydney, his many stories playing the game including when he represented Australia in an overseas tour, his tales of watching cricket on his travels that stretched his wife's patience, and how Australia and other countries do in terms of making the game accessible for all.
Graeme's website including links to his work, his book, and his socials: https://graemeinnes.com/
The Cricket Sickos Podcast on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/2kkhzf25
On Youtube: https://youtube.com/@aditrs7870?feature=shared
RSS link: https://anchor.fm/s/fa16cb28/podcast/rss
Follow Adit on Bluesky @aditrs.bsky.social
Music from Sicko Mode by Travis Scott
Original Sickos cartoon by Stan Kelly
Graphics by my incredibly excellent, cool and wildly handsome friend Harry Player
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