Episode 76 - Friendship Built on Googlies with Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo

Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo came to Australia from Poland via Spain when he was a few months old. His parents were migrants building a new life, which meant irregular work and shifts. As a result, Mateo was, in his own words, "raised by TV a little bit." And on that TV, especially in summer, was test cricket. For him, learning the game was inseparable from learning to be Australian. "My journey to cricket is coincident and kind of helped me learn to become Australian," he says. It was not a strange game to him—it was just the game that was on.

A Friendship Forged Over Googlies

The emotional core of Mateo's cricket fandom is a single childhood memory. At age seven, on a bus trip to the Adelaide Zoo during vacation care, he was "absolutely chewing my poor sort of friend next to me's ear off" about googlies—the leg-spin delivery that turns the other way. A kid in the row behind piped up, equally eager to talk about it. Mateo abandoned his original seatmate, and the two spent the rest of the trip talking cricket. After the zoo, they played cricket in the schoolyard. That was the beginning of a friendship that remains central to Mateo's life today. They both live in Melbourne, down the street from each other. "Cricket was really the origin of that friendship," he says. "That's where so much of the emotional component of it comes into me."