My Summer of Cricket author Nikhil Kulkarni joins me this week on Conversations with Sports Fans.
Confession Time: I know very (very!) little about the sport of cricket.
And I suspect many of my listeners are not unlike me
Having said that, we are – most-assuredly – in the minority. There’s an estimated 2.5 billion (yes, that’s billion with a B) cricket fans worldwide, making it the second most followed sport on the planet. It trails soccer by an estimated 1 billion.
- Side Note: You might be interested in seeing the Top 10 and where your favorite sport resides (or doesn’t) as of this 2024 report.
So, when I was approached by an Australian book publicist about having author Nikhil Kulkarni – a self-proclaimed cricket tragic (more on this in a moment) – contact me about having Nikhil as a guest to discuss his book, My Summer of Cricket: Three tests, one fan, and decades of stories, I was more than game.
Especially after I asked Google to give me the definition of a cricket tragic: “an extremely passionate, almost obsessive fan of cricket, someone whose life revolves around the sport, experiencing deep emotional highs with wins and devastating lows with losses, often sacrificing other things for the game and knowing every detail, from stats to folklore.”
This is my kind of guest!
Just over a year ago, Nikhil attended three of the five test matches in the bilateral India-Australia Border-Gavaskar Trophy matches in the Australian cities of Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. Following his nearly 3 weeks immersed in national cricket competition, he set out to write the memoir-esque book noted above, My Summer of Cricket.
Understandably Nikhil and I discuss cricket – and he’s exceedingly patient with me! – but we also discuss the life of a passionate (e.g. tragic) sports fan and the communal nature of being one which is universal no matter the sport your fandom fancies.