Random Cricket Photos Post 32

#RandomCricketPhotosThatMakeMeHappy

I first came across this photograph on the cover of Gideon Haigh's book 'Game For Anything'. Every time I looked at it while reading the book, it made me wonder what it was about. To be honest, initially I never thought it’s a real photograph and thought it’s something created digitally. It seemed way too dramatic to be real. When I came across it in another book, it piqued my curiosity.

It’s every bit a real photo. In fact, it’s an award winning one clicked by Darren Pateman, a photographer with Newcastle Herald who clicked it in 2002.

October 19 in 2002 saw Australia suffering from devastating bushfires so bad that the senior firefighters called it the most ferocious they had ever encountered. About that day, journalist Kimberly O’Sullivan of the Advertiser-Cessnock wrote

"In the early hours of the morning a fire was deliberately lit behind Cessnock racecourse. It accelerated quickly, splitting and becoming two major fire fronts with enormous flames shooting into the air and moving with great speed, ravaging communities at Abernethy, Kearsley and Kitchener."

Photographer Pateman had been dispatched to cover the bushfires when, on his way to Abernethy, he came across this stunning scene of cricketers engrossed in a game at Baddeley Park, largely unperturbed with the fire raging behind them. They didn’t seem to have an iota of worry about the world literally burning behind them before it came so close that they couldn’t help but pay attention.

While the fires left behind a trail of destruction, as they are doing in 2019, they also allowed Bateman to capture something that can be summed up best in two words - Quintessentially Australian. Fearless and in total love with cricket.