IN SPITE OF OURSELVES: Big Bash, Cassettes, Gigs & More!

·50 min·3 clips

Steve Smith answers David Warner with a 41-ball 100 after Warner’s 25-ball fifty.

Cricket Et Al opens by admitting it has only just caught up with the Big Bash. Gideon Hager and Peter Lawler make that lateness part of the joke. The conversation still moves quickly. Steve Smith's batting becomes the first serious anchor, especially the way his form has been playing out on social media and around the Thunder game the hosts are discussing. David Warner comes in next. The hosts use him to frame the familiar feeling of a match tilting toward something obvious before Smith arrives and changes the mood. From there, the show turns toward the BBL's rhythms and why they only start to feel natural once the test-series clutter has lifted. Then the focus shifts hard to India and New Zealand. New Zealand's ODI series win is treated as the bigger cricket story. The hosts walk through the Rajkot and Indore results and the 337 target they set for India, then underline how thoroughly the visitors have beaten India on Indian soil. Daryl Mitchell is the name that keeps coming back. His 137 is praised for the way it refused to let the Indian spinners dictate, and his series total makes him sound less like a one-off and more like the central batting force New Zealand leaned on. Virat Kohli gets careful attention too. The hosts remember the doubts around him from a year earlier, then point out how strongly he has batted across recent series against Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. That line of thought makes next year's World Cup feel real rather than theoretical. The talk keeps its usual side-channel running. One thread is the pair's campaign against the pink-ball sesquicentenary plans, which they clearly think has been smuggled into cricket by stealth. Another is the broader absurdity of modern cricket politics, where things arrive late, sound ridiculous, and then somehow become normal. The show keeps bouncing between technical cricket and comic analogy. It is comfortable moving from batting mechanics to movie references, from selection logic to social satire, and back again without apologising for the turn. The closing stretch loosens even further. The hosts drift into the kind of free-running banter that can only happen when both speakers are fully inside the same cricket weather system. Even the stranger digressions stay attached to the same basic instinct: watch the game closely, but never pretend the surrounding nonsense is not part of it. The result is a cricket conversation that feels lived-in rather than packaged. It leaves room for admiration, irritation, and a few stupid jokes in the same breath. The episode never sounds like it is trying to be tidy. It sounds like two people who know the sport well enough to notice when the sport itself has become ridiculous.

As heard by us

Big Bash, New Zealand, and two hosts who keep cricket chat lively, sharp, and just a bit loose.

Cricket Et Al sits in the overlap between a late catch up with the Big Bash, New Zealand's ODI win over India, and the kind of cricket talk that can slide from form into campaign mode.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want cricket nerdery with pub-room timing.

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