Six and out, one hand, one bounce, an afternoon at the g where a guy tries to sell you a pie. Australians practically wrote the book on how to do cricket right. It's the summer sport we've loved for generations. But what if it rains, Well, you just head indoors and invent a whole new kind of game. Hey, I'm Tony Armstrong. Welcome to the poolroom, where we celebrate the winners, losers
and the weird stuff between. Indoor cricket was an inventor by Dennis Lilly, but it was that legend of the outdoor version along with his keen business mate Graham Monahan, who popularized it in the nineteen seventies. They trained juniors at a centre in Perth where one Friday afternoon, bad weather stopped play. Instead of heading back to the rooms for a tinny and a bucket of hot chips, Lily says, they took the nets and the game indoors and improvised
some rules. It was quick, it was exciting, and the kids went wild for it. Lily and Monahan saw a business opportunity and started promoting indoor cricket to draw players to the club other venues called on. They started going inside to build more of these strange pitches with nets and artificial turf. More and more people joined. At its peak in the eighties, some folks reckon four hundred thousand
people Australia wide were playing indoor cricket. The West Indian team even came out for an exhibition match Perth Shopping Center, with legendary players like Viv Richards and Clive Lloyd getting around it. Indoor cricket was a hit now. If you're not familiar with the rules, they're apparently based on an old English pe drool. So eleven players became six or eight, and instead of having two innings, each team gets one with only sixteen overs each. There's all kinds of weird
scoring stuff too. Certain parts of the net give bonus runs, players bat for a fixed four over, Partnership points are deducted when you're dismissed, and every player gets to have a go at both batting and bowling. So yeah, it's still cricket, but it's been shaped by the indoor environment anyway. With some proper boundaries in place, the sport was free to become a nationwide phenomenon. Called Indoor Cricket Arenas or Ica, which was founded in nineteen seventy nine by a couple
of guys called Michael Jones and Paul Hanna. It wasn't long before hundreds of icas popped up and in nineteen eighty four a national competition too. But the real action began in nineteen ninety five when reps from cricketing nations Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and England formed the World Indoor Cricket Federation. It was official indoor cricket was an international sport. Now with international sport comes international competition, something Australian cricketers
notoriously put their whole ass into. An indoor cricket was no different. Since its second year in operation, Australia's fielded a men's team and a women's team. Sorry, it turns out most puns are cricket puns. So the first tournament we headed to England where our chaps played three rounds, lost none and then smashed New Zealand in the final.
We repeated this effort at the next tournament in nineteen ninety eight, played five, won five, polverized New Zealand one hundred and forty one runs to thirty five, and then we just kind of carried on like that. Since nineteen ninety five, eleven Men's and ten Women's International Cricket World Cups have been played at the top level. They've taken players to host nations like Sri Lanka, South Africa and the UAE, and well, there's no friendly way to put this.
Australia has won them all. Every single tournament. We can barely even manage to lose a match. In the most recent Cup, played in twenty twenty two, the men's team played ten matches, winning nine and the women's team won all twelve of theirs. Why are we so good? Is it the way we were forced to let our dad relive his glory days as a fast bowler every Christmas? Or is it just so ingrained in us, the need to get a piece of willow and whack a ball
with it. Whatever it is, we've taken a sport, fortraed it a little bit and made it our own. Indoor cricket is still a thing, which Google tells me is something people ask a lot. Yes, people are still playing indoor cricket and loving it. In fact, about one hundred and sixty thousand people still play regularly in Australia in hundreds of indoor centers across the country. Incidentally, Graham Monahan's
not one of them. Actually, no one knows exactly where he got to, but on weeknights in suburban courts Australia wide, his legacy remains undefeated. You've been listening to an iHeart production the pool room with me, Tony Armstrong. Catch you next time.