Richie, Classic Catches and more: Why Channel 9 was one of its kind
4:53 AM, a cold December morning in north India and despite the confinements of your cosy house, the sub-temperate readings on the Celsius scale discourage even the thought of abandoning the repose of your mink blanket. But off you must be, even though as the city sleeps and the darkness outdoors smears everything in dormancy, you have something to look forward to.
Tiptoeing towards the living room, part shivering and part regretting the day you got enamoured by cricket, you push the power button of the CRT television, back when the curve on the TV screens was more concave than convex, more Arjuna Ranatunga than Virat Kohli. As it turns on, the blinding transition of a flash and the accompanying sound that resembled an ebbing desperate whistle, with the volume adjusted to safe levels, the memorized digits were pressed on the remote subconsciously, and there you went, right on the screen was the classic red outlined letters of ESPN, or the rather minimalist logo of Star Sports, in case you are a younger reader.
And that's when you were redirected to the cricket broadcast from all the way down under, where Channel Nine worked wonders, to revolutionize the experience, to make all the inconvenient shenanigans seem worth their value, to make cricket played in Australia seem a carnival and every day of play an event to look forward to.
Forty years of Nine, encapsulating cricket's greatest moments, the World Series Cricket, the sweat flick of DK Lillee, the magical work of Sachin Tendulkar six thousand odd miles away from his maidans of Bombay, Brett Lee's sensational inswingers under the lights, Brian Lara's scintillating 153 at the SCG that made him name his daughter Sydney, the phenomenon called Adam Gilchrist and a bloke named Mitchell Johnson turning the heat up like never seen before in the '13/14 Ashes, you saw it all on Nine.
But now, like all great things, it must come to an end. There will be more great moments down under, there will be more legends in making, but it will never be the same again. With the Australian cricketing rights given over to Seven Cricket for broadcasting, it truly is the end of an era. In the spirit of the good old times, let us look at what made the Nine experience better than any.
#4 Daddles the "Duck"
Nine was the first broadcaster to use supporting visuals to enhance the entertainment value of the sport, the very reason they stood out from everyone right from the beginning of their coverage in 1977/78. Among all the graphical quirks they brought to the viewers, there was none better than "Daddles".
The duck that popped on the screen every time a batsman departed without troubling the scorers, it became an instant hit with the viewers and stayed ever since. Absurd yet comical, the blue-capped avian with pads on and a bat in hand would launch off into a smug walk, before the realization hit and it would slump into a heart-broken display of forlorn emotions and a facepalm to mask the shame, the perfect animation to sum up a batsman's state of mind as he walked off the huge Australian outfield with the jeering of the crowd making the walk seem a never-ending expedition of agony all the way to the dressing room.
Over the years, it followed all kinds of cricketers in their walk of shame to the pavilion, not even sparing the likes of Tendulkar, Ponting or Lara.