Radio as Social Sculpture Live in Melbourne: im Regen-Austausch — Oyster Clouds by Max Parnell

‘Once I woke up and looked out of the window and saw the greyness there, I knew it was going to be a day that if I, you know, bowled fairly well, I should get wickets because it was one of those tailor-made days for swing bowling… the conditions were perfect … humid, the air was heavy and the clouds were oyster in hue.’

– Bob Massie, BBC Radio 1, 1972

Perhaps more so than any other sport, cricket matches are deeply weather dependent. Which bowlers are picked, whether the captain who wins the coin toss chooses to bat or bowl first, at what moment the batting side chooses to declare and ultimately who wins will all, to a lesser or greater degree, be affected by the weather. Atmospheric pressure, humidity levels, cloud formation and light conditions are all elements that the team will take into consideration when devising a strategy at the start of a test match. Ask any player, and they will tell you that a blue sky and hard ground serve batters, whereas humidity and stratus clouds will favour the swing bowlers. Are such theories grounded in scientific data, or do these ‘tactics’ merely stem from a form of confirmation bias? With this meteorological mythology as our springboard, in Oyster Clouds we journey back to 1972, to the second test of the Ashes at Lords, where under a stratocumulus layer, a young Bob Massie made his debut for Australia.