I like cricket, and now I have relocated from the UK to New Zealand I’ve had to find methods of listening to cricket. Not watching, I cannot give up days watching cricket, but on the radio I can have it on and still get things done.

England International Cricket

My usual method of listening England international cricket was Test Match Special on 5live. However its usually region locked so to listening requires some sort of UK VPN. I use expat shield, though I would not recommend installing in into anything other than a virtual machine with an undo disk as it does tend to make a mess of your machine. Then TMS can be accessed. In practice this means using a computer and is a bit fiddly. It is worth noting that England home tests are not region locked, only the overseas ones.

A simpler solution is to use Test Match Sofa. It’s a bit sweary and shouty but a viable alternative and by using TuneIn Radio app for a smartphone you have an easy to use portable radio, I have even used it on the bus over 3G.

Domestic Cricket

Domestic cricket is another matter. Its not region locked, however the BBC don’t make it easy to listen. The county cricket schedule is available on the ECB site or on the BBC site. Once you have the schedule, locate the game you are interested in and click on the link. It will then play in flash – which is fine if you want to listen on a computer. I like to use my phone as a portable radio and sometimes use a sleep timer to go to sleep to.

To do this, hover over the “Windows Media version of this stream” link, you should see on the status bar or tooltip a link that ends in intXX.asx, if you are doing this on a phone you will probably have to click on the link and download the asx file. Either way what you need it the number after int and before .asx. If for example it says int7.asx then the number is 7. Now go to TuneIn and search for BBC Live Event 7 and you can listen. If you are listening to a four day county game then it will probably be on the same number for all four days.

Other Countries

Sometimes I listen to Australian cricket and to get ABC I use clover.fm as a proxy.