“Watching it wasn’t work, it was paid spectating,” he recalls.

“On a whim, he seemed able to set benchmarks that others could only dream of.

“I can’t recall being so disappointed to see the end of any innings.”

Newlinds was covering the match for the ABC – his employer for an 18-year career familiar to any radio listener in Tasmania.

But for someone so synonymous with humble Hobart, Newlinds’ full story is a global saga encompassing England, South Africa, USA, India, France and even Burnie.

Hailing from the Northern Sydney suburb of Duffys Forest, he studied communications in Canberra before cutting his teeth in community radio, joining the national broadcaster and becoming the unofficial voice of Tasmanian sport.

Since retiring three years ago, Newlinds has been transcribing his many sporting recollections.

The result is AROUND THE GROUNDS - Magic moments from the life of a sports broadcaster ($33, Finch Publishing), a 246-page memoir co-written by Melbourne freelancer David Brewster with a foreword by Tim Lane.

It spans an era in which Newlinds graduated from small-scale regional sporting events to the international stages of Test cricket, the Commonwealth Games, the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race which became his adopted child and the “full-scale civil war” that was Australian rugby league in 1997.

Newlinds’ career introduced him to the planet’s best venues and athletes, some of which spanned a similar timeframe.

Watching Ricky Ponting spearheading Tasmania’s surge towards the 2012-13 Sheffield Shield, he recalls having first seen the future Australian captain as a skinny teenager in November 1992 playing for an AIS Academy team coached by Rod Marsh against the ACT XI in Canberra.

“As I watched the warm-up in that hour leading up to the start of play, it struck me that Ponting was going about his preparation as enthusiastically as he had done with the AIS team at Manuka more than 20 years earlier.”

Newlinds’ first love of cricket forms the backdrop for an engrossing and well-written story.

This stretches from backyard games with friends and siblings to an eye-opening post-retirement return to Bellerive for a Twenty20 international between Australia and England.

“The cricket was pure 2018, complete with music clips, dancing girls, fireworks and flame throwers, a long way from the peaceful MCC versus New South Wales tour match that had so enchanted me 40 years before.”

He reminisces about fond memories of working in the SCG scoreboard as a youth which included a front-row seat over the famous John Dyson catch against the West Indies in 1982.

The young Newlinds travelled extensively around Europe, enjoying a prolonged spell in England where he combined playing drums in a band called International Rescue and playing cricket for the Stoics club of Kew Gardens, noting how the “list of locations from 19th century novels” he graced proved quite a contrast from the bush around Duffys Forest.

“Black taxis, afternoon teas, celebrities and very long bar sessions. This was the England I’d found for myself.”

Returning home, Newlinds’ focus turned to his second love of radio in which he had long been learning his craft by “channelling the masters” of ABC Radio, namely Tim Lane, Jim Maxwell, Peter Roebuck and particularly Neville Oliver’s contributions to the BBC’s Test Match Special.

“With his broad Tasmanian accent he came across as a bit of a larrikin, a loudmouth with a touch of the  Wild Colonial Boy, just as the English expect an Australian to be,” Newlinds writes.

“He was the perfect counterpoint to the public school tones of his colleagues.

“The memories of those Test matches remain as clear in my mind as if they had been televised.”

Recollections of making his on air debut for a Canberra FM station are as vivid as a batsman recalling his first delivery.

“I waited behind my microphone, nervous as a kitten, while Peter, Paul and Mary sang Puff The Magic Dragon to the punters of Canberra and Queanbeyan.

“As the song finished, Tony hit a button and pointed at me.

“Away I went, spluttering my way through my very first piece of live-to-air broadcasting.”

The ABC followed and as a disciple of the equally revered Test Match Special and The Beatles, Newlinds admits that arriving at the broadcaster’s hallowed commentary box at the SCG was like turning up with a guitar to record at Abbey Road studios.

In 1998 he headed south with his wife and their three-week-old daughter to take up a vacancy in the Hobart office of ABC Radio.

“The idea was that I would acquire more experience and return to Sydney in a couple of years.

“Though the choice wasn’t ours, the possibilities of the move seemed to far outweigh the disruption.”

Newlinds’ observations of Tasmania from an objective mainland perspective, make for interesting reading, not least the description of York Park manager “Robert ‘The Wagon’ Groenewegen” as always being “the voice of reason”.

“It was time for some fast learning,” he writes.

“I soon understood that regional rivalries in Tasmania were on a level you wouldn’t anticipate in a state of half-a-million people.

“[Football] retained an in-built quarrelsome element and it seemed to me that the differences that divided Tasmanian football - be they historical, geographical or cultural - and corroded its structure were greater than the things that brought it together.”

Of the many Tasmanian sporting highlights he was to witness, Newlinds shares recollections of Lance Franklin’s freakish 13-goal performance against North Melbourne in 2012, Shane Crawford’s 300th appearance in 2008 and what appears destined to remain Launceston’s most historic AFL moment - the controversial Sirengate match between St Kilda and Fremantle in 2006.

“What happened was pandemonium of the historic kind, the like of which, on balance and being fair, could only have happened in Tassie.”

Away from footy and cricket, Newlinds embraced a diversity of other sports including his annual devotion to the Sydney-to-Hobart plus the 2001 world swimming championship trials and annual Hobart International tennis tournament - both a short stroll away from ABC headquarters across Liverpool Street.

With echoes of his Brian Lara comment, Newlinds says gazing out at the view provided by the Domain Tennis Centre - rivalled only by that from the media centre in Monte Carlo apparently - “can only loosely be described as work”.

An entire chapter - amusingly titled Pele the wonder dog - details Newlinds’ lesser-known love of the round ball football code, the author commenting that Australia’s national ambivalence towards soccer is demonstrated by not even being sure what to call it.

“Despite its attractions and qualities as a game, in Australia soccer has always lived on the fringe of the other three codes.”

Newlinds landed gigs at the 2006 and 2010 Commonwealth Games - taking him to contrasting degrees of familiarity in the host cities of Melbourne and New Delhi.

Assigned to cover shooting, he dived head-long into the mission despite admitting, with commendable honesty: “Pistol, air rifle and small bore shooting are possibly the most uninteresting sports you could ever watch, let alone talk about.”

Meanwhile, personal sporting activity was to come in useful in securing post-race interviews at the slightly higher-profile swimming events.

“Having played a bit of rugby at school I knew how to handle myself in a scrum, which served me well in the pack of poolside media and journalists armed with microphones and cameras.”

The story reaches a natural conclusion with a fitting analogy when Newlinds eventually became a victim of “a large wave of budget cuts in February 2015”.

“You learn a lot playing and watching cricket, including that when the umpire’s finger goes up, it’s time to go.”