Book Review: My Summer of Cricket-Three Tests, One Fan and Decades of Stories by Nikhil Kulkarni
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Team Kitaab reviews My Summer of Cricket-Three Tests, One Fan and Decades of Stories by Nikhil Kulkarni (Hembury Books, 2025).
Nikhil Kulkarni’s My Summer of Cricket: Three Tests, One Fan and Decades of Stories is, on the surface, a book about cricket fandom. Beneath that surface, lies a study of memory and the strange ways a sport can become a structure through which an entire life is understood. Cricket, in Kulkarni’s telling, is a language of inheritance, intimacy and continuity.
The book moves between temporalities with notable ease. The immediate frame is the 2024–25 Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia, which Kulkarni attends in full, travelling across Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Yet the emotional architecture of the narrative rests in accumulated recollections stretching back to childhood in North Karnataka, in early-morning radio commentaries, in televised rituals shared across generations, and in the emotional afterlives of matches long completed. The “summer” of the title is therefore less a discrete season than a culmination of decades spent absorbing cricket into the rhythms of everyday existence.
What distinguishes the book from conventional sports memoir is its resistance to triumphalist narrative. There is little interest here in constructing fandom as expertise or authority. Kulkarni instead approaches cricket as an emotional ecosystem populated by fragments overheard commentary, train journeys, conversations with strangers, stadium atmospheres, private superstitions, moments of loneliness softened by collective experience. The cumulative effect is diaristic without becoming indulgent. The prose often succeeds when it lingers in apparently minor details, allowing the texture of fandom to emerge gradually rather than announcing its significance outright.
