Cricket Adaptation Of “Field Of Dreams” Still Not In Production, Frustratingly

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

The strangest thing about the streaming age is not what gets made, but what doesn’t. For all the billions poured into content strategies, global rollouts, and international co-productions, the most obvious cultural home run remains untouched. It is called Wickets of Fantasy. It is a cricketing adaptation of Field of Dreams. It stars Angus Sampson. And it still does not exist.

The script is simple enough to be perfect. A weary wheat farmer outside Bellata hears a voice in the dry wind whispering, “If you roll it, they will come.” Against every instinct, he builds a turf wicket in the middle of his best paddock. His family looks on in disbelief as he tends the strip with a rusting roller and a borrowed mower. Then, one evening, as the galahs wheel overhead and the dust settles on the horizon, the heroes of yesteryear begin to arrive.

Bradman is first, pads strapped on with spectral precision, still frowning at the memory of sectarian divides, slowly coming around to the idea that not all Catholics are bad. Keith Miller follows, climbing out of the mist as though stepping down from the cockpit of a Mosquito bomber, his hair slicked with Brylcreem and nicotine, muttering about an evening of sinful reverse cowgirl and stand-up 69ing with Princess Margaret. “Donnie, my back is fucked from rooting all night, mate. I can’t bowl this morning!” he says. Behind them, Richie Benaud floats into view in his cream jacket, offering the faintest “marvellous” to nobody in particular. Soon enough, the whole pantheon of Australian cricketing ghosts assembles, drawn by the sound of a kookaburra ball fizzing off the seam.

They play as though time has stopped. David Hookes lights a cigarette on the boundary before carving cover drives into the wheat. Shane Warne grins and insists he will bowl from both ends, all day, with no complaints, and will take six. Victor Trumper, gone for more than a century, cuts through point as if it were still 1902. The crowd, imagined at first and then real, stands in silence. Angus Sampson watches from the rope, a son slowly walking out of the shadows to stand beside him, both men wordless, reconciled by the sight of the game itself.

The emotional heft is undeniable. Imagine middle-aged men shaking their heads in emotion as Warne tricks W.G. Grace of all people with a stock standard wrong-un. Or Twopenny, a member of the All-Aboriginal team that went over to England in the 1890s, coming around the wicket to W.G. and bouncing a few off his forehead. Imagine Bradman and Miller, handshakes at last beneath a north-west sunset. Imagine the ghosts of cricket gathering in a paddock of wheat, and a crowd forming from nothing more than belief.

Field of Dreams worked in America because it stitched baseball to the sentimental heart of the country. There is no reason Wickets of Fantasy would not do the same here. Bradman is more than a number. Miller is more than a root rat. W. G. Grace is the perfect villain. To imagine them together again is to imagine Australia itself, condensed into one improbable image.

And yet it remains unwritten. A whisper across the paddock. A promise of what could have been.

More to come.