Except, one-by-one, those broadcasting gigs fell over, culminating on that fateful day in March 2023, when Today FM, MediaWorks’ upstart talkback station, fell apart live on air with Tova O’Brien telling listeners the staff had been “f***ed” by management and Duncan Garner calling the whole thing a “betrayal”.
The AM Show, presented by Duncan Garner, news anchor Amanda Gillies, sports presenter Mark Richardson.
Richardson, who hosted the afternoon show with Leah Panapa, was listening. He learned his fate live, along with everyone else.
“When I got into my car at 9 o’clock to go to work, I had a job. And by the time I got there, I didn’t. It was all unravelling in front of me.”
He liked the job and felt the show had legs, but he wasn’t “dumb”.
“We knew the success of that station wasn’t riding on the afternoon offering. We were filling air, but we thought we were filling air pretty well,” he says.
“I’ve been through that in cricket, I’ve been in and out of teams. When I got into the Black Caps, I thought, ‘I’m the one who decides when I leave here’ – and I did, I got out early.
“But this time, it felt like a really unfair kick in the guts. But I was lucky I got this other opportunity.”
Richardson, 54, is now a qualified investment advisor at Forsyth Barr in Auckland. In a nutshell, he makes money by helping other people make money with their money. It meant brushing off a (very faded) Bachelor of Commerce he finished while playing cricket for Otago, and sitting a handful of exams as a 50-something starting his career again from scratch.
Richardson has told this story before, but it’s clearly a pivotal moment for him. When all those broadcasting jobs disappeared, things got tough. At first, his agent was sure he would find more work on telly, then slowly realised the jobs just weren’t out there.
“Moving on from 20 years of broadcasting takes some time. I’m not sure if there was a finality, but there was a real sort of emptiness, that it’s not fair,” he says.
At a loss of what to do next, Richardson turned to the NZ Cricket Players Association, or players’ union. “It doesn’t really [fit] my political leanings with being a life member of a union, but…” he says.
The organisation helps players transition to life after the game – even ones like Richardson, who hadn’t played for two decades. They sent him to an HR company and a personality test suggested he was 100% psychologically suited to being in the military – and least suited to a career in sport and entertainment. He was staggered, but then again, it did explain why he’d felt on edge for more than half his life.
“I always stressed about everything. And I think 1759537448 I’m just conditioned to being able to deal with that. Always feeling a little bit uncomfortable.”
‘Moving on from 20 years of broadcasting takes some time.’
He says he really learned to struggle as a batter, which he picked up after his hands suddenly stopped bowling spin the way they had at the start of his career. And he means that in a good way – now, struggling makes achievements more rewarding.
“What I’m probably most proud of as a cricketer is that I wasn’t really that good but I got every ounce of ability out of myself… I’d just grit my teeth and survive.”
It sounds exhausting. Is this new career a little kinder to the nervous system? Not a chance. By 8.30pm, his brain is usually shattered. There have been times he has fallen asleep on the bus home from work because he is “mentally stuffed”.
“There’s a million different ways to make a buck in this world,” he says.
“And you can’t check out – because people’s money doesn’t sleep. If they want something done, you’ve got to get it done… and if they are worried about their money, it’s your responsibility to worry with them.
“I find it mentally up and down, but I think I’ve always gravitated to vocations that give me a sense of self-worth… and this job gives you a tremendous sense of self-worth.”
He compares starting out in finance to learning a language and he’s learning Spanish by living in Spain, by which he means, he’s thrown himself into it completely. His wife, Mary, lost her role with Air NZ during Covid and retrained in real estate just before Richardson started his studies and together they are grateful to be able to start again in their 50s, especially as next year they will be empty nesters when their 18-year-old twins, Annabel and Charlie, leave for university. But yes, learning new things in middle age made him nervous.
“‘Ding ding, your assignment has been graded’ – [when I got that message] my heart would go, like I was walking out to bat,” he says. The qualifications to work in a job like his usually take people a year and a half to complete. He did it in six months. “I actually, proudly, set a record, I think.”
It turns out, people like talking about markets and they like talking about money. When he started at Forsyth Barr just over two years ago, Richardson would regularly book a round of golf with a bunch of strangers and the minute they started chatting, he’d have a “good few hours of talking shop, which builds that street cred”. Because being “the guy off the telly” didn’t really work in his favour like you think it might.
Mark Richardson racing Darren Lehmann in 2004. Richardson won the race. Photo / Photosport
“Now, I’ve become very selective about how I tie myself to my former life,” he says. “Everything I do needs to build credibility in this.”
That means that if “The Block ever came back or if The Block did come back or if The Block had come back, I would have said no. It would have placed me [back] as the man on telly”.
Cricket commentary is different. Maybe don’t tell TVNZ, but he says he would still do that for free because he loves it so much. This summer, he will set up a mobile office near the commentary box and do his day job in between speaking another language, this time of wides and googlies and cow corners.
There are a lot of similarities between cricket and finance, according to the man who knows both. In cricket, you need to have the basics, and if you want to be good, those take time to learn. You learn about risk management – which anyone who saw Richardson bat knows he understands that concept all too well.
“[In finance] you live and breathe your successes, and your losses keep you awake at night, just like cricket. If you had a bad day and you played a bad shot, you ask questions of yourself – ‘what the hell’s wrong with me?’
“You’ve got to learn from your mistakes. And it’s probably worse here … it’s not your batting average, it’s someone else’s portfolio.”
For someone who has made a name for themselves ruffling feathers (if that’s not something of an understatement), Richardson cares “dearly” about his colleagues and his clients and about what people think of him. But during his broadcasting career, he learnt he wouldn’t be destroyed if people didn’t like him.
Did he worry he had upset people with his comments on everything from asking women about their pregnancy plans all the way through to suggesting an all-female team on The Block should “flirt” with potential buyers to get a better auction price?
Mark Richardson and Shelley Ferguson on The Block NZ.
“I’ve got no regrets. I always said what I believed. I basically said what I thought, not what I think I should say. There was a lot of disagreement and a lot of angst over things that I said, but I never felt I crossed the line. It was always just a difference of opinion.
“I didn’t go out to upset people, but I knew it was part of the gig… if you just want to be mediocre and never actually go as far as you can go…Just say what you think you should say, be happy to go under the radar, not upset anyone, be good at the mechanics. You might survive – but you’ll never thrive.”
He doesn’t remember exactly what he said to get under late Aussie cricketer Shane Warne’s skin – but he wears the fact that he did as a “badge of honour”.
“I think I said something wrong one day and that was that. We didn’t get on, we had clashing personalities. He was one of the greatest to ever play the game, and I was just me. I was always quite proud of the fact that this great player, for some reason, I lived rent free in his head.”
As he’s having his photo taken, the receptionist at Forsyth Barr tells a preoccupied Richardson it’s not often that he’s not talking. It sounds like a gag, but she later whispers to me that he’s “actually quite quiet. That’s why I said that”. Maybe that’s new-ish kid energy, because Shane Bond, Richardson’s former Black Caps teammate and fellow TVNZ commentator, says actually, what you see on screen is pretty close to what you get off it.
“When you’re in the public eye it’s easy to try to want everyone to like you. [Richardson’s] just himself. He’d say he’s negative and grumpy, which is probably true, but that’s probably the same for most blokes over 50,” Bond says.
“He will express an honest opinion whether in person or private and you can get into a good debate on it. I like that. He likes his golf and solitude. I’ve always found him interesting. He’s done a lot of different things and certainly gets outside of his comfort zone. I admire him for that. Plus, you have to be a bit nuts to open the batting.”
Speaking of nuts, in 2018, Richardson said he wouldn’t mind being a National MP because he saw it as a game, a competition. What about now? A 2026 run for office, perhaps?
“[I have] not a skerrick of political ambition,” Richardson says rather emphatically. “[Back then] I wasn’t a journo – I’d never been a journo. Then the National Party was showing some interest and it was a stroke of my ego. Duncan [Garner] said, ‘don’t you ever go into politics’… and I think I came to my senses. I would last five minutes in that environment.”
Richardson didn’t get to make his own decision about ending almost every other one of his broadcasting jobs, but he thinks this summer of cricket commentary will be his last. Next year, Sky will pick up the broadcast rights and Richardson doesn’t see a place for him there. Instead, he’s going to soak up his last moments in the media spotlight.
“I’ve done it for 20-odd good years, and I will miss it. But then, this is a new life. And this will be [drawing] the last line under broadcasting, and I’ll be completely out and completely moved on.
“In cricket, I got near the top, but not one of the greats. And in broadcasting, [I] got up there, into primetime, but not one of the greats. But I’ve got to be happy.
“It feels like this is my swansong…so I’m going to enjoy it.”
Free-to-air cricket is live on TVNZ during the 2005/26 summer.
Bridget Jones joined the New Zealand Herald in 2025. She has been a lifestyle and entertainment journalist and editor for more than 15 years.