On a tour of Australia in the 1990s, I was a dinner guest at Srikantan Ramamurthy’s house and was taken around his fabulous cricket collection. A highlight was a diary of the 1902 tour of England by the great Australian batsman Victor Trumper. It was an awe-inspiring moment for a young cricket writer. I knew someone who knew someone who was related to Trumper (Ramamurthy was a friend of Trumper’s descendants). Fewer than six degrees of separation!
That Trumper diary, though, is “almost comically succinct”, writes Gideon Haigh in Stroke of Genius , easily the cricket book of the year, of the century, and a contender for the title of best ever. C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary has competition at last.
It extends the possibilities of cricket-writing-as-literature. If you read only one book published this year, it will have to be this biography, cultural commentary, the story of the evolution of a continent and the emergence of the first national hero as well as the role of photography in embedding in the minds of generations the iconic images that stand for things beyond themselves.
In the 1980s, David Frith wrote a biography of Archie Jackson calling him the Keats of cricket. The romantics saw a straight line between the batsmanship of Trumper and Jackson.
“When he died,” wrote Frith of Jackson, “cricket’s transition from an aesthetic exercise to a purely mathematical strategy was underway.” Romanticism also somehow demands a premature death. Keats died at 25, Shelley at 29, Byron at 36. Jackson was 23 when he died, Trumper 37.
The Meaning of Cricket by Jon Hotten is a collection of his writings. The subtitle says it all: Or How to Waste Your Life On an Inconsequential Sport. Only the truly obsessed can understand the absurdity of that obsession while revelling in it.
Just as some of the most interesting fiction writers from the subcontinent have emerged from Pakistan in recent years (Nadeem Aslam, Mohammad Hanif, Daniyal Moinudeen, Kamila Shamsie), some of the best cricket books recently have been written on Pakistani cricket. Two fine histories of the game there, written by Osman Samiuddin and Peter Oborne respectively, appeared within months of each other a couple of years ago.
On Pakistan cricket
This year, Oborne co-wrote White on Green: Celebrating the Drama of Pakistan Cricket with Richard Heller, a wonderful ride through the mind and grind of Pakistan cricket told in a series of essays, and an interview with Dr. A.Q. Khan, cricket lover and father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb.
Dr. Khan’s lab runs a cricket team for which Misbah-ul-Haq, the Pakistani captain played. There are amazing nuggets throughout the book. Like the actor Omar Sharif turning out for an Egypt team on a tour of England in 1951, and the story of Raees Mohammad, the fifth brother and the only one not to have played Test cricket. He was 82, and this was the first time he was being interviewed in his own right, and not as the lesser known brother of Wazir, Hanif, Mushtaq and Sadiq.
Scyld Berry’s Cricket: The Game of Life is both history and autobiography, aesthetics and philosophy, and written with a casual humour and disguised intensity.
Just as Berry’s take on numbers or the spirit of the game or Vinod Kambli’s rise and fall evoke specific responses in your mind, he seems to somehow become aware of it and deals with the digression, tying up the threads with rare skill. He celebrates the game with the enthusiasm of a new convert and the experience of an old hand. It is a startling combination.
Urban legends
There is the temptation to see South Africa’s A.B. de Villiers as a Renaissance man. After all, he was shortlisted for the South African national hockey squad and their football squad, he captained the national junior team in rugby and continues to hold six national schools swimming records. He ran the fastest 100-metres among juniors in his country, and was a member of the junior Davis Cup team and the under-19 badminton champion. He is a scratch golfer too. And to top it all he had received a medal from Nelson Mandela for his science project.
All wonderful stories, and all untrue, according to AB: TheAutobiography. “These are the facts,” says the player, “decent at golf, useful at rugby and tennis when I was young, and enjoying cricket ever since. The errors will doubtless remain on the Internet and people will continue to believe I was some kind of prodigy at all those different sports, but the truth will hopefully somehow endure.”
The Autobiography is a book full of sunshine and joy, of god and gratitude. This might turn some away, but setting the records straight makes it worthwhile.
In Absolutely Foxed, his autobiography, Graeme Fowler writes with an engaging honesty about his battles with depression. “You are not alone,” is the message he sends out to fellow-sufferers of one of sport’s least discussed conditions.
So there you have it. The cricket books I enjoyed the most this year.
