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March 12, 2010Posted by Samir Chopra on 03/12/2010 in Samir Chopra
Cricket books and masters of the game
Cricket fans living in the United States used to complain about lack of access to the game. Well, we got live telecasts (on satellite and broadband video) and we got the chance to play the game itself. But one thing is still hard (impossible?) to find: a bookstore that carries cricket books.
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Thus, one highlight of my recent trip to Australia was a chance to visit stores that actually carried decent selections of cricket books and to rediscover three masters of cricket writing: John Arlott, Ray Robinson and Gideon Haigh. The icing on the cake was that two of the books are genuine classics: Arlott's An Eye for Cricket is a pictorial one, featuring the photography of Patrick Eagar, the greatest cricket photographer of all; Robinson's opus On Top Down Under is yet to be rivalled as an intimate portrait of Australian captains. I do not attach the adjective "classic" to Haigh's Silent Revolutions only because its vintage is too recent; give it a few years and it will be so, the quality of the writing to be found in there will ensure it endures and continues to edify.
I purchased books by this trio from both first-run bookshops (Readings in Melbourne) and second-hand specialists (Goulds and Berkelouw in Sydney). My procurement method included the roundabout technique of looking up titles on www.abebooks.com and then calling in orders.
In buying and reading these books, I rediscovered several pleasures which had started to become distant memories: the idle browse through several decades of cricket history, the serendipitous discovery of a classic, and most importantly, when reading cricket history, the chance to find out just how much has changed and how much remains the same in this game. There were other, more tangible pleasures: the chance to start each day with a stroll down to the coffee shop on the corner, followed by a leisurely immersion in cricket history.
Reading these books was also a humbling experience. I used to pride myself on being well-read about cricket. Well, as one of my students in Brooklyn might say, ‘you ain't there, son’. For as cricketing historians, Arlott, Haigh and Robinson stagger with their erudition (and dazzle with their writing flair; Arlott perhaps less so but that’s just because he is a trifle more understated).
Haigh has established himself as a modern master par excellence; one is relentlessly exposed to what a library of 3000-plus cricket books can bring about. He is an allrounder too and I wonder how many Cricinfo readers realise he is one of the best business writers out there? If anyone is qualified to analyse the foibles of the IPL from a business perspective, he is. I urge Cricinfo readers to track down his masterly take-down of the cult of the CEO; the word "cricket" shows up nowhere in the book, yet it manages to teach us about modern cricket.
In the case of the sadly departed Ray, I was reminded again of what a deft touch he could bring to his writing and how prominently his affection for the game comes through in his portraits of Australian captains. He reminds me (in his finished product) of no one more than David Halberstam (also now sadly departed) the great American journalist and writer who showed the same skill of being able to combine staggering amounts of information into a seamless narrative that informed and entertained.
In the weeks to come, I hope to review all three of the books mentioned above; in the case of the Arlott and Eagar book, I will be handicapped by not being able to share the photographs with you, but some of the photos are likely to be so well-known that a mere mention of them should be enough to sustain my verbal descriptions.
Posted by: Mohan at March 12, 2010 3:56 PM
Yes, here's an example of Haigh's mastery over both Cricket and Business where he comes up with this masterful suggestion that BCCI should give up control over IPL to ICC. http://www.cricinfo.com/decadereview2009/content/story/440354.html
Posted by: sushant singh at March 13, 2010 1:19 PM
Well, An Eye for Cricket is really an EXCELLENT book.The photography in the book is the best ever you will see in a cricket book.Now that you are recomending On Top DOWN UNDER , I will definately go for it & will search in any book store in New Delhi.
Posted by: japdb at March 14, 2010 3:11 AM
If you like Robinson try "Between Wickets" about cricket between the wars. A great book with lots of stats that must have been hard to get in the days before Stats Guru. japdb
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Shanaka Amarasinghe Possessing the best disguised googly in Sri Lanka (because no one has ever really seen it), Shanaka is the finest legspinner to never have played top-level cricket. He is a popular cricket analyst and host of The Score, the No. 1-rated, if slightly infamous, sports show on radio in Sri Lanka. While in England playing rugby, he earned his LLM at King’s College and is a lawyer by training if not inclination. He is also an actor, a journalist, a writer, and thinks he is a comedian.
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Mike Holmans, a database consultant by profession, has spent thirty summers (and a few winters) going to the cricket. Brought up in one and working in the other, his dearest wish is for a season to end with Yorkshire winning the county championship by beating runners-up Middlesex by one wicket with five minutes to go. If it’s also a summer when England win the Ashes, so much the better.
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Michael Jeh Born in Colombo, educated at Oxford and now living in Brisbane, Michael Jeh (Fox) is a cricket lover with a global perspective on the game. An Oxford Blue who played first-class cricket, he is a Playing Member of the MCC and still plays grade cricket. Michael now works closely with elite athletes, and is passionate about youth intervention programmes. He still chases his boyhood dream of running a wildlife safari operation called Barefoot in Africa.
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Saad Shafqat takes special pride that his cricket-watching life began during the three-month interval between Javed Miandad's debut Test in Lahore and Imran Khan's 12-wicket haul at Sydney. Although a practicing neurologist based in Karachi, cricket has never been far from his activities. He has co-authored Javed Miandad’s autobiography Cutting Edge and has been a contributor to Cricinfo since 2005. His regular column Reverse Swing appears fortnightly in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily.
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