The story is told of a sportsman, who, asked to comment on his autobiography said, “I haven’t read it yet.” At the other end of the scale is Mike Tyson’s claim that while in prison he read Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Hemingway. Many people find it difficult to put “sportspersons” and “books” into the same sentence. Or to write about players’ reading lists without condescension.
In his playing days, asked about his favourite book, Sachin Tendulkar smiled sweetly and said, “I haven’t begun reading books yet.”
One of the striking sports photographs of last year was that of India’s captain Mithali Raj reading The Essential Rumi during the World Cup in England.
When Don Bradman wanted a list of books to read he consulted the cricket writer Neville Cardus. More recently, Mark Butcher has written about how “he read an enormous amount on England tours,” and how “Mike Atherton threw books at me,” to ensure the supply didn’t dry up.
During the 2011 World Cup, the International Cricket Council had teamed up with an NGO to promote reading, and asked a player from each country to choose his favourite book. Shane Watson and Virat Kohli both chose Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open , Tamim Iqbal Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone , and Ed Joyce 1984 .
All this is by way of leading up to Ravichandran Ashwin’s request on Twitter: “Any suggestions for a good read? No autobiographies preferably”
In over three decades of writing about the game, this is the first time I have encountered such a request. In fact, I have discussed books, however briefly, with very few Indian cricketers: Rahul Dravid, Bishan Bedi, S. Venkatraghavan, Aakash Chopra, Sunil Gavaskar, Abbas Ali Baig (at the time when he featured in a Salman Rushdie novel).
Ashwin is in South Africa with the Indian team, and maybe interested to know that the country’s Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee, was an off-spinner and played club cricket in his youth.
But let’s get back to his request. Suggesting books to read is fraught with all kinds of difficulties. There is the problem of relative taste, for one. By limiting the choice to cricket books, however, we can hope to be on the same wavelength.
Ashwin, an intelligent, articulate man, might not need to be told about the standard texts: Cardus, James, Arlott, Robinson, Robertson-Glasgow, Fingleton, Frith and Haigh. Or the two Indian classics, A Corner of a Foreign Field by Ramachandra Guha and Pundits from Pakistan by Rahul Bhattacharya.
I shall recommend therefore the less publicised (in India) books.
Cricket Wallah by Scyld Berry, is a wonderful tour book on one of the most boring series ever played: India versus England 1981-82. India won the first Test and sat on the lead till the sixth Test. Yet, through all that dust and grime and boredom, Berry saw a future where India would be calling the shots in world cricket. Berry’s more recent, more personal Cricket: The Game of Life is set to become a classic too.
Mike Brearley’s recent On Form might be en route to joining his earlier On Captaincy as a masterpiece. Less specific than the earlier book, but more philosophical, it rewards re-reading.
Peter Roebuck’s It Never Rains… is the diary of a county season where the player’s self-doubt and self-renewal could be read as the generic response of the good-but-not-great sportsman.
“It’s strange that cricket attracts so many insecure men,” writes Roebuck. “ It is surely the very worst game for an intense character, yet it continues to find many obtuse sensitivities amongst its players. Men of imagination, men of ideals risk its harsh exposures.”
Ian Peebles’s Straight From the Shoulder on chucking continues to be the starting point for all discussion on the issue. Particularly interesting in the light of Ashwin’s own thoughts on the subject.
Arthur Mailey, cartoonist, columnist and taker of 99 wickets in 21 Tests wrote 10 for 66 and All That in 1958. His reaction to his dismissal of his hero Victor Trumper remains one of cricket literature’s most poignant lines: “There was no triumph in me as I watched the receding figure. I felt like a boy who had killed a dove.” It says as much about the batsman as about the bowler.
It is possible that leg-spinners have written more interesting books than have off-spinners. Ian Peebles, Richie Benaud, Shane Warne, Peter Philpott, Bill O’Reilly versus Jim Laker, Hugh Tayfield, Erapalli Prasanna. Not that this means anything!
For short essays full of passion and wry humour, there is Jon Hotten’s The Meaning of Cricket which is quirky, brings together melancholy and excitement under one roof. There is no compulsion to read it all in one sitting, making it the ideal book to be reading when the opening batsmen have just begun the walk out into the middle.
And when the fancy turns to fiction, there’s always Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland , and closer home, Arvind Adiga’s Selection Day .
In cricket literature or ‘criclit’, Ashwin will soon discover a universal truth: so many books, so little time!
