The Shorter Wisden 2013

by John Wisden

  The other fascination with this genre is the way in which history gets rewritten. When England beat Australia in 2005 for the first time in 18 years, the consensus was that the success was partly down to Michael Vaughan’s captaincy. Seven years later, Anderson has become the first player to offer an alternative view, claiming Vaughan never made him feel relaxed. “I actually felt alone and isolated when I most needed support,” he writes. “Good captains get players to perform above themselves at times by putting their players at ease, and although a lot has been made of Vaughan’s laconic style, I never felt comfortable playing under him. I never felt like he rated me: the language that he used with me was seldom positive and I didn’t like that.” I can’t help feeling that, in seven years’ time, Anderson will have something more insightful to say about Pietersen when he writes his inevitable second autobiography. If you can wait that long, that should be the one to buy.

  Which brings us to that other long-time cricket favourite, the post-retirement, second-career-as-a-commentator, doyen-of-the-game’s memoir, complete with a foreword by Sir Ian Botham – though why so many continue to ask him for his endorsement is never entirely clear. Botham is so competitive – or possibly insecure – that he can’t resist putting his subject down, even when he’s trying to be nice. His contribution to Jackers, A Life in Cricket by Robin Jackman (with Colin Bryden) is a case in point. “I am always happy when we are in the same town for a few days as there aren’t many people who are easier to take money off on a golf course,” writes Botham. “If he drills a good drive, it goes about the distance of my wedge!” With friends like these...

  There again, it has to be said that, though Jackman might have a good story to tell, he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to do so, preferring to act as the after-dinner raconteur with tales, not always entertaining, of beer- and gin-soaked evenings with other players. Each to his own, however, and I dare say there are some who will find this an entertaining and quick read. Personally, I could have done with a great deal more self-analysis. It may not be easy for Jackman to accept that his career was defined as much by what happened off the pitch during the 1980-81 England tour to the West Indies as it was by his performances on it. But that is the way it is: more people will remember Jackman for being the man whose decision to play club cricket in South Africa in the 1970s eventually led to the cancellation of the Georgetown Test.

  Jackman is quite eloquent on the manoeuvrings that surrounded that tour and eventually kept it on track. But on his choice to play in South Africa, he is almost entirely silent. The country were banned from Test cricket in 1970, after the ICC recognised what most other countries and sports had grasped many years before: that the apartheid regime was morally and politically repugnant. Jackman must have been aware of this, so why did he choose to spend his winters away from Surrey playing cricket there? Was he not that bothered that the black population was being brutally repressed, kept out of key jobs (cricket included), and forced to live in segregated squalor? Or did he just think it was nothing to do with him, and everything would be OK so long as he kept the money – and his eyes shut? He never says.

  He’s also silent on his decision to settle in South Africa after giving up cricket in England, other than to say he had met a lovely South African woman, Vonnie, whom he married. It wasn’t as if he was returning to the country of his birth. He had been brought up in the Home Counties and, given the fallout from that 1980-81 West Indies tour, I would have expected Jackman to harbour at least some reservations about emigrating to an apartheid state once he had become aware of other people’s strength of feeling. But no. Instead, he writes about the black resistance groups in Zimbabwe as terrorists, with seemingly no understanding of the decades of white colonialism that had sparked the guerilla wars. I don’t expect politics to be every cricketer’s strong suit, but this is ridiculous, and Jackman leaves me with the feeling – rightly or wrongly – that, however much progress South Africa has made since readmission, it is still dominated by a white cabal.

  A rather more revealing and intimate portrait of a South African cricketer from roughly the same era comes in the shape of David Tossell’s Tony Greig. For the last 30 years or so, the former England captain and all-rounder had, as Gideon Haigh pointed out, “been barely remembered as a cricketer”, while Mike Atherton contended: “Greig remains one of the most underrated England cricketers of the post-war period.”

  Three things defined Greig in the public memory: his ill-advised declaration that he was going to make the 1976 West Indians “grovel”; his leading role in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket revolution; and his nationality. All three rightly take centre stage in Tossell’s book, but so too does Greig himself, the flawed man whose father was an alcoholic, who suffered from epilepsy since he was 11, who took all criticism – fair or unfair – head on, without ever asking anyone to make excuses for him. And, along the way, we learn that Greig was a better cricketer than he was given credit for. His Test batting average of 40 was higher than both Botham’s and Andrew Flintoff’s; his bowling average was poorer than Botham’s, but on a par with Flintoff’s. Furthermore, Greig achieved six five-wicket hauls, to Flintoff’s three – and in fewer Tests. All of which suggests he ought to be remembered as being among the three best English all-rounders of the post-war era.

  The real pleasure of this book, though, is that Greig’s story has been told by a first-rate sportswriter. This is no ghosted part-work, overfilled with self-justification and interminable anecdotes of parties and tour drinking bouts which so often are passed off as intimacy and self-revelation. Greig appears to have given Tossell carte blanche to write what he wanted, and encouraged his family to have their say – not all of it flattering. The book unwittingly became a fitting tribute to a man who died at the end of 2012, and was unusual in putting his integrity before legacy. Above all, it comes with the ring of truth. Yes, Greig never denied that qualifying for England was an act of career pragmatism, but never once was he an apologist for apartheid. Nor did he downplay, or have any regrets about, his mercenary role in the professionalisation of cricket. All that’s missing is any sense of gratitude from many of the players whose financial futures he was instrumental in securing.

  By the end of the book, Greig is still not an easy man to like, but it’s impossible not to feel the ice round him melt a little. He was so gloriously difficult. We tend these days to want to package our sports stars into easy, media-friendly compartments. Even in his late sixties, Greig refused to be pigeon-holed. South African, Australian or English? His idiosyncratic TV commentary consistently failed the Tebbit Test everywhere he went.

  There again, Icki Iqbal’s utterly charming The Tebbit Test: The Memoirs of a Cricketing Fanatic exposes the jingoism at the heart of this infamous proposition. In 1990, Norman Tebbit – a former Tory cabinet minister – argued that ethnic minorities in Britain revealed their true nationality by the cricket team they supported. It’s unlikely you will have heard of Icki Iqbal, so let me fill you in. He was born in 1945 in Pakistan to a well-off, middle-class family, and has been obsessed with cricket ever since 1954, when the Pakistanis began to make their presence felt in international cricket. He moved to England in the mid-1960s, worked hard as an actuary, and is now as British as anyone. He even supports England.

  But his journey hasn’t been quite as straightforward as Tebbit might have liked. Almost every sentence of this book speaks of a man with a Pakistani soul. His enthusiasm for English cricket is based partly on familiarity, but largely on disillusionment caused by corruption in the subcontinental game. Iqbal has become fed up with defending the indefensible. Had he not lost his faith in Pakistani cricket, there’s little reason to believe he would have transferred allegiance.

  And why should he? Multiculturalism is one of Britain’s great success stories. Partisanship is hot-wired into every true cricket fan, and shouldn’t be readily transferable. I have my own sliding scale of prejudice in international cricket. When England are playing, I always
support them. If not, my pecking order runs Pakistan, West Indies, India, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. I’ve no idea how many Tebbit Tests I fail along the way, but I’m really not bothered. In my world, the main test is just being passionate about cricket. If you are, then you’re welcome.

  Social history is also central to Gentlemen & Players: The Death of Amateurism in Cricket by Charles Williams. Few sports have reflected the English class structure quite so rigidly, and Williams offers a faithful account of the development of the modern game through the social make-up of county cricket. What’s most astonishing about the Gentlemen–Players divide is not that it ever disappeared, but that it took so long to do so. The idea of a posh amateur being able to tell a county which dates he fancied playing on during his summer holidays is beyond parody. Class barriers were coming down throughout Britain after the Second World War, but cricket managed to maintain them until 1962. Then again, MCC were in charge...

  For Williams, the inevitable and necessary end of cricket’s class divide is not without its losses, for he believes something of the game’s spirit went with it. I’m not so sure. If the only way a sport can retain its ethos is by hanging on to inequality, then it was probably not as pure as it was cracked up to be. Moreover, as Williams’s book makes clear, it was more often than not the Gentlemen who were the most ruthlessly professional.

  Phil Tufnell never got close to the genius of Shane Warne on the field, but he is more than his equal along the dodgy road of post-cricket celebrity, where the boundaries between being laughed with and laughed at become increasingly blurred. Warne should take Tuffers’ Cricket Tales away with him on a Trappist retreat for a week before it is too late and, on his re-emergence, vow never again to take fashion advice from Liz Hurley or adopt a haircut that looks 20 years younger than his body.

  I realise I’m stepping even closer to grumpiness than usual here, and I concede there is something to be said for live and let live. Tuffers is clearly having a good time in his new life, and a lot of people seem to get pleasure out of it, so what’s the harm? Well... it just all seems so trivial. I want to remember Tufnell as the man who spun out West Indies at The Oval, not as some half-wit on reality TV. And this book of recycled anecdotes, packaged in a series of bite-sized paragraphs under subheadings such as “Puking in Ealing” and “The Crepe Suzette Pan of Uncertainty”, has clearly been published with his new fan base in mind.

  The thing is, I don’t believe a word of it. This new cor-blimey geezer feels like a total reinvention. He was born Philip Clive Roderick Tufnell, and went to an independent school. Was his laddish persona a self-cultivation? If so, his performances as a pundit on Test Match Special take on a darker meaning. Tuffers’s role on TMS is to be the informed bloke calling out from a sea of posh establishment voices, the man of the people who may frequently get his words and thoughts confused, but has a heart of gold and speaks the truth to Joe Public. If Tuffers isn’t really like that at all, then his shtick is insincere and patronising. I know I’m being harsh, but I feel disappointed. I loved watching Tufnell bowl, and I can’t bear the fact that, if he carries on putting his name to books like this, he’ll principally be remembered as having sold out.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to make cricket funny. It’s the trying too hard that’s the problem. The game itself is so shot through with hubris that only those running it seem not to notice. Left to its own devices, humour will almost always find a way to land a laugh.

  A few years ago, the actor and stand-up comic Miles Jupp performed a one-man show about his efforts to become a cricket journalist covering an England Test tour; he has now extended that riff into Fibber in the Heat, a gentle – and genteel – unrequited love affair.

  Like many of us who are blessed with next to no natural ability for cricket, but have a borderline-obsessive desire to follow it, Jupp wondered – during a career break from playing Archie the Inventor in the touring production of the children’s show Balamory: Live! – whether he might be able to combine his passion for cricket with something that could loosely be called a job. And so, having maxed out his almost non-existent contacts book, he eventually found himself with two letters inviting him to contribute the occasional freelance report for the Western Mail and BBC Radio Scotland during England’s 2005-06 trip to India.

  As it happens, I found myself doing something rather similar in 1992, when I managed to persuade the Pakistan cricket team to let me hang around with them during the 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand so I could write a book about Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. I can therefore testify that every word Jupp writes resonates with eternal truth, failure and laughter – though in my case it took several years to appreciate just how much funnier everyone else found the experience than I did.

  Jupp lives constantly on the verge of being found out. He’d like to write several probing features for the Cardiff-based Western Mail about how Welsh-born Simon Jones’s injury has unbalanced the squad, but his day-to-day preoccupations are far more mundane: worrying if he has the right accreditation, worrying that the other hacks have made separate travel arrangements, worrying whether he’s going to get into the press box and find there’s nowhere for him to sit, worrying that no one is going to invite him out in the evenings and that he will be spending night after night feeling homesick in the not-very-nice hotel he can barely afford. Worrying, always worrying.

  It has to be said that Jupp came rather closer to making it as a proper member of the British cricket media corps than I ever did, but he fails for much the same reason. At heart, he is just too much of a fan to be a reporter. I never could get used to the po-faced silence of the press box, where cheering a century was the last word in poor form. I knew the game was up when I found myself celebrating with Wasim inside the Pakistan dressing-room at the MCG after he had just bowled his country to victory in the final, rather than trying to get a few quotes I could sell. I just couldn’t imagine ever wanting to go back into the press box. And yes, that night I too failed the Tebbit Test.

  Marcus Berkmann set the benchmark for heroic tales of failure in amateur cricket with his 1995 book Rain Men. It chronicled the weekly incompetence and petty rivalries of his nomadic team, the Captain Scott XI, and established a new – and welcome – sub-genre of cricket writing in which the terminally useless and unfit, who make up 90% of the world’s players, get their day in print. Sustaining interest and comedy in people known to nobody but the author and a few close friends is a hard act to pull off. Since Berkmann, many writers have met with varying levels of success.

  One of the typical problems with this sort of book is being able to believe that the team are quite as bad as portrayed. Amateur cricketers are prone to self-deprecation, and I’ve lost count of the number of times over the 30 years I’ve been playing for the particularly useless Hemingford Hermits that opposing captains have said before the start, “Oh we’re really not very good at all – seven of our best players are on holiday,” only to find we are 13 for five after six overs. So I’ve become deeply suspicious of cricket writers bearing gifts of false modesty. I will, though, make an exception for Not Out First Ball, by Roger Morgan-Grenville and Richard Perkins, a book that oozes charm and humour from the very first page and, most importantly, describes failures of the terminally delusional so accurately that I could almost believe one of the more disloyal members of the Hermits – and disloyalty is written into the team’s DNA – had written a roman à clef.

  Every familiar character is writ large. The captain who has never quite been able to come to terms with the fact he is no longer head boy of his minor public school; the fast bowler whose shoulders went 20 years ago, and can now only pitch one ball in six; the opening batsman who can’t get the ball off the square, and is invariably one not out after ten overs; the wicketkeeper who can no longer bend his knees. Then there’s the sledging. Why would anyone want to undermine the opposition when there’s so much more fun to be had from rubbishing your own mate
s? If the White Hunter Cricket Club doesn’t exist, it ought to. And if it does, the Hemingford Hermits will give you a game.

  I shouldn’t end, though, without a brief salute to the pamphlets that cricket enthusiasts continue to self-publish. A special mention should be made of Triumph at Wattle Flat: When Castlemaine Beat the Poms, by Richard Mack. I’ve no idea what spurs a man on to research a minor game between the first English side to tour Australia in 1861 and a Castlemaine XXII, and then write it up in such depth. But I’m glad that men like Richard Mack exist. Cricket – and cricket writing – wouldn’t be the same without them.

  John Crace is the author of ten books on subjects from cricket and football to fatherhood and literature. He is also a TV reviewer and columnist for The Guardian.

  WISDEN BOOK OF THE YEAR

  Since 2003, Wisden’s reviewer has selected a Book of the Year. The winners have been:

  2003

  Bodyline Autopsy by David Frith

  2004

  No Coward Soul by Stephen Chalke and Derek Hodgson

  2005

  On and Off the Field by Ed Smith

  2006

  Ashes 2005 by Gideon Haigh

  2007

  Brim Full of Passion by Wasim Khan

  2008

  Tom Cartwright: The Flame Still Burns by Stephen Chalke