Cricket books | reviews and recommendations

Cricket, Lovely Cricket? by Lawrence Booth | book review

While Lawrence Booth’s posts sometimes nestle next to ours on the Wisden Cricketer blog, we’ve never actually spoken to him, so you can be assured of our impartiality.

Cricket, Lovely Cricket? An Addict’s Guide To The World’s Most Exasperating Game is officially recommended.It’s kind of an overview of the game as it currently stands; a primer to tell you everything you really need to know. Not the rules or the records, but the culture of the game.

As we read it, we continually thought it was the kind of book we’d try and foist onto a friend who didn’t like the sport to trick them into entering our world. ‘See, it’s not shit,’ would be our implicit message. But if you’re worried it’s a book for those new to cricket, it’s not.

We probably read more cricket writing than most, but there were plenty of good stories in here that we’d never heard before and Booth’s also a writer who’s not averse to sneaking out the kinds of stories that cricketers and cricket writers usually keep to themselves.

A man who writes a chapter on the language of cricket has to know the clichés well enough to steer clear of them and Booth is a writer who seems like he thinks about each of his sentences. We’re not sure he could write a duff cricket book. Buy it from Amazon, if you haven’t got a copy already.

What I Love About Cricket by Sandy Balfour | book review

You have to write in some detail when you do a book review, but in our eyes there are two main types of books. There are books that you enjoy and there are books that you have to force yourself to read.

We enjoyed What I Love About Cricket and as long as we don’t feel like we’ve wasted time on a book, we’re happy with it. Now for more detail. Some of the following may seem negative, but bear in mind that these criticisms are from a perspective of having liked the book.

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Jrod’s book

He claims it’s got better spelling and grammar than the website, but he’s put ‘disrepsective’ on the page where he’s selling the thing, so do you trust him on that?

The writer of Cricket With Balls gives us The Year Of The Balls 2008: a cricket disrespective. Part with your hard-earned and support the man.

We thought about doing a book once, but we Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Ved our way to a standstill. Writing books is hard, even if you’ve already done all the writing.

Book review: If It Was Raining Palaces I’d Get Hit By The Dunny Door

Yes, it’s good. There’s a review for you.

Okay, let’s do a little bit more. First of all, the title. If It Was Raining Palaces I’d Get Hit By The Dunny Door is quite transparently a bit of Australian slang. It’s a way of saying you’re unlucky even when it’s nigh-on impossible to be so. The subtitle is ‘The Ashes travails of a whingeing Pom’, which should go some way further to explaining what this book is about.

The author, Nigel Henderson, is a freelance journalist who mostly works on the Times’ sports desk. During the last Ashes series, he delved into his bank account and took his girlfriend, Sue, on a punishing jaunt around Oz following the English cricket team. When we describe it as punishing, we mean the cricket mostly.

That’s probably the main weakness of the book, actually. While it’s well-written, flitting from light-hearted anecdote to deeper thoughtfulness, the subject matter’s a bit unremittingly bleak if you’re an England supporter and being as this is written by a self-proclaimed ‘whingeing Pom’ it’s aimed at those people.

It’s billed as part sports book, part travelogue, part loser-lit, but the travelogue aspect never really takes centre stage. We’d guess it was never really supposed to, but in light of the one-sided nature of the cricket, it might have been better to bring it the fore a touch. Even an English cricket writer can’t sustain the humour-in-tragedy tone for an entire book.

The best parts are the dealings with the locals. Some were clearly humorous at the time, but even those that were probably borderline unendurable become entertaining in the retelling.

At one point, during the subsequent one-day series in which England were victorious, Mike Hussey is dismissed. Henderson has been getting pissed off with some mouthy Australians a few rows back from him and turns to celebrate the wicket in an ‘in your face’ kind of way. They notice and retaliate with the the ferociously barbed shout: “Grey shirt” because Henderson is indeed wearing a grey shirt.

In a way it would be good if that ended there, but they actually recover quite well. The chant becomes: “Grey shirt, grey hair, grey man, grey country.” Henderson’s internal response is “That’s harsh. The shirt, the man and the country I can take, but the hair? It’s not like I’m completely grey. There’s a bit around the edges I grant you, but Sue says it makes me look distinguished. Is she fibbing?”

Sue’s role is to reflect Henderson’s thoughts back at him with added clarity, so that you see the absurdity of what he’s thinking and what you too would doubtless be thinking in his shoes. Any mindless cricketing optimism is soon undercut by someone who barely knows the game and on a train journey ‘the longest stretch of straight track in the world’ can go from sounding like a quirky little point of interest en route to something that literally defines bordom, depending on who’s describing it.

Speed-read the bits where Flintoff’s chipping a catch to mid-on and you’ll like this book. It’s a cricket book and it’s not a biography of a 25-year-old.

Get If It Was Raining Palaces I’d Get Hit By The Dunny Door from amazon.co.uk