A load of oddballs: the eccentricities of past cricketing heroes

For reasons I can’t seem to remember, I have read an awful lot of cricketing histories. The dullest, by a distance, was Sir John Major’s plodding effort, a labour of love to write, I’m sure, but a real labour to read. One of the most astute was Sir Derek Birley’s magisterial A Social History of English Cricket. It apparently helps to be a knight of the realm if you wish to get your cricketing history into hard covers. Richard H. Thomas isn’t there yet — he’s an associate professor of journalism at Swansea university — but his book is so absorbing and entertaining I would be surprised if the offer of at least a CBE wasn’t already in the post.

For Thomas has done something unusual but actually very simple and effective. He tells cricket’s long and involved history through some of the interesting and characterful men (and a few women) who have played the game at the highest level. It is at heart, a Brief Lives of Cricket — not a discrete series of character portraits but a continuous flowing narrative that hops from player to player with elegance and wit. It’s one of those books that reads easily but must have been a complete bastard to put together. Though Thomas’s previous cricket writing has scarcely extended beyond a couple of articles for The Nightwatchman, his judgments of each player are never less than pertinent and occasionally original. In short, he knows his stuff.

I have to admit, having written a couple of cricket books myself over the years, that I quail at the amount of research he must have undertaken to get this book finished. He is aware of all the familiar stories, and tells a few of them again, because the best ones are like nursery rhymes — we never grow tired of them.