Close the nominations. Unless someone publishes proof of Shergar pulling a plough in the Yemen, it must be a good bet for William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011.
Twirlymen is the absorbing maiden work by Amol Rajan, a journalist at the Independent. His aim is to celebrate spin bowling’s impressive survival in the face of change and the often unjust machinations of cricketing authorities; to remind us of spin bowling’s past dominance; to explode myths; to raise off-spin, ‘an ugly ducking in cricket’, to its rightful plinth; to extol the mastery of the basics over the capriciousness of mystery; and to celebrate the great Twirlymen. It is a sweeping and exciting manifesto from an author with a deep knowledge and merrily uninhibited love of spin bowling.
Nevertheless, its incongruous introduction got me off on the wrong foot. Amol Rajan clearly wants Twirlymen to be considered an academic work. He takes guard by spelling out his argument and locating it amidst prevailing literature and theory. The book’s structure is soundly described and its revisionist stance sharply defined.
That much is reasonable, but sometimes it seems that the author is overreaching – like a nervous batsman on debut, hands pushing too hard at the ball – in relating Twirlymen to ‘the spheres of biology, history and literature’. We are told that the unwritten sub-headline is ‘A Darwinian Approach to Spin Bowling’. Adaptation is an important strand in the book but all cricketers have had to adjust as the game has evolved – spinners are no special case. One-day cricket has placed new requirements upon batsmen and wicket keepers; batting helmets have weakened the fear of express pace bowling; and changes to fielding regulations have complicated captaincy. Moreover, as opposed to ‘survival of the fittest’, Rajan’s descriptions of rivalries like Lock versus Laker seem more in the line of survival of the fortunate.
The flirtation with historical theory and the French Annales school is more curious still. Rajan writes that his approach – celebrating the ‘Great Men’ of spin bowling – is in contrast to the Annales mode of la longue durée. With respect, Twirlymen is a special book but to site it in a historical canon alongside Fernand Braudel is like comparing my on-drive to Sachin Tendulkar’s: both fine specimens, of course, but a futile contrast.
The theoretical approach might have been fascinating if followed through but it would be an entirely different book. Thankfully, the incongruous theorising is dwelt on no further and Twirlymen is all the more wonderful for it. This really is a memorably good book: well structured, well researched and winningly written.
We learn about the first ‘hat-trick’ in the 1780s (David Harris’ prize of a gold-laced hat) and the agonies of lacerations to spinning fingers (Richie Benaud’s calamine lotion saved his career, whilst Graeme Swann dips his hand in a bucket of his own urine). The ‘brotherhood of the twirlymen’ affectionately narrated, such as Shane Warne and Abdul Qadir sitting on the latter’s floor in Pakistan spinning oranges to each other.
Spinning deliveries come and go and come again, and attributions of invention tend to be false. Australian spinner Jack Potter, rather than Pakistan’s Saqlain Mushtaq, pioneered the ‘doosra’ in the 1960s; and Englishman Bernard Bosanquet did not invent the googly, which could have been the creation of Walter Mead, who in turn probably did not father the flipper, which we can safely speculate was the handiwork of New Zealander-turned-Australian leg-spinner Clarrie Grimmett between the wars. Some of the book’s best passages are about the legendary doosra delivery, a leg-break that looks like an off-break. Rajan’s descriptions of the ‘other one’ sound like the ‘One Ring’ in Lord of the Rings. It creates devastating panic if used sparingly; but, it will consume undiscerning practitioners. It has numbed Harbhajan Singh’s stock off-break and utterly shattered Saqlain Mustaq: ‘he became addicted to it, reliant on it for the whole of his method, unable to operate without it, and so wholly did it consume him that…it pushed [him] into regrettable early retirement.’ The craving to master the doosra has pushed lesser bowlers such as Saeed Ajmal and Johann Botha beyond the brink of legality. Only Muttiah Muralidaran (correct spelling) has conquered it; and it is cheering that England’s Graeme Swann, possibly the best finger-spinner since Laker, has spurned it.
Rajan explains that Twirlymen is ‘an extended apology, mainly to the cricketer I might have been’. And it’s a fine way to say sorry. However talented a Twirlyman he was in his youth, Amol Rajan the cricketer was unlikely to becoming one of history’s greatest spin bowlers. But he has written one of spin bowling’s greatest histories.
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