Features

Old Trafford Bookshelf

Paul Edwards reviews two books: Malcolm Knox – The Captains (published by Hardie Grant, £17.50) and Gideon Haigh - Sphere of Influence (published by Simon and Schuster, £7.99)

The cricket world is getting smaller and it is also changing very quickly.

Not so long ago a follower of the English game could expect a county’s overseas player to turn up in time for that first freezing visit to the Parks and stay until the last golden September evening in, say, Canterbury or Worcester. Nowadays, a month’s contract is par for the course and teams have even been known to hire a cricketer for a single match. Some English players arrive late for the domestic season because they have been playing in the IPL, and the current reshaping of the county programme has to accommodate the lucrative Champions League. Traditionalists may find themselves in the unusual position of echoing Dizzee Rascal - or, indeed, Sajid Mahmood - in asking, “What’s happenin’?

Fortunately, there are some very fine writers on hand to analyse the present and re-evaluate the past. For example, anyone wanting to understand the rise and rise of India’s power brokers could do no better than buy Gideon Haigh’s latest collection of essays Sphere of Influence: its long opening chapter is a masterly analytical narrative which recounts and disentangles the developments leading to the subcontinent’s “ownership” of the world game.

Later essays consider the role of the ICC, the influence of the IPL, the Stanford Super Series (remember that?) and spot-fixing. Some of Haigh’s essays may not make terribly comfortable reading for Lancastrians raised on Test Match Special and the sacrosanctity of the English season, but that only makes pondering their conclusions all the more essential, a task which is eased by the author’s fine writing, astute investigations and pithy assessments. Consider this on the numbing ubiquity of international cricket: “Turn on your television, flick idly between the Test Match here, the IPL game there and the one-day international everywhere, and one sees not competition but content, created simply to be sold to the highest bidder.” Haigh’s knowledge of business and his clear-eyed love of cricket - the game, I mean, not the production line - make him the ideal author to give us a sense of where we are now. Sphere of Influence is indispensable.     

Unsurprisingly for a Melbourne-based writer, five of Haigh’s essays consider captains of Australia’s Test side and this theme of leadership is further explored in Malcolm Knox’s The Captains, which aims to tell the story of Australian cricket “through the prism of the captaincy”.

Such a subject may appear a trifle remote for English sports fans, but parochialism is an unattractive characteristic in any case and one which cricket fans can no longer afford to display. And in truth, anyone investing in Knox’s book will be very amply repaid, for it is a fascinating read and Lancashire supporters may be particularly interested in the sections on the county’s former coach Bob Simpson, whose 311 at Old Trafford in 1964 was his first Test century and who was later recalled to the captaincy in the aftermath of the Packer affair.

Simpson also coached the national side when Allan Border and Mark Taylor led the baggy green battalion and Knox describes it all with a journalist’s shrewd eye for the key fact and a novelist’s skill in selecting the telling phrase. He also does a nice line in extended metaphor: “Many captains were miniatures; the odd long-serving one, such as Darling or Woodfull or Bradman or Benaud or Simpson are large oil canvases. Border is an epic mural.” The Captains’ 400-plus pages are crammed with such percipient analyses and thoughtful judgements. Together with Sphere of Influence, Knox’s book offers a rewarding antidote to the prospect of a grey February.