Bat, bowl and write

Can cricketers write good books? If sales figures are anything to go by, perhaps not.

The answer, says a regular reader of cricket books by cricketers, may lie in their reluctance to tell all. They write goody-goody books in which everyone – except the Boards – smell of roses. In private conversations, of course, they tell a different story.

Line gone, the length can also be a problem. Steve Waugh's book was over 800 pages long.

Mercifully, no one else has written such a long book, but plenty of them have written very dull ones.

One of the best was David Gower's autobiography in which he wrote about the £1,000-bet someone had taken that the first four Australian batsmen would score centuries.

The first three did – and the fourth got out on 99. Ian Botham's autobiography Head On was a page turner too – in an era when cricketers rarely made headlines for the wrong reasons, Beefy with his wild streak was notorious for his off field exploits too.   

The latest good book is by Matthew Hayden.

He tells plenty of stories, including one about how, in order to deny that there was a cockroach in the food, the waiter in the hotel at Nagpur simply swallowed it.

Indian cricketers have not yet taken to writing their memoirs. Sunil Gavaskar started early in 1977 with Sunny Days but given how many international cricketers there have been, there have been few followers.

A refreshing read, however was Delhi boy Aakash Chopra's tour diary Beyond the Blues , which not only had a lot of perspectives on our domestic cricket, but had some on-the-ball analysis of the IPL format. Chopra scored with his insights of the weaknesses of Kolkata Knight Riders and accounts of what went on in the dressing room.  

And even if our cricketers have been lethargic in penning their memoirs, we've got breezy accounts from visiting coaches.

Kiwi coach John Wright's Indian Summer (co-written with Sharda Ugra and Paul Thomas) was an impressionistic diary – both of life in India as well as cricket, and gave a good outside perspective. A bit too circumspect, though.

Hopefully, the Prince of Calcutta – when/ if he chooses to write his autobiography – will be a bit more forthright.

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