Slow outfield,dragging innings

Cricket was an English conceit that South Asians slowly acquired and then assimilated, rather as English had done with South Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Now they have reversed the conceit. Cricket's myths may give South Asians a good feeling, but the truth is very sobering. It is played in only 14 out of 193 countries.

Yet if you listen to South Asians talk about it, you'd think there was no other sport worth the candle. And, Hamdullah, they are right.

Cricket is so seductive that it turns academics into journalists and journalists into academics. The Cambridge Companion to Cricket, edited by Anthony Bateman and Jeffrey Hill ( Cambridge University Press ), and comprising essays by Englishmen and South Asians, is a perfect testimony to this. The result is some very tiresome stodgy sociological hodgepodge. But as long as it is about cricket, who cares? Besides, thank god there is no economics, except for a tedious essay on New Zealand's gate money!

Sociology

Not that the sociological point is hard to grasp. After all, it has been done to death. It goes like this: Cricket embodied Englishness; Englishness was worth embracing; but the English would not allow you to become English; so you got a chip on your shoulder; then you wanted to prove a point; and you beat them at their own game; the Empire had struck back.

All the writers in this book – and there are 17 of them – make the same point in different ways. They could have been less ponderous about it, but then a Test Match is not a T20 game, is it?

Each writer has tried hard to solve the mystery – why is such a slow game so appealing to some people? Why do radio stations devote hours and hours to it? Why do TV channels bid their underpants on it? Why do South Asians and West Indians sit for hours in a blazing hot sun or in rain or in freezing cold or muggy afternoons?

Because it is cricket. But what is cricket? There's the sport, the tournament, the game and above all, the players. The contributors deal with all these aspects, only to return to pavilion baffled by the cosmic ‘wrong `un' that cricket is.

Central weakness

The lay reader, sadly, is not their concern, but just other academics. That is the central weakness of this book. It just isn't reader friendly. And if you are writing about cricket, you've got to write for the yobs, not for the nobs.

There is a chapter on Don Bradman, there is a chapter on Sachin Tendulkar and there is a chapter on cricket broadcasting. All three are excellent, but overdone.

The innings could have been declared closed if not an hour before lunch ,then certainly an hour after it. Instead, the writers have batted on till half an hour before stumps. Much the same is true of all the chapters, and especially the one about Brian Lara which improbably talks of him and Caribbean poetry.

Moral: cricket is interesting but its history and sociology are just not. Only those who have played cricket at a truly competitive level know this.

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