The Shorter Wisden 2013 (28 page)

We’ll Get ’Em in Sequins
is divided into chapters on seven of the greatest cricketers to play for Yorkshire – George Hirst, Herbert Sutcliffe, Hedley Verity, Fred
Trueman, Geoffrey Boycott, Gough and Michael Vaughan – and can be read pleasurably in that way. Cumulatively though, the book amounts to rather more, as what emerges is an intelligent and
touching social history of a sport and a county that were dragged, at times kicking and screaming, from the repression of the Edwardian era, via the Angry Young Men of the post-war period and the
reluctance to engage with women’s rights and social diversity, through to the all-singing, all-dancing man hugs of the early 21st century.

Davidson’s approach does have its minor drawbacks. I’m all for seeing cricketers as rooted within the social mores of their time – not enough writers have done this – but
they are also individuals responsible for their own actions. Even by the standards of their day, Trueman and Boycott took boorishness and self-centredness to new levels. My favourite chapter by
far, though, is the one on Verity, in which Davidson perfectly captures his reserve, dignity and self-sacrifice. The description of Verity’s war service is almost unbearably moving, and it
remains a goal of mine to visit his grave in Sicily.

One of the perennial genres of cricket writing is the ghosted autobiography of the senior, well-established international, and this year’s pick of the bunch is James Anderson’s
Jimmy: My Story
. I don’t know Anderson at all, but he has always come across as a nice bloke, even when he was larging it up as the tyro with the red streak in his hair. And
his book, the story of his rise, fall and rise again as an England player, does nothing to disprove the notion. Here is a thoughtful, determined and quite gentle man working hard to develop his
skills and maximise his success as a bowler.

The inevitable downside of this sort of book is that it feels as if it has been written by committee, with his agent checking every chapter to make sure Anderson has been outspoken enough to
secure a newspaper serialisation deal, but not so much that he will risk offending the ECB or any of his current team-mates. As a result, we get a lot of cod psychology about how a man called James
– a laid-back guy who wouldn’t say boo to a goose – has to turn himself into fearsome Jimmy, the lairy geezer who is never short of a few insults for opposition batsmen. The first
time he describes the process, it’s quite interesting. By the fourth or fifth, I’m ready to skip a few pages.

More troublesome are the diplomatic omissions. By far the biggest story in the England camp over the past 12 months has been Kevin Pietersen’s falling out, and subsequent rehabilitation,
with the squad. And as a long-term member of the England team, Anderson is ideally placed to offer an insider’s-eye view. We get nothing. Nada. I appreciate that the book’s deadline may
have predated the denouement of the Pietersen affair, but KP had long been an accident waiting to happen, and Anderson’s unwillingness to offer anything but total admiration for him leaves
the reader in an unconvincing no-man’s-land. Describing his match-winning 151 in Colombo early in 2012, Anderson writes: “At that point things could have gone either way, but he well
and truly took the game out of the Sri Lankans’ reach by playing one of the innings that has made him as popular as he is with England fans.” But what about Pietersen’s popularity
within the team? Surely relations must have been fairly toxic by then.

The other fascination with this genre is the way in which history gets rewritten. When England beat Australia in 2005 for the first time in 18 years, the consensus was that the success was
partly down to Michael Vaughan’s captaincy. Seven years later, Anderson has become the first player to offer an alternative view, claiming Vaughan never made him feel relaxed. “I
actually felt alone and isolated when I most needed support,” he writes. “Good captains get players to perform above themselves at times by putting their players at ease, and although a
lot has been made of Vaughan’s laconic style, I never felt comfortable playing under him. I never felt like he rated me: the language that he used with me was seldom positive and I
didn’t like that.” I can’t help feeling that, in seven years’ time, Anderson will have something more insightful to say about Pietersen when he writes his inevitable second
autobiography. If you can wait that long, that should be the one to buy.

Which brings us to that other long-time cricket favourite, the post-retirement, second-career-as-a-commentator, doyen-of-the-game’s memoir, complete with a foreword by Sir Ian Botham
– though why so many continue to ask him for his endorsement is never entirely clear. Botham is so competitive – or possibly insecure – that he can’t resist putting his
subject down, even when he’s trying to be nice. His contribution to
Jackers, A Life in Cricket
by Robin Jackman (with Colin Bryden) is a case in point. “I am always
happy when we are in the same town for a few days as there aren’t many people who are easier to take money off on a golf course,” writes Botham. “If he drills a good drive, it
goes about the distance of my wedge!” With friends like these...

There again, it has to be said that, though Jackman might have a good story to tell, he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to do so, preferring to act as the after-dinner raconteur with
tales, not always entertaining, of beer- and gin-soaked evenings with other players. Each to his own, however, and I dare say there are some who will find this an entertaining and quick read.
Personally, I could have done with a great deal more self-analysis. It may not be easy for Jackman to accept that his career was defined as much by what happened off the pitch during the 1980-81
England tour to the West Indies as it was by his performances on it. But that is the way it is: more people will remember Jackman for being the man whose decision to play club cricket in South
Africa in the 1970s eventually led to the cancellation of the Georgetown Test.

Jackman is quite eloquent on the manoeuvrings that surrounded that tour and eventually kept it on track. But on his choice to play in South Africa, he is almost entirely silent. The country were
banned from Test cricket in 1970, after the ICC recognised what most other countries and sports had grasped many years before: that the apartheid regime was morally and politically repugnant.
Jackman must have been aware of this, so why did he choose to spend his winters away from Surrey playing cricket there? Was he not that bothered that the black population was being brutally
repressed, kept out of key jobs (cricket included), and forced to live in segregated squalor? Or did he just think it was nothing to do with him, and everything would be OK so long as he kept the
money – and his eyes shut? He never says.

He’s also silent on his decision to settle in South Africa after giving up cricket in England, other than to say he had met a lovely South African woman, Vonnie, whom he married. It
wasn’t as if he was returning to the country of his birth. He had been brought up in the Home Counties and, given the fallout from that 1980-81 West Indies tour, I would have expected Jackman
to harbour at least some reservations about emigrating to an apartheid state once he had become aware of other people’s strength of feeling. But no. Instead, he writes about the black
resistance groups in Zimbabwe as terrorists, with seemingly no understanding of the decades of white colonialism that had sparked the guerilla wars. I don’t expect politics to be every
cricketer’s strong suit, but this is ridiculous, and Jackman leaves me with the feeling – rightly or wrongly – that, however much progress South Africa has made since readmission,
it is still dominated by a white cabal.

A rather more revealing and intimate portrait of a South African cricketer from roughly the same era comes in the shape of David Tossell’s
Tony Greig
. For the last 30
years or so, the former England captain and all-rounder had, as Gideon Haigh pointed out, “been barely remembered as a cricketer”, while Mike Atherton contended: “Greig remains
one of the most underrated England cricketers of the post-war period.”

Three things defined Greig in the public memory: his ill-advised declaration that he was going to make the 1976 West Indians “grovel”; his leading role in Kerry Packer’s World
Series Cricket revolution; and his nationality. All three rightly take centre stage in Tossell’s book, but so too does Greig himself, the flawed man whose father was an alcoholic, who
suffered from epilepsy since he was 11, who took all criticism – fair or unfair – head on, without ever asking anyone to make excuses for him. And, along the way, we learn that Greig
was a better cricketer than he was given credit for. His Test batting average of 40 was higher than both Botham’s and Andrew Flintoff’s; his bowling average was poorer than
Botham’s, but on a par with Flintoff’s. Furthermore, Greig achieved six five-wicket hauls, to Flintoff’s three – and in fewer Tests. All of which suggests he ought to be
remembered as being among the three best English all-rounders of the post-war era.

The real pleasure of this book, though, is that Greig’s story has been told by a first-rate sportswriter. This is no ghosted part-work, overfilled with self-justification and interminable
anecdotes of parties and tour drinking bouts which so often are passed off as intimacy and self-revelation. Greig appears to have given Tossell carte blanche to write what he wanted, and encouraged
his family to have their say – not all of it flattering. The book unwittingly became a fitting tribute to a man who died at the end of 2012, and was unusual in putting his integrity before
legacy. Above all, it comes with the ring of truth. Yes, Greig never denied that qualifying for England was an act of career pragmatism, but never once was he an apologist for apartheid. Nor did he
downplay, or have any regrets about, his mercenary role in the professionalisation of cricket. All that’s missing is any sense of gratitude from many of the players whose financial futures he
was instrumental in securing.

By the end of the book, Greig is still not an easy man to like, but it’s impossible not to feel the ice round him melt a little. He was so gloriously difficult. We tend these days to want
to package our sports stars into easy, media-friendly compartments. Even in his late sixties, Greig refused to be pigeon-holed. South African, Australian or English? His idiosyncratic TV commentary
consistently failed the Tebbit Test everywhere he went.

There again, Icki Iqbal’s utterly charming
The Tebbit Test: The Memoirs of a Cricketing Fanatic
exposes the jingoism at the heart of this infamous proposition. In 1990,
Norman Tebbit – a former Tory cabinet minister – argued that ethnic minorities in Britain revealed their true nationality by the cricket team they supported. It’s unlikely you
will have heard of Icki Iqbal, so let me fill you in. He was born in 1945 in Pakistan to a well-off, middle-class family, and has been obsessed with cricket ever since 1954, when the Pakistanis
began to make their presence felt in international cricket. He moved to England in the mid-1960s, worked hard as an actuary, and is now as British as anyone. He even supports England.

But his journey hasn’t been quite as straightforward as Tebbit might have liked. Almost every sentence of this book speaks of a man with a Pakistani soul. His enthusiasm for English
cricket is based partly on familiarity, but largely on disillusionment caused by corruption in the subcontinental game. Iqbal has become fed up with defending the indefensible. Had he not lost his
faith in Pakistani cricket, there’s little reason to believe he would have transferred allegiance.

And why should he? Multiculturalism is one of Britain’s great success stories. Partisanship is hot-wired into every true cricket fan, and shouldn’t be readily transferable. I have my
own sliding scale of prejudice in international cricket. When England are playing, I always support them. If not, my pecking order runs Pakistan, West Indies, India, Sri Lanka, New Zealand,
Australia and South Africa. I’ve no idea how many Tebbit Tests I fail along the way, but I’m really not bothered. In my world, the main test is just being passionate about cricket. If
you are, then you’re welcome.

Social history is also central to
Gentlemen & Players: The Death of Amateurism in Cricket
by Charles Williams. Few sports have reflected the English class structure quite so
rigidly, and Williams offers a faithful account of the development of the modern game through the social make-up of county cricket. What’s most astonishing about the Gentlemen–Players
divide is not that it ever disappeared, but that it took so long to do so. The idea of a posh amateur being able to tell a county which dates he fancied playing on during his summer holidays is
beyond parody. Class barriers were coming down throughout Britain after the Second World War, but cricket managed to maintain them until 1962. Then again, MCC were in charge...

For Williams, the inevitable and necessary end of cricket’s class divide is not without its losses, for he believes something of the game’s spirit went with it. I’m not so
sure. If the only way a sport can retain its ethos is by hanging on to inequality, then it was probably not as pure as it was cracked up to be. Moreover, as Williams’s book makes clear, it
was more often than not the Gentlemen who were the most ruthlessly professional.

Phil Tufnell never got close to the genius of Shane Warne on the field, but he is more than his equal along the dodgy road of post-cricket celebrity, where the boundaries between being laughed
with and laughed at become increasingly blurred. Warne should take
Tuffers’ Cricket Tales
away with him on a Trappist retreat for a week before it is too late and, on his
re-emergence, vow never again to take fashion advice from Liz Hurley or adopt a haircut that looks 20 years younger than his body.

I realise I’m stepping even closer to grumpiness than usual here, and I concede there is something to be said for live and let live. Tuffers is clearly having a good time in his new life,
and a lot of people seem to get pleasure out of it, so what’s the harm? Well... it just all seems so trivial. I want to remember Tufnell as the man who spun out West Indies at The Oval, not
as some half-wit on reality TV. And this book of recycled anecdotes, packaged in a series of bite-sized paragraphs under subheadings such as “Puking in Ealing” and “The Crepe
Suzette Pan of Uncertainty”, has clearly been published with his new fan base in mind.