Book review: The Vincibles, by Gideon Haigh

On a lazy summer afternoon with the cricket coverage in the background I completely galloped through this incredibly entertaining work by Haigh. Within pages the fortunes of the Australian test team paled into insignificance as I desperately read onto the next chapter in the life of the ‘Yarras’ 2001-02 season.

As the title suggests Haigh at no stage sought out to write a serious cricket book about a motivated sporting club. Instead a true reflection of what the ‘pitch-in’ life really is like in a local cricket club. Can you imagine David Warner sitting down weekly typing up the club newsletter, or Nathan Lyon acting as chairman of selectors (actually he may put his hand up for that)? In humorous prose Haigh describes what it is like for the true lovers of cricket to just get a game. I agree wholeheartedly with his sentiments that he gets more joy from a cover drive than Mark Waugh ever did, owing to genuine surprise and elation at its execution, so do I.

I found myself giggling at most of the ups and downs in the life of the ‘Yarras’, and in a number of places being reduced to tears. Others will find differing points of greater hilarity to them but I lost it reading the description of Wombles’ stewardship and transfer protocol of the clubroom keys. The description of the elongated selection negotiation, finally requiring that whoever chose player Y (the champion) also was required to take player Y (the duffer) as well gave me much hope for the world. Middle aged men reduced to rationale more at home in a primary school yard.

Contrast this to the tedium experienced in picking up the second piece of cricketing literature ‘100 not out’, edited by Rod Nicholson. The genesis of this book review existed when these two works lay side by side, one the story of the triers the other of the champions, what a great ability to contrast those two people groups and hopefully find that common thread of passion for the greatest game[1].

I do believe the passion of Haigh’s comrades extends through to what is ultimately the third tier of competitive cricket below country & state, albeit with a few ‘A’ teams & development squads hanging around, but you wouldn’t feel it from what is ostensibly a reference book written by Williams and Nicholson for an incredibly niche audience.

What appears to ‘100 Not Out’s’ writers (and maybe many at the up echelons of cricket) is that ultimately it is a game that transcends any individual, facts and statistics only bearing importance inasmuch as they help the game’s story reach greater heights. The mountain of centuries Bill Lawry scored for Northcote pales into insignificance compared to that one century ‘Moof’ scored helping the 3^rd XI to victory in the grand final.

As you can obviously guess my clear preference is for ‘The Vincibles’ over ‘100 Not Out’  - and a lot of the cricket books I've read.

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[1] There is one instance of crossover between the books where Haigh describes a former Prahran first grade cricketer deciding to join the ‘Yarras’ ranks being confronted immediately at his first training session by the eccentric ‘Space Cadet’ who informs the new arrival that his vocation is teaching Tibetan throat singing.

Short Pitch: Lessons from World Series Cricket

The following excerpt is taken from page 81 of Gideon Haigh's wonderful book The Cricket War, and describes the Australian tour to England in 1977.

Generational problems in the team had been some time coming... nine players [in the back row of the team photograph] had a combined eighteen Tests between them.  Among the team's nominal seniors ... only the captain and vice-captain Chappell and Marsh were genuinely risk-averse selections: Walters had never succeeded in England, McCosker's jaw might not have healed, Thomson was a medical miracle, and none of Walker, O'Keeffe or Davis had been first-choice players a year earlier.  Premature Australian retirements in the preceding two years had divided the team before Packer's intercession.  As Ian Davis remembers: "There was literally no middle age in that side.  You had me and Hooksey, and Serj and Kim Hughes in our early twenties, and then all these other guys round thirty.  Unless you were a very strong personality, you were just in awe of them". 

A page later, Haigh continues regarding Greg Chappell's captaincy:

The captain pined for the do-it-yourself ethos of his brother's time: cricketers who didn't need to be told ... As his virtuoso skill proved insufficient to inspire, Chappell withdrew.  The senior players closed ranks around him, instinctively protective but inadvertently widening their distance from the ranks.  Everyone felt aggrieved, nobody felt responsible, individual isolation was universal.

Sound familiar?

It's fair to say that in the dozen years following the Centenary Test, Australian cricket struggled to reclaim anywhere near its best form.  The hard-bitten culture instilled by Chappell or Allan Border has been minimised by subsequent captains who - while the logical or best choice - didn't have either the same horses to choose from, nor the psychological skills to maximise their performance.

A case in point - would any Australian dare disappoint Chappell or Border?  Recently, we saw players "try" their captain and face the ramifications.  With the most effective Australian captains of old, expectations were communicated through personal relationship, rather than rules.  It is within this environment that players like Lillee, Thomson, Warne and McGrath flourished and under which Australians traditionally perform best.

Australian cricket took a decade to recover from such a fractured dressing room.  Similar stories abound of the 1989 Englishmen and the post-Richards West Indians; one wonders whether it will take Cricket Australia another decade to understand the value of powerful and incisive leadership - on and off the field.

Book review: Game for Anything - Gideon Haigh

If Bill Simmons is the everyman sportswriter full of pop culture, in-jokes and homer-isms, then Gideon Haigh is his antithesis. You read Simmons as he thinks aloud, a man down at the bar with his mates. However, he's just self-aware enough to know that because he monopolises the conversation he should fling jokes about to keep his audience engaged. There's obvious research, but done on the sly; he's no stat-geek, but muses on feel and zeitgeist.

Haigh, deliberately and with culture incomparable, compiles cricketing words that evokes a history professor's magnum opus. Immaculate research, mirrored by thoughtful prose. Simmons' raison d'etre is entertaining learning. For Haigh, it is the reverse. And they're both brilliant.

Cover image courtesy: tower.com

Haigh's compendious “Game for Anything” released in Australia his collected writings for publications such as Wisden Asia and the now-defunct periodicals The Bulletin and Wisden Cricket Monthly. It features several learned insights into periods of the game about which I, a studious and informed cricket fan, knew very little. Each essay is structured magnificently, being economical yet descriptive; each word is steeped in context. That he quotes an assortment of historical figures from Jardine Machiavelli to Mark Waugh exemplifies his remarkable reading range.

In fact the stand-out point of Haigh's work is just that – his research. Articles are based not around his palpable love of the game, it's correct spirit and statutes; his writing is revolves around a prescient “angle” and why it emerges as such a story from a multi-textured background.

There are elements of whimsy as well: he defines his favourite cricketer as the English batsman Chris Tavare, decries the rise of park cricket sledging and, most beautifully of all, develops delicate snapshots of cricket history. These short trips are, unlike the footage that comprises most of our memories, full-colour and high-definition – he makes Bradman more than ridiculous numbers and grainy footage of a fourth-ball duck.

Perhaps what's most remarkable about his text is how easily he makes just the right words fit together on paper. Despite obvious labour over books, newspapers, journals and microfiche, Haigh's words appear with economic precision – as if he has the most severe of editors. When writing for a mass audience using such a scholarly approach, Haigh is to be praised and respected for balancing intellect with ease of reading. Characters like Lawrence Rowe, Richard Wardill and characteristics such as gambling are all treated with the same laconic, precise respect. A memorable example was my favourite essay from Game for Anything, concerning the late-19^th century Australian captain Harry Trott and his commitment to Kew Asylum.

If you learn about politics from a book by a political master, you learn about cricket from Haigh – far more than from any other writer today. His words lack Roebuck's flair but also his occasional florid tones. He analyses the game from a removed, scholarly position; writing not because he loves the game (although he does) but because he feels it has stories to tell. In the prologue, he encourages young writers to do likewise.  

It's so utterly characteristic of Haigh - a book of cricket essays where his opinions are so subtly obvious yet with only this one proclamation.  Highly recommended.

For a different perspective, the SMH also reviewed this work.

My Favourite Cricketer: Chris Tavare by Gideon Haigh

In our continuing series My Favourite Cricketer, we invite cricket writers and bloggers to pay tribute to the players they remember most fondly.  This week respected journalist Gideon Haigh encouraged us to post the following excerpt by way of his entry.

Some years ago, I adjourned with a friend to a nearby schoolyard net for a recreational hit. On the way, we exchanged philosophies of cricket, and a few personal partialities. What, my friend asked, did I consider my favourite shot? ‘Easy,’ I replied ingenuously. ‘Back foot defensive stroke.’

My friend did a double take and demanded a serious response. When I informed him he’d had one, he scoffed: ‘You’ll be telling me that Chris Tavare’s your favourite player next.’ My guilty hesitation gave me away. ‘You poms!’ he protested. ‘You all stick together!’

Twenty years since his only tour here, mention of Tavare still occasions winces and groans. Despite its continental lilt, his name translates into Australian as a very British brand of obduracy, that Trevor Baileyesque quality of making every ditch a last one. He’s an unconventional adoption as a favourite cricketer, I’ll admit – yet all the more reason to make him a personal choice.

Tavare played thirty Tests for England between 1980 and 1984, adding a final cap five years later. He filled for much of that period the role of opening batsman, even though the bulk of his first-class career was spent at number three and four. He was, in that sense, a typical selection in a period of chronic English indecision and improvisation, filling a hole rather than commanding a place. But he tried – how he tried. Ranji once spoke of players who ‘went grey in the service of the game’; Tavare, slim, round-shouldered, with a feint moustache, looked careworn and world-weary from the moment he graduated to international cricket.

In his second Test, he existed almost five hours for 42; in his third, his 69 and 78 spanned twelve hours. At the other end for not quite an hour and a half of the last was Ian Botham, who ransacked 118 while Tavare pickpocketed 28. As an ersatz opening batsman, he did not so much score runs as smuggle them out by stealth. In the Chennai Test at the start of 1982, he eked out 35 in nearly a day; in the Perth Test at the end of 1982, he endured almost eight hours for 89.  At one stage of the latter innings, he did not score for more than an hour. Watching on my television in the east of Australia, I was simultaneously aching for his next run and spellbound by Tavare’s trance-like absorption in his task. First came his pad, gingerly, hesitantly; then came the bat, laid alongside it, almost as furtively; with the completion of each prod would commence a circular perambulation to leg to marshal his thoughts and his strength for the next challenge.

That tour, I learned later, had been a peculiarly tough one for Tavare. An uxorious man, he had brought to Australia his wife Vanessa, despite her phobia about flying. Captain Bob Willis, his captain, wrote in his diary: ‘He clearly lives every moment with her on a plane and comes off the flight exhausted. Add to that the fact that he finds Test cricket a great mental strain and his state of mind can be readily imagined.’ You didn’t have to imagine it; you could watch him bat it out of his system.

Tavare could probably have done with a psychiatrist that summer; so could I. Our parallels were obvious in a cricket sense: I was a dour opening batsman, willing enough, but who also thought longingly of the freedoms available down the list. But I – born in England, growing up in Australia, and destined to not feel quite at home in either place – also felt a curious personal kinship. I saw us both as aliens – maligned, misunderstood – doing our best in a harsh and sometimes hostile environment. The disdain my peers expressed for ‘the boring Pommie’ only toughened my alleigiance; it hardened to unbreakability after his 89 in Melbourne.

Batting, for once, in his accustomed slot at number three, Tavare took his usual session to get settled, but then after lunch opened out boldly. He manhandled Bruce Yardley, who’d hitherto bowled his off -breaks with impunity. He coolly asserted himself against the pace bowlers who’d elsewhere given him such hurry. I’ve often hoped for cricketers, though never with such intensity as that day, and never afterwards have felt so validated. Even his failure to reach a hundred was somehow right: life, I was learning, never quite delivered all the goods. But occasionally – just occasionally – it offered something to keep you interested.

You can find Gideon Haigh's books on Amazon.

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Cricket Australia: Sitting on the Fence

"The time is coming where you have to choose between what is easy, and what is right"

Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

It didn't take a rocket scientist - or a banking executive - to figure out that Australian cricket has both structural and talent issues. A 4-1 thumping in our last Ashes series, mediocre World Cup campaign and a captain with a positively Reiffel-esque batting average over the past three series (21.5) is proof enough for anyone with even half an eye and a tenth of a brain that Australian cricket has reached its lowest point since 1985.

While Ricky Ponting's tetchy leadership, Mitchell Johnson's latent outswinger, Greg Chappell's insistence on youth and Andrew Hilditch's residence in a fantasy world have contributed to this state of affairs, the root cause lies with James Sutherland and Cricket Australia. For too long they have tried to have their cake and eat it too by chasing the financial gains of Twenty20 and also lauding a the benefits of a competitive Australian Test squad.

By chasing both, they will achieve neither.

On one hand, commissioning Don Argus to report on their cricket management structures sounds good, even curative. But doing so while the other hand throws so many resources into the nascent Bigh Bash League (BBL), Cricket Australia is endorsing two policy decisions which negate the other. It is another curious leadership decision from CA whose actions indicate they are chasing the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs while paying only lip service to Test standards.

For much of the past twenty years as pitches become more standardised worldwide, cricket has degenerated into two groups: the "haves" and "have-nots". The "haves", fuelled by television revenue, good attendances and growth economies include the regular suspects: South Africa, England, India , Australia and perhaps even Sri Lanka. The second tier includes fallen powers West Indies and Pakistan, as well as New Zealand, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.

More accurately, these two groups could now be defined by the cricketers they produce. The West Indies' best now favour the shortest form, while the best of New Zealand, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe often eschew their nations to tour the world as T20 guns-for-hire. The fundamentals of creating world-class players in both formats require player pathway systems so different that only the mega-wealthy institutions in world cricket can afford the time it takes to do so.

courtesy: telegraph.com.au

World cricket hasn't so much been divided along lines of Test quality, but on the type of cricket on whcih each nation has focused. If kids are developed where T20 is prioritised, it results in a bunch of individual talents and a poor Test team. Where a Test technique can occasioanlly benefit T20, the reverse is rarely, if ever, true. To acknowledge any speculation David Warner has what it takes to play Test cricket exists is to question the value of life itself - the man bears as much resemblance to a Test opener as my 94-year old grandmother.

By dividing it's attention between a Big Bash league with privately owned franchises (eeeugh - I hate that word in relation to cricket) and an Argus report recommending that the best 66 players play Sheffield Shield cricket at any one time, Cricket Australia is, dividing it's resources in an attempt to promote the game. By doing so, they've ignored the great rule: punters love success, and in Australia that means a strong Test team.

If Divide and Conquer still applies on the battlefield, so too is it effective in the marketplace. CA has already done the dividing, leaving it now open for conquest by a crowded Australian sports market which asks supporters to invest more than ever.

Let's not forget that private ownership as a model has only worked in Rugby League and never in the long term for any other sport. In fact, News Limited, after pioneering SuperLeague, now still owns the entirety of the Melbourne Storm and North Queensland Cowboys, as well as 69% of the powerhouse Brisbane Broncos. Rupert Murdoch, like Packer before him, got what he wanted out of setting up a rival competition. The hideous failures far outweigh that partial success as the names Christopher Skase, Dr. Geoffrey Edelsten, Eddie Palmer and his beloved Brisbane Bullets and the Victoria Titans weigh heavily on Aussie fans' consciousness.

courtesy: news4u.co.in

The heavily-publicised BBL, intent on chasing dollars, imports the likes of Kieron Pollard and new fans will involve suspending first-class cricket during December, Australia's busiest Test month. How can Australia rebuild with the best First Class talent they have when that talent is not receiving games?

Cricket Australia has been forced into a position that all cricketing countries now must face: chase dollars, or what you feel is important. It's a nice coincidence when those options are one and the same. In Australia's case, that is unfortunately not the case. While paying lip service to the importance of Tests, CA has done everything but say "we're here for the dollars" by instituting a flawed BBL model at the expense of First Class cricket.

courtesy: zimbio.com

Only four years ago Austrlaian domestic cricket was the strongest on the planet - now no more, as players chase the dollars (and no-one's blaming them). Australia simply can't follow the Indian model (IPL) because there isn't enough support - or money - to go around. That Australian domestic cricket - or more crucially, given how many eggs are in it's basket, the new BBL - can't get a look-in on free-to-air television is a damning indictment of what Australians think about the grass-roots. Cricket captures the imagination in the backyard, when Australia plays and never through the likes of Gary Putland and the Melbourne Stars.

CA, to use the most cliche of cliches, is trying to have it's cake and eat it, too. Rather than committing - by dint of playing talent (like England has with Tests) or financial need (as the West Indians have done with T20), Australia continues not to choose its battles and try to succeed at everything.

The smaller countries of the world faced this challenge first, as New Zealand and Bangladesh have all but admitted for years that their best chance of attaining any success has been in the One-Day arena. Why else would players like Scott Styris choose to retire from Test cricket but not from the short format? Pakistan and the West Indies are already producing more guns for hire than good quality Test players. It's saddening to realise that the same is true of Australia.

As India wrestles with the impending doom brought about by Tendulkar, Dravid, Sehwag and Laxman's respective entries into Valhalla, even that powerful nation will, in time, face the same challenge. While England will not remain immune forever, the structures in place around the game in it's birthplace may allow a defence against the irrepressible schism that threatens to divide cricket.

It's true of any business struggling in a crowded economy that you should choose either to expand your services, or focus on doing what you do best. For 125 years, Australia has produced the best Test cricketers in the world. Over the past decade, that trend has been reversed as players are seduced by the quick runs and quicker bucks available.

In a recent revealing podcast on Test Match Sofa, Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh revealed that the first priority of the Australian cricket team wasn't to win matches but to publicise the sport in Australia. When it comes to branding - the honeypot into which Cricket Australia has fallen - it is a simple fact that Starbucks produces coffee, Asics produces quality running shoes, Sri Lanka will deliver turning pitches - and Test cricket has been elevated to its highest form by teams from the Great South Land.

For Cricket Australia to forget that would be shameful.

Book review: The Big Ship by Gideon Haigh

The Big Ship by Gideon Haigh, a re-post from our sibling site, Books with Balls.