The Picador Book of Cricket

This book is a rare delight to cricket lovers, coming as it does amidst a slew of inferior, thrashy books clearly designed to cash in on the almost religious fervor displayed by cricket fans from the Indian Sub-continent. The Picador Book is essentially an anthology, reproducing some of the finest articles and essays on cricket, most of them almost impossible to find, and long out of print. It spans over a century of cricket, and devotes sections to the mandatory topics any cricketing anthology must have: - profiles on greats of the game, accounts of memorable test matches, and essays on trends, styles and themes. However, Guha has also chosen articles that celebrate the spirit of cricket, focusing on the small details that make cricket the game all of us love. Indeed, there is a section devoted to "Little known Heroes", where well known writers faithfully describe cricketers who may not have been successful on the big stage, but in some way, have endeared themselves to that author. Thus, the doyen of cricket writers, Sir Neville Cardus, lovingly writes about Yorkshire paceman Emmott Robinson, while in another piece, a Fiji fast bowler gets a glowing tribute! The books prime attraction is the portraits of cricketing legends that cover more than half the book. This is a connoisseur's delight, with legends from W. G. Grace to Sachin Tendulkar featured. The book may seem to focus only on older players, but it is often easy to forget that we tend to equate players from the 1930s in the same breath as those from the 1900s. Thus, pieces on Victor Trumper and Wally Hammond represent eras as diverse as those of Sachin Tendulkar and Gary Sobers, and Guha takes care to present the pieces in as chronological a fashion as possible. The list of writers, of course, is strictly A-List. Neville Cardus is there, as is Jack Fingleton. C.L.R. James, the author of "Beyond A Boundary", widely regarded as the finest book on cricket, is also well represented, as is one of India's finest cricket writers, Sujit Mukherjee. There are also rare pieces by John Arlott, C.B. Fry, and the most famous name of all, Sir V.S. Naipaul himself! Probably the only complaint that one could make of the list of writers is that Guha himself is not featured. His articles on cricket are masterpieces of the genre, combining rare facts, delightful insights, and a dry sense of humor, all of which have made him a household name among Indian cricket fans (at least, the more literate ones!). He has contributed an excellent introduction, though, as well as a piece at the end, on his fifty (yes, fifty!) favourite books on cricket. Another complaint that could be made is that Guha, for all his claims of presenting as diverse a collection as possible, has under-represented writers from the Indian sub-continent, and even from South Africa. Indeed, most of the articles seem to be from English or Australian writers. To be fair, though, most of the finest pieces on the game have come from these two countr