I have been collecting cricket books for over 50 years, whereas I have nothing at all which would pass as a music collection. Thus were I to be banished to a desert island, such as that enjoyed by personalities appearing on BBC Radio 4's long running Desert Island Discs, I would think in terms of eight books to take rather than CDs tapes or records.
My first choice would have to be The Ashes Crown The Year by Jack Fingleton. First published in 1954, but reissued in the late 1980s, it is by far the best of the many books about England's Ashes victory of 1953.
Fingleton, a full time journalist,was a former Australian opening batsman and the author of ten books on the game, all except one of which are of high quality. Here he recaptures all the excitment of a tense and dramatic series, besides covering the rest of the tour and leading us on a journey through a now largely vanished England, taking in the Stanley Matthews Cup Final, the ascent of Everest and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. I first read it in 1954. It remains fresh and compelling, invoking memories of a cricket obsesed nine year old, following the first Ashes series of his experience.
From an early age also, I became fascinated by the Bodyline series and wanted to read as much as I could about it. The four best books were all written some time after the event, Fingleton's Cricket Crisis, which covers many other things including a visit to Co Carlow in 1938, came in 1946, while the 50th anniversary was marked by good offerings from Ronald Mason and Lawrence Le Quesne.
However, by far the best and most important, in my view, is David Frith's Bodyline Autopsy published in 2002.
Frith is a master historian, whose bographies, tour books, ancient and modern, and unique studies of cricket's suicides, have added much to our knowledge of the game. Here he produced what is surely the last word on the subject. Not only does he provide full and balanced match accounts, which still capture the interest despite details being well known, but he had, over the years, spoken with nearly all the players on either side and thus had an unsurpassed archive from which to work. This book answers the questions which had plagued me for years and would be an essential part of my eight.
Next to three biographies: I have decided to limit myself to one book per author, or two more of Frith's books, his studies of tragic figures AE Stoddart and Scots born Archie Jackson, might well have found their way on to the island.
As it is I begin with one by John Arlott, who vies with Fingleton to be my favourite cricket writer, and whose books compete with the Australian's for shelf space. Unfortunately the two men disliked each other.
Arlott's best book is probably Fred: Portrait of a Fast Bowler published in 1972, though there have been later paperback editions. Arlott was a complex character with a deep knowledge of human nature and cricket history. He was thus the ideal man to write about the real Fred Trueman, not the embittered figure living in his own past who let down his many admirers with his too long a tenure of the summariser's chair on TMS. Here we have character analysis, controversy and vivid match description. This book is, as Fred wished it to be entitled, "The definitive biography of the finest bloody fast bowler who ever drew breath."
Cricket's key figure of the 20th Century was undoubtedly Sir Donald Bradman, the subject of eleven biographies - more than any other Australian save Ned Kelly. and central figure in many more.
Biographies such as those by AG Moyes and Roland Perry are the sort that give hagiography a bad name, while Fingleton - in several of his books - goes to the other extreme. Irving Rosenwater's Sir Donald Bradman published in 1978, is neither of these. It is a monumental but riveting study of every conceiveable aspect of The Don's career, off and on the field. Not even this book can unravel the very private man who was Don Bradman, but it comes much closer than any other, perhaps benefiting from being one of the few not to be written with its subject's co-operation.
My third biography is Gideon Haigh's Mystery Spinner. Haigh is, in my view the most accomplished of modern cricket writers, with six other top class books under his belt - even die hard England supporters should not avoid Downed Under about Flintoff and Fletcher's ill fated venture of 2006/07 - here Haigh writes about the Australian spinner Jack Iverson. Iverson, a very ordinary Grade cricket paceman, developed variations of leg spin, top spin and googly, that won his country the 1950/51 Ashes, before dropping out of all cricket and being hardly heard of again, until he died by his own hand over 20 years later. Haigh unravels the mystery of his bowling and his life in this modern classic. I would not be without it.
Evocation and nostalgia are part of cricket and few wrote more or better in this vein than Neville Cardus. He is not so popular as he once was and has suffered rather from the fact that many of his best loved stories do not stand the acid Test of Wisden.
Nevertheless I would not leave home without one of his offerings and would take The Playfair Cardus a paperback.published in 1963. A selection of the player studies he wrote for the now defunct Playfair Cricket Monthly, it covers cricketers from his youth in the early 1900s to the 1960s. It is less romantic than some of his earlier books, but his imagery remains as fine as ever cricketers from Archie MacLaren, who captained England in 1902, to Gary Sobers by way of Bradman and Walter Hammond, spring to life in its pages. It is a book to read and re read.
As a seventh choice, one to remind me of Ireland. Until the last few years, selection would really have been limited to Pat Hone's Cricket in Ireland, now the choice is much wider. Three books appeared after Ireland's Carribean adventure, Gerard Siggins, author of one of them, has updated and improved Hone's book with his Green Days and there have been some important county and club histories. My choice however would fall on Ireland's 100 Cricket Greats which Siggins wrote in collaboration with Jim Fitzgerald. The title is self explanatory. Well written,it contrives to inform and entertain, besides providing food for thought and material for discussion. I could while away many hours compiling my own 100, and inventing conversations with the authors demanding that they explain some of their choices.
My last book is difficult to categorise, being Beyond A Boundary by CLR James, constantly in print for the last 45 years. While choosing it meant excluding Rowland Bowen's remarkable Cricket A History of its Growth and Development Throughout The World, James' book is essential.
He was a Trinidadian, Marxist with a belief in the English public school system, a historian and philosopher of international renown, and a cricket writer surpassed by few.
All these threads are evident in this book, which includes superb studies of WG, George Headley and the campaign to have a black man captain the West Indies. But it is much more than a cricket book, for which reason, if in the fashion of the BBC guests, I could only take one book, it would have to be Beyond a Boundary, much as I would miss Arlott and Fingleton to say nothing of the others.
A glance at some of my shelves after typing the last line has sent me into spasms of confusion. How could I have ignored that one... and that one.. to say nothing of this one. It is time to stop before I change my mind.
Those eight then are my Desert Island Books.
