Cricket Writing
Yes. There is such a thing as cricket writing - a unique subset of writing that when well done is the only form that straddles fact and fiction (Peter Roebuck is a good example - uses facts to conjure fiction..!), prose and poetry (the immortal Neville Cardus), humor and pathos (this is easy - whats humor for one side is obviously heart break for the other - after cricket is a battle between two teams....), complexity and simplcity (G. rajaraman who now writes on cricket in Outlook is known for his Nehruvian sentences that somehow can be construed as being machavelien at times...for simplicity look no further than R.Mohan - formerly of the Hindu) and finally history and predictive/present (the singular pieces of Ramachandra Guha come to mind in contrast to say, a Vijay Lokapally in the Hindu).
Its actually quite a body of work, varied, impressive and enlightening and the rise and wane of the pen over the years seems to mirror the fate of the game too - slow boring works were produced when Boycott was plodding away while now its about getting straight to the point - quickies in the time of the Twenty20.
As someone that spends over two man hours on cricinfo.com on days there are no matches (it doesnt have to be India playing - I love cricket first....)and obviously a few more on the days there is a game (again, most games, most countries - certainly anything cricinfo.com covers), I'm amazed how much of cricket coverage and therefore good cricket writing is restricted to the web. IN spite of a spate of Australians releasing books these days - its the in thing now - the entire team suddenly has a unified hobby - lets write and tell all.....or maybe Australia's leading publisher made them a deal - 11 books for AuD 100 each....anything less than that and you have to pay me to publish them. I'm sure Richie Benaud will peddle the limited edition Australian cricket omnibus this christmas on Channel 9 - written and personally signed by each Australian cricketer. Its limited edition for more reasons than one - its limited in its world view, limited in its ability to sell and limited in its relevance to cricket......last year, a host of english cricketers got to penning their thoughts. I wonder how this goes though and where they find the time to sit with their ghost writers to relate their thoughts. I wonder how it would be for the Indian cricketers to pen their experiences - Ganguly in Bengali, Dhoni in Jharkhandi (is there a lang like that?), Sachin in Marathi, Dravid in impeccable Kannada (everything he does is practiced of course..!), Laxman in wristy Telugu, Bhajji in broken, gaali ridden Punjabi and of course, Sehwag....in Hindi (wait Sehwag will only write a chapter - he'll be done with his whole thing in one chapter)......that would be fun - the Indian national cricket omnibus written by the heroes themselves.
Well till such things happen, I'm of course limited to cricinfo.com - there arent too many better alternatives. I'm very angry with them though (actually with ESPN and Disney, who bought them) - they have robbed cricket lovers of a wonderful magazine - the Cricinfo magazine - with its excellent articles, in depth coverage, is now reduced to a sidebar on the website - oh come on ESPN - all that happens in the stupid US of A doesnt happen in India - we still read books and magazines here, newspaper sales in India are still going up (yes, thats right..) and the magazine was genuinely classy. Some senior financial analyst, professing to do a strategic analysis with absolutely no knowledge of the game or an udnerstanding of the customers must have recommended its scrapping.....please, please banish all these analysts to India (to seedy places like the Times of India) and let us have our magazine back.....
Well rants and raves apart - heres a genuinely funny look at cricket - I almost fell off the chair rolling in tears of mirth when I read this:
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