Cricket comedy. No, wait!
What I love about cricket
Sandy Balfour (Ebury, £10.99)
I have a terrible fear that the SPIN office bookshelves will not be able to bear the weight of too many more tomes explaining cricket in a semi-’humorous’ fashion to the uninitiated. This is not just – SPIN podcast devotees, please note– a comment on the DIY skills of our own Colin the Janitor. More a weariness at picking up a book that I just know will make comic play about ‘googlies’ sounding a bit like ‘goolies’ or Mike Gatting liking his food or Americans – they’ll never understand! –thinking we’re crazy: gee, five days without a winner!
Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Please.
So I came to Sandy Balfour’s tome – subtitle: ‘one man’s vain attempt to explain cricket to a teenager who couldn’t give a toss’; back-cover sell line: ‘hilarious memoir’ – with an eye not so much jaundiced as nervously twitching.
And I was pleasantly surprised. Because, rather than play the lame comedy card as he recounts his attempts to introduce his teenage daughter’s boyfriend to cricket, Balfour plays it, generally, straight. It’s familiar territory, but there’s something sneakily poetic about the rhythm of Balfour’s writing that eschews (most of) the easy laughs and, instead, finds something of the stillness and understated eccentricities of his/our love of cricket. Balfour and the monosyllabic youth go to Lord’s and make a bat and in between, the author dwells on his own playing efforts (these bits could have been cut and pasted from 20 other books by/about club cricketers). But What I Love About Cricket is not really about sport at all – it’s about fathers and daughters and the generation gap; about comparing the author’s own teenage frustrations with his new, middle-aged place in life; about life and cricket making him feel like a loner.
What I Love About Cricket is slight and personal and, really, not much happens: it feels like a well-crafted blog pushed reluctantly into print. Which is both its strength and its weakness. But at least, despite the title, there’s no comic play re: googlies etc. And for that alone, it gets a muted thumbs-up. Duncan Steer
