Book Review - Hitting Across the Line by Viv Richards

 Hitting Across the Line: an Autobiography by Viv Richards

Sydney: Sun, 1992                                                    ISBN 0725107073

As I write this review, we are witnessing an Ashes series for the ages - two teams going hell-for-leather with nothing between them. Even though it's the middle of winter here in Oz, one's thoughts turn to the greatest of games every night as each test match so far has ebbed and flowed. Bazball meets the World Test Champions makes for a fascinating tussle, and too much cricket is never enough, so my daytime revolves around the current cricket news, and this "autobiography", which I picked up for a song at an op-shop and will pass on to others through my local neighborhood free library.

I write autobiography in quotation marks as this book is quite clearly ghost-written (by Mick Middles), and in some ways is a let-down for me. Apart from the clunky openings to each chapter, where we get a page or two written by Middles to try and give us the essence of Viv, but which are actually cringeworthy, this book is a fairly standard cricketer's story - some chapters on youth, his breaking into the West Indian team, various chapters about the County Game, and some reflections on his life and some of the issues that Richards sees as important within cricket.

For such a dominant figure when out in the middle, this book seems, if anything, subdued. Richards gets stuck into the press, particularly the British Tabloids, but - to me at least - treats the cricket establishment, both in the West Indies and England more kindly than it perhaps deserves. He skirts around the scandal of his sacking at Somerset, and only spends a few pages discussing the internecine politics of West Indian cricket.

In fact, and I hate to state this, Hitting Across the Line feels very much like something dashed off in between other activities, with a nod to what people expect to hear, but not with too much thought. Middles' little prologues to the chapters seem to suggest that is very much what happened - if, as is indeed suggested, these prologues show how the book was written, it seems that Middles drove around Antigua with Richards and recorded his answers to questions as Richards was on the way to the local bar, or to the sporting ground.

This book doesn't do justice to such a giant of the game. Unless you are a complete Richards tragic, I'd give this one a miss.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell