Book Review - The 100th Summer by Greg Chappell

 The 100th Summer: 76-77 Season Pakistan New Zealand Centenary Test by Greg Chappell

Toorak, Vic: Garry Sparke & Associates, 1977                        ISBN 0959709894

I am one of those Australian men who was introduced to cricket in the 1970s. Our current crop of Australian cricketers can never in my eyes live up to my boyhood idols of Chappell, Lillee and Marsh. While I well remember my first day of watching live Test cricket at the MCG in 1981, it is the Centenary Test that first sticks in my mind as a complete match that I followed and took in via (black and white) television.

Greg Chappell has in this book written his account of that Test and the preceding series against Pakistan in Australia and New Zealand in New Zealand. It is a workmanlike description of the play, with less off-pitch description than I was hoping for.

The 76-77 season was one of re-calibration for the Australian side: the (in Chappell's opinion) premature retirement of his brother and Ian Redpath, along with Ashley Mallett and Terry Jenner calling it quits, meant that a lot of skill and experience left the team at the same time. And although Pakistan had their usual internal squabbles before the tour began, with threats of walkouts by half the team, when they did arrive on Australian soil they presented a formidable outfit with experienced players such as Mushtaq Mohammad, Majid Khan, Zaheer Abbas and Asif Iqbal, leavened with the youthful talent of Imran Khan and Javed Miandad.

The three Test series was a hard-fought one-all result, with Pakistan fighting hard and cannily on unfamiliar pitches, and Australia suffering most particularly in the bowling department after Jeff Thompson smashed his shoulder when he collided with Alan Turner in the first Test of the summer.

After the ignominy of defeat in the Third and last Test of the series in Sydney, Chappell took the team to New Zealand determined to do better. The general level of fielding and particularly catching was below standard against Pakistan, so Chappell worked his team hard in the lead up to the Tests. Max Walker came into the side to replace Thommo, but once again the bowling was the worry. Alan Hurst was in the touring party but didn't impress in the games before the Tests, so wasn't picked in the team. Gary Gilmour was in the side, even though his record in the lead up games was not much better than Hurst's, and he proved to be a weak link in what was otherwise a successful attack for this series (despite his schtick these days, Kerry O'Keeffe was a good attacking option for Chappell throughout this summer, as well as being a handy contributor with the bat).

The ups-and-downs of the extraordinary Centenary Test are well documented by Chappell - I won't go into them here as I don't think there is much in the book that isn't already well-known.

Now to the things that aren't in the book, particularly the elephant in the room..... the fifth-last paragraph of the book begins "[s]hortly before the start of play [in the Centenary Test] Dennis had called me aside in the room. I had a fair idea of what he wanted to tell me".... but no, it was not to tell Chappell he'd signed up with World Series Cricket, but to say his back injury had recurred. I'm supposing that because this book was published at the time, Chappell was reluctant to go into detail about the biggest cricket story of the decade, but there's a certain amount of irony in the fact that he spends a couple of pages earlier in the book discussing an agreement with the Australian Cricket Board around sponsorships that allowed cricketers to maximise their income-earning potential. If you pick up this book thinking you'll get any insight into the behind-the-scenes action to do with WSC, you will be disappointed.

Chappell has a reputation for being uncompromising when it comes to playing the game, but I feel that he comes across in this book as someone who understood how difficult it was to play at the highest level, and his descriptions of how a player may have got through a difficult period in a match adds much more to the fall of play than the numbers on the scorecard may suggest (the scorecards and averages are included in this book, as is a name index).

I'll sign off with a quote that shows even the greats don't always get it right. "In only their second Test together, [Ian] Davis and [Alan] Turner were showing an understanding that held out the promise of a combination which could provide a valuable contribution to Australian cricket fortunes in the future." Turner was out of the side by the end of the summer, never to return.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Silence of the Heart by David Frith

 Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides by David Frith

Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company, 2004          ISBN 184018406X

What a strange, compelling, yet ultimately unsatisfying book! Probably only David Frith, with his stern views and dogged determination could have written it, but I do wonder whether even he might have lost heart at times during this project.

There is no doubt that as a sport Cricket is very different to most. A team game that relies uniquely on the performance of individuals, where base chance plays an inordinate part in success or failure, and where there is ample time even during a game to reflect on one's own performance, a thoughtful person could begin to wonder whether in the right circumstances depression over performance could lead to suicide.

At first it seems Frith might be on to something, as in the preface he states that Test cricketers have committed suicide at twice the rate of the rest of the population (in the UK), and goes on to show that they have killed themselves at seemingly higher rates than top-flight participants in other sporting codes.

What then follows is over 200 pages of people who have played cricket at first-class level (some only one game) across the world (although the book focusses mainly on England and Australia) who took their own life. Frith shows enormous dedication in delving not only into each person's cricket history, but also into their personal lives and (obviously) into their deaths. While some lives are short and some are boring, others are a fascinating insight into the mores and times in which they lived.

There are names with which I'm familiar (Stoddart, Trott, Wills) and others that I will no doubt never read about again. As suicides however, the stories are mostly depressingly familiar: usually those in this book killed themselves (and sometimes others) for the "usual" reasons; money, gambling, love, illness, old age. Their methods are mostly familiar as well - gunshot, gas, poison, drowning, jumping to their deaths (it might have been interesting for Frith to do a statistical analysis of the types of death - are cricketers more prone to one way of killing themselves than another?).

As Mike Brearley writes in the Foreword, we can never really ultimately know why someone chooses to take their own life, but as Frith states in the final chapter most of the suicides of which he has written occurred for reasons other than cricket (in fact pretty much the only ones he can definitely pin down to the game are those of fans rather than players). Frith then goes on to speculate whether, rather than cricket "causing" suicides, people who are more prone to depression are drawn to cricket. As Brearley said, it's really unknowable.

On a final note, another unique thing about cricket is the literature is has spawned. This book is one of the more curious.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

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