Guha has produced another great cricket book, the magisterial A Corner of a Foreign Field, but States of Indian Cricket is arguably the more entertaining work. Search out these books and read them one a week, and you’ll have made it all the way to the World Cup.
Three titles that cut through the clutter of cricket books
Pundits From Pakistan
Rahul Bhattacharya (Picador, 2005)
That Bhattacharya is the best cricket writer of his generation was confirmed by this, a heady and delightful account of India’s tour of Pakistan in 2004. The reader will find here finely detailed accounts of the games—Virender Sehwag’s triple-hundred at Multan has never been better described—braided in with plenty of colloquial talk with old-time stars and moments of skittering comedy.
Not to be missed.
Azhar
Harsha Bhogle (Penguin/Viking, 1994)
“There can be few things more beautiful in life than Mohammad Azharuddin in flight,” wrote Azhar’s fellow Hyderabadi, Harsha Bhogle, at the beginning of this book, written some years before the subject’s fall from grace for match-fixing. No trace of that ignominious story can be found here, but Azhar’s quicksilver feet and wizard touch—no one has ever made a simple dab for a single look so attractive—are memorialized in this
Excellent biography.
Swami and Friends
R.K. Narayan (Hamish Hamilton, 1935)
R.K. Narayan’s first novel remains as fresh as ever. It tells of the capers of a group of schoolboys from sleepy Malgudi (this fictional town was to become his standard setting), seeking to emulate the great MCC with a cricket club of their own. ‘Swami and Friends’emits excitement about cricket, tinged with a slight contemporary unease with colonial pastimes—the doubting Swami, we are told, was “familiar with Hobbs, Bradman and Duleep”, but he had “not thought of cricket as something that he himself had to play.”
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