Many a Tale Being Sold

Reviews by Saxelby

If you stroll into your local bookshop you will find numerous books by English cricketers are covering the shelves. Just as they were being humiliated 5-0 by Australia came the paperbacks, and suddenly legends of the game such as Andrew Strauss and Paul Collingwood were telling their “amazing” life stories both inside and out of cricket. After the hastily forgotten shambolic celebrations that greeted the Ashes victory of 2005, all we are left with are some of the flimsiest books ever written on any subject.

This winter has also seen a sudden rush of antipodean variations on a theme, with the captain’s diary of Ricky Ponting and the life story of “Roy” Symonds amongst them. It will be interesting to see if Ponting has a chapter explaining why he had to leave the field to check with Buchanan as to whether he should take the new ball at Adelaide, but that is another story in itself. The last and least anticipated of all these books has to be Paul Nixon’s "How to be Incredibly Annoying - Volume Six". The book includes a forward from Mike Waterman, Nixon’s long lost Irish cousin, who clearly believes he can earn a call up to the next Ireland squad at the age of 48.

The year also of 2005 saw Larne Cricket Club enjoy tremendous success on and off the field, and the local club has also seen a considerable amount of their players put pen to paper. As with the England set-up the club has since fallen on hard-times just as the paperback versions of these books are released, and just as with the international biographies some of these volumes are questionable works of literature. Even off the field commercial developments ran parallel . . . England got a strange deal with BOSS perfume for men, while Larne negotiated with Lonilidel a deal to promote their cut price fragrance eau de sewer. It is the issue of the books though that has really caught my attention . . .

By far the most distinguished cricket writer to have emerged from Larne is of course Professor McSwiggle. Having eclipsed his old enemy Robin Walsh both in his performances on and off the field, McSwiggle has been busy penning the long awaited sequel to the first volume of his autobiography, "I am not Nobby". This second volume is curiously entitled "I am Nobby", and is believed to contain many frank stories of his experiences in the junior sections of the NCU. The book includes some very special chapters which sometimes seem truly fictional, such as How I scored 89 runs, How I took 6-2 and How to win four leagues in a row. Yet all are supposedly true, and whether fact or fiction make jolly good reading.

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