A non-partisan colossus

Growing up in India at a time when cricket writing and literature have never been in short supply, it has become important to identify those which make the mark and others which fall short of it.

Few writers have been as widely read and followed like Peter Roebuck and fewer still, have affected passionate followers of the game, including yours truly, like he did. Be it that space on the top right corner of The Hindu, or the magazine pane on the ESPNcricinfo homepage, Roebuck really did make me scrounge around, looking for every last word he wrote. Each sentence struck a chord with me instantly, sometimes with a ten-second delay, when I had to re-read it to understand what he actually meant.

While he sometimes sounded a touch controversial, being blatant and forthright with his criticism, the lines he wrote, like those of any good writer, could be recalled almost at will, and you could ruminate on and appreciate them for hours at end. Roebuck’s portraits and profiles of people scythed through their personae, dissecting them into parts you never knew existed. Again, at the end of it, you would nod in agreement and curse yourself for not having noticed it before.

I was another of those fans bound by strong ties of nationalism, and could not accept the fact that the Aussies really were near-invincible, in the Warne-Mcgrath era, or whatever you wish to call it. Reading his pieces during those times, it seemed, to my narrow vision, that he was being biased towards them. And, for a long time, I thought he was another of those Aussies (no offense) blowing his own trumpet.

Reading this Suresh Menon piece, changed my perception on the man, and eventually, the game itself. One of Roebuck’s books, It never rains, features in that list, and, he being one of the few writers I read then, I immediately followed the hyperlink. Now here was an Englishman, another among those there-or-thereabouts cricketers who never succeeded at the highest level, filled with his own insecurities about his game, yet, possessing that knack of having a conversion rate that any cricketer would have envied, in converting what he saw to what he wrote.

Kerry O’Keefe, in an interview soon after his death, describes Roebuck as a bookworm, wearing “coca-cola bottle glasses”. Perhaps, behind those Coke bottles, was an electron microscope of the highest resolution, for I have never heard of a writer with greater attention to detail. While you can get away with being an average commentator on a television channel, using those mundane clichés over and over again, it never is an option as a writer. It is an art which requires an eye for the seemingly unobvious, to detail which is invisible to the mere mortal. Roebuck had two of those eyes, and perhaps a third, which was why his remained one of the very few unpartisan voices in an increasingly biased world.

He was a colossus, no less, and that space, be it on newspapers or on ESPNcricinfo, will be hard to fill. Early morning coffees will never be the same again, without those powerful, witty thoughts for company.