All aboard the ghost train

So far as I know, the Barmy Army's Jimmy Saville look-alike has not yet written his account of the 2005 Ashes but he is probably working on it - or his ghost-writer is. Ghosts have had to do some serious graft to deliver these books in time for the Christmas market and the results are not as uneven as one might expect, given the rushed time-scale.

Ghosts are increasingly credited these days, if not on dust-jackets then in the acknowledgements, but it is still an undervalued skill. Ghost-writing, like wicketkeeping, is glaringly obvious if you get it wrong and completely undetectable if you get it right. Appropriately Jack Russell's ghost a few years back was the best in the business, Peter Hayter, who is also the uncredited author of Ashes Victory, the Professional Cricketers' Association's official history, told "in the team's own words".

Hayter cleverly caught Botham's voice in the best-selling autobiography a decade ago and did it brilliantly again with Phil Tufnell's account of the last but one tour of West Indies. In Ashes Victory Hayter has taken on the toughest test of his versatility yet, the entire England team. He has managed to convert what must have been hundreds of snatched interviews and phone calls into a seamless narrative that captures the intensity of the series and roars along. Hayter's gift for mimicry makes him a sports-writing version of Rory Bremner and it seems that anyone who can do character dialogue as well as he can should be writing plays. Then again, given how badly the theatre pays, most playwrights probably wish they were writing for the likes of Marcus Trescothick and Geraint Jones.

There are a number of other writers skilled in the black art of ghosting. David Hopps of The Guardian is an unobtrusive master and in this crop Myles Hodgson does Freddie Flintoff, Simon Wilde is Graham Thorpe, Martin Hardy plays Michael Vaughan and Steve James, a former player, writes in the voice of the England coach Duncan Fletcher. It would be nice if more people wrote their own books - writing is only organised thinking after all - but that is probably a naive hope. With so many ghosted books there is bound to be overlap and those forking out for Being Freddie and Ashes Victory can decide for themselves which ghost does the better Flintoff.

Hodgson's describes his dismissal in the dramatic fourth-innings chase at Trent Bridge thus: "I thought I was going to see us home but [Brett] Lee pulled a delivery out of nowhere. I don't know how fast it was timed at but it nipped back and took my off stump out." Hayter's Flintoff recalls: "He did me all ends up with a ball that beat me for pace and nipped back as well. It would have got me out every day of the week and twice on a Sunday."

Over the series Hayter's Flintoff consistently shows the more colourful turn of phrase. Patrick Eagar's photograph in The Ashes in Focus shows that the ball did not quite knock out Flintoff's off stump but then everyone saw it slightly differently. Ian Stafford in Ashes Fever maintains it kept low and James, writing as Fletcher, says cautiously: "It deviated significantly off the strip."

September must have been a tough month for the ghosts as they chased up players and nagged them for quotes, then had to convert the material at a blistering Brett Lee pace into book form. Their job was helped by the gripping story they had to tell but ghosting is never entirely straightforward. Most writers have had to do it at one time or another and they invariably grumble about their subject's unavailability or inability to say anything of interest. Moreover, if the supposed author does utter something controversial or revealing, it is usually followed by a phrase the ghost dreads above all others: "But you can't put that in the book." In addition, ghosts tend to get paid much less than the people in whose voices they are writing, so it can seem like drudgery.

Sometimes they keep themselves amused with below-stairs pranks. When I was labouring anonymously on the `autobiography' of a well-known comedy actress a few years ago I phoned a friend for a moan. He was going through a similar process on behalf of a famously taciturn jockey and to lighten our tasks he bet me lunch that I could not shoehorn the name of the former Polish premier General Jaruzelski into my text and I bet him he could not get the composer Ivor Novello into his. To our shame we both won our bets.

Disappointingly I can find no evidence of similar unprofessionalism in any of the titles under review, although I detect in Thorpe's autobiography another ghost's trick of giving the subject enough rope with which to hang himself. "I've never been one for going out of the hotel and exploring local culture," says Thorpey, revealing an unappealing narrowness of mind. Staying in might make sense if you are playing at Abergavenny but it is a bit dumb to ignore the delights of Colombo or Sydney or Port-of-Spain.

Wilde's Thorpe sounds consistently authentic, perhaps a bit too much so as most of the book's 390 pages are devoted to blackening the name of his ex-wife Nicky. It is called Rising from the Ashes in an attempt to ride the current wave of popularity but Having Nothing Whatsoever To Do With the Ashes would have been more appropriate. Thorpe supports the dads' pressure group Fathers 4 Justice, so he could have been one of the 50-odd blokes dressed as Batman on the Saturday of the Edgbaston Test. But that would have been the closest he got to the white heat of battle.

Rising from the Ashes is a melancholy read; the stats at the end include a list of Thorpe's most memorable hundreds including, wistfully, the one he would dearly like to have made this summer against Australia. Although Thorpe would presumably have scored more runs than Ian Bell had he been picked, Fletcher (in Ashes Regained) maintains it was Pietersen who replaced him not Bell. Thorpe would also have held more catches than KP but would such an old misery guts have been able to embrace the new team ethos?

For all the smiles and enthusiasm there are still traces of the old grumpiness and self-pity in the England team's public utterances. Several players seem happier to have "proved a few people wrong" than to have won the Ashes. In Calling the Shots Hardy's Vaughan gets stuck into the press in familiar fashion, claiming not to read the papers while at the same time bemoaning the rubbish written in them. He scorns former players who criticise the current team, along with "critics who fill their pens with poison", but also claims to enjoy a good working relationship with the press corps. Given the oppressive year-round proximity of players and journalists, it may indeed be possible to have all these feelings at the same time, however contradictory.

What is truly baffling, though, is that someone who can drill Glenn McGrath for a flat six, smash 177 at Adelaide and lead his side to an Ashes win should give a stuff about what some hack in The Sun has to say. And how does Vaughan have time to read the papers? But then public figures are strangely fascinated by how the world sees them, like daily visitors to the hall of mirrors staring for hours on end at their own distorted images.

Calling the Shots is the most disappointing of the ghosted bunch. Possibly Hardy had only limited access to England's idol but the book is almost devoid of anecdote or humour, although we do get the old favourite about "getting the runs" in India and the unbelievably lame "Pietersen, or KP as he's known because of his initials not because he's a bit of a nut".

Vaughan is famously keen to let his cricket do the talking. Laudable as this is in a Test batsman, it is not the quality you look for in an author. But even this dogged effort is a reminder of just how successful Vaughan's team has been over the last two years.

It is natural to seek reasons for the period of sustained success and these books offer plenty of key influences, from psychotherapy to consultations with polar explorers. Singing seems to play an important part in the morale-building process, as does the team huddle. Owen Parkin composed a song which the England team sings before every game (maddeningly I cannot find the lyrics anywhere but Parkin's previous work on the Glamorgan team song hints at his style: "Over the Severn and down to the Taff/Like lambs to the slaughter they take on the daff").

Fletcher's book contains the text of a sentimental poem, `The Man in the Glass', about facing yourself in the mirror, a copy of which the players are given to learn. He also reveals his business background with a lot of flipchart flummery about the `how', the `why' and the `what' - management training fads of the kind that countless thousands of employees have had to undergo in the last 10 years. Who can tell what bearing they had on the outcome but, with 2,200 pages to be filled, it would not quite do to say England's Ashes success was due to at last finding some world-class players who were more focused than the Australians and had a few slices of luck.

An Ashes series with the result in doubt until the final session at The Oval must be rated one of the greatest sporting contests. It seems churlish to question the quality of the cricket but, for all the Australians' grace in defeat, their supporters have been kicking their cats for months about the team's underachievement with the bat, not to mention Ricky Ponting's misguided decision to put England in at Edgbaston.

Battle for the Ashes and Ashes 2005 promise unbiased views, both books being written by Anglo-Australians. The first, by David Frith, includes a preamble about previous series. Frith weaves his customary historical references into elegant and always enthusiastic match reports.

Gideon Haigh is less an Anglo-Australian than a freak of cricketing nature, being a fair dinkum Aussie who supports England. He is the star writer of the moment and the latest in a blue-blooded lineage, reaching back to Neville Cardus through CLR James and Matthew Engel, whose allusions soar beyond the boundaries of normal cricket journalism into music, politics and literature. Haigh's analyses are brilliant and his profiles of players more revealing than any ghost could manage. A sharp proof-reader might have noticed the Second Test chapter heading that says Australia won by 2 runs. And it was Michael Frayn, not Noel Coward, who coined the line "It's not the despair that I hate, I can cope with that. It's the hope that gets you". But neither blemish detracts from the excellence of Haigh's collected writings.

I will remember this summer as much for what I annoyingly missed - the Andrew Strauss catch, Flintoff's magical over to dismiss Justin Langer and Ponting, the Gary Pratt run-out and subsequent Ponting outburst - as, in the case of the final hour at Edgbaston, for what I could not bear to watch. These books fill in the gaps and no doubt it won't be the last time the series is revived in ghostly or human form.

Ashes Victory
by the England team (but Peter Hayter, really)
Orion, hb, 203pp, £17.99
Sharp, vivid and can be read in a session.
4 out of 5

Being Freddie
by Andrew Flintoff and Myles Hodgson
Hodder and Stoughton, hb, 315pp, £18.99
A professional job but Fred's a former competitive chess player and a bright lad - I'd rather read it in his own words.
3/5

Rising from the Ashes
by Graham Thorpe with Simon Wilde
Collins Willow, hb, 390pp, £18.99
If you want a feelbad stocking-filler as an antidote to the other seasonal offerings, this is the one for you.
3/5

Calling the Shots
by Michael Vaughan with Martin Hardy
Hodder and Stoughton, hb, 270pp, £18.99
Possibly suffers from a weight of expectation. For all the touchy feely stuff about the players feeling each others' pain, it's a bit lifeless.
2/5

The Ashes in Focus
by Patrick Eagar
A&C Black and John Wisden & Co, hb, 128pp, £19.99
Worth buying for the shot of Strauss's catch, but I also like the action photo of actor Graham Seed (Nigel Pargetter in The Archers) leaping for safety as a Pietersen 6 crashes into the Lord's pavilion.

Battle for the Ashes
by David Frith
Ebury Press, hb, 258pp, £14.99
David Frith's 26th cricket book. Painstaking, informed and well-written as ever.
3/5

Ashes 2005
by Gideon Haigh
Aurum, hb, 220pp, £9.99
A collection of Guardian pieces (and quite a bit more) from the swot of the press box with a wide range of references from Bosanquet to Big Brother and Kafka to Calvino.
4/5

Ashes Regained
by Duncan Fletcher with Steve James
Simon & Schuster, hb, 211pp, £12.99
Fascinating backstage revelations of how the campaign was planned and prosecuted.
4/5

Ashes Fever
by Ian Stafford
Mainstream Publishing, hb, 211pp, £16.99
Efficient but not particularly feverish account of the series with good photos by Philip Brown.
3/5