Cardus can wait

If you are a supporter of Indian cricket, or just plain interested in knowing more about how Indian cricket - with it's big-ticket stars, hordes of cricket crazy fans, behind-the-scenes board politics - functions, then you must pick up a copy of John Wright's Indian Summers. This could well be the single most important book written by someone intimately involved in Indian cricket since Sunil Gavaskar wrote Sunny Days back in 1977, when he was still a player.

For all the talent it produces, and for the volume of writing that comes out in daily newspapers, websites and weekly and monthly magazines, you could barely fill a shelf with books on Indian cricket worth reading. There's no shortage of unabashed hagiography that attempts to pass off as unauthorised biography, and of blow-by-blow tour books which seldom do more than summarise matches and events, quoting extensively from what was published in newspapers at the time.

If you expect stunning new revelations about scandal, or sensitive personal information from inside the dressing-room, you don't know Wright well enough. Even from distant Christchurch, far from the places and scenes he describes vivdly, Wright is careful about how the things he writes can affect people. When describing incidents he takes names only when they add to the telling of the story, and even then rarely quotes something that anyone could take offence to.

But Wright, unlike his successor Greg Chappell, always kept the media at more than a cricket bat's length through his tenure. To be fair to him, Wright didn't play favourites - he was equally unavailable to everyone from the media. In all this, though, it was possible to get a sense of what the man was like, if you interacted with him, and the occasional beery evening and odd bummed cigarette was not unheard of. But in reading the book you get a clearer picture of what he was trying to achieve.

"Sometimes I talked too much and smiled too little," he writes, talking of his time coaching Kent. When coaching India he might have spoken too much in the dressing-room but he didn't say too much in the media. "A huge part of coaching and management is making players believe they're better than they are," explains Wright when talking about having to deal with some tricky cricketers in the side.

Wright also understood Indian cricket well by the time he had completed one year as Indian coach. He lived out of hotel and club rooms, did not even have a contract for the longest time, and when he writes, about the BCCI office in Mumbai, "I reckon those ramshackle surroundings are the greatest feat of camouflage since a wolf put on sheep's clothing," you know he's comepletely with it, and no foreign coach. And that is saying something, given the widespread scepticism of the efficacy of a foreign coach when he was first appointed, admittedly mostly from former Indian cricketers who he was now putting out of work. Wright could have used this book as an opportunity to give the finger to some of his persistent baiters, but he resists the temptation to do so.

What he does do in the book is tell you about the little incidents that reveal so much about some of the cricketers in this team. For example there is still a feeling among the most staunch Indian fans that butter wouldn't melt in the mouths of the likes of Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar, and they'll be surprised to hear that the two are not incapable of producing the odd sledge, like the time when India were on top in the 2001 home series against Australia and asked Steve Waugh, "So how's the final frontier looking now, Steve?" The book, which is fast-paced and readable enough to finish in one sitting, is filled with little things like this that will tell you a bit more about the protagonists of the India cricket scene.

There's a genuine warmth of feeling Wright has for the team and for India and it comes through in the book. This is never more evident than when he writes, "When I finish with cricket in a professional capacity and get back to watching it purely for pleasure, I won't bother going to Lord's; I'll go back to India." Similarly, if you're a genuine fan of Indian cricket, read Wright's book. Cardus and company can wait.

John Wright's Indian Summers (Indian edition)
by John Wright with Sharda Ugra and Paul Thomas
Published by Viking, 2006
Price Rs 495, 244 pages