Cricket is Pinteresque

This year's Nobel Prize for Literature went to the playwright Harold Pinter. Only three playwrights working in English - George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill and Pinter's main influence, Samuel Beckett - had won the prize before him. And curiously (or not, depending on your point of view), like Beckett, Pinter has a love of cricket.

Beckett played two first-class games (check his player profile) for Dublin University against Northants. And while we've all known Pinter is a life-long cricket fan, Robert Winder reveals more in today's Guardian:

The game is not, however, a light-hearted social affair to him. He grew up awed by Len Hutton and co, and fell for cricket not as some raffish country house pursuit, but as a bold theatre of aggression. His cricket is not simply picturesque; it is Pinteresque, with glints of malevolence in its courtesies, steel beneath its smile.

This is not to say that his own approach is grim; merely that it is serious. He plays cricket as if it matters - so it does matter. It counts.

As if cricket wasn't already the sport of the Gods; it also creates Nobel Prize-winning writers!