In their own write

Donny Davies was the main soccer writer of the Guardian and John Arlott the number two man. The latter was once scheduled to travel with the Manchester United team to Belgrade when, at the last minute, there was a change of plan and Davies himself decided to accompany the team. Arlott's disappointment is described in restrained, sober prose in his autobiography, Basingstoke Boy. So is the aftermath of that decision. The plane crashed, killing players, media and crew, Davies among them. "For several days to come, J.A. had almost to pinch himself to believe in that reprieve." J.A. is John Arlott - the autobiography is written in the third person ("to have written in the first person would have destroyed a habit of many years").

When I first read Basingstoke Boy over a decade and a half ago, I was irritated. Irritated that a man who had lived such a rich life (cricket apart, there were friendships with Dylan Thomas and Richard Aldington, EM Forster and Cyril Connolly, and then the poetry, the wine expertise) chose to be over-discreet, using the third person to keep the reader from getting too close. Of the person Arlott, his thoughts and feelings, there is precious little. He uses his pen skillfully to tell us about the outer shell of his life, but the kernel remains untouched.

Such a problem does not afflict Neville Cardus's Autobiography - here the reverse is the case. Too much is told that is too good to be true, as indeed a couple of researchers discovered when they tried to find evidence to corroborate many of his anecdotes.

Cardus wrote like a romantic, inventing stories that enhanced that image, not letting facts interfere with a good tale. What a man invents about himself tells us as much about him as anything else, and it is instructive to read Cardus for the kind of stories he invented. Perhaps these are truths of a higher order. Autobiography is a delightful read, but is not recommended as a text to refer to for settling bets.

Cricket writers have brought as much pleasure when they have written about themselves as when they have written about the game and its players. Cardus, Frank Keating, Jim Swanton are all delightful reads whether they are reporting a match, giving breath to their fantasies, or telling us about the best job in the world (the title of one of BBC commentator Don Mosey's books).

Some books are mainly anecdotal, like Brian Johnston's It's Been a Lot of Fun; others speak of more complex issues such as displacement (like Caught England, Bowled Australia by David Frith, which is subtitled, "A cricket slave's complex story"). Frith was born in England, lived in Australia, and then returned to England to continue his "saturation involvement in cricket" as he calls it. Once you get past his side of the story of how he was sacked from Wisden Cricket Monthly, this is a wonderful tale of a cricket historian and writer who, one imagines, was consulted by encyclopedias rather than the other way around. If Swanton delighted in being known as "sort of a cricket person", Frith is no less than the complete cricket person.

The playwright Simon Raven's book on the game, Shadows on The Grass, as well as Sujit Mukherjee's Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer are intensely personal reactions to the game. "No cricket one has watched or read about can ultimately be as memorable as the cricket one has played oneself, no matter at what level," says Mukherjee, who did play Ranji Trophy cricket. In fact, it is worth quoting Mukherjee at some length to get a flavour of his book:

There is a doffing of the hat here to CLR James and Beyond a Boundary, which at one level can be read as pure autobiography. When you extend autobiography far enough, you get the story of a community, a state or a nation. From the particular to the general is a few steps, but not every writer can make that journey interesting.