Independent voice

First the good news: The Independent's James Lawton is a very fine writer on cricket (indeed, on all sports) and any collection of his columns is going to be stimulating, entertaining to read and chock full of opinions and marches under fire towards the moral high ground. For those who have not come across Lawton before, this is as representative a collection of his work as you are likely to get.

He is particularly good on issues involving the spirit of cricket. Lawton writes superbly on Zimbabwe, notably an article from November 2004 imagining Michael Vaughan telling his grandchildren how he did his duty by playing cricket there, and he is good on the game's characters - Matthew Hoggard, Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting among others. His take on the forfeited England v Pakistan Oval Test still makes good reading, though it was written in the confusion of the moment and much has happened since.

That, of course, is always the risk when articles written for immediate consumption are reprinted at a later date without changes, and with readers' benefit of hindsight. It is a tribute to Lawton's view of the game as much as to his way with words that he gets the mood right pretty well every time.

That is the good news. The bad news is that the book shows every sign of having been put together without much thought.

The editor (Ivan Ponting, an experienced cricket writer) obviously thought Lawton's name was not enough of a selling point, so he had to find a way to pitch Lawton to bookshop browsers and Amazon surfers. Thus, even though the articles are all chosen from the Indie, from June 2000 until now, the introduction reports at length on the dispute Lawton had with Viv Richards in Antigua in 1990, when he was with the Daily Express.

I assume this is because his squaring up to Sir Viv was the only time that Lawton has impinged on the game's casual followers, but it smacks of desperation by marketing men to make use of such an irrelevant event here. Interestingly, even Lawton himself in his introduction gets the year wrong, saying it was 1989, which shows how much we all remember about it.

Another pitfall of collections such as these, if not carefully edited, is that the writer appears to repeat himself. If you have an anecdote about Mike Atherton's view of what makes a good captain, or Merv Hughes and Javed Miandad sledging each other, it is fine to tell it three times in eight years as a columnist. Three times in 250 pages of a book is less exciting.

A bigger gripe is that there are no words of introduction to any of the articles themselves. We are left to remember what the big issue of the day was. A couple of lines each time to help us on our way would have been nice. Instead, all we get is cut-and-paste. Lawton deserves a better compiled book than this.

On Cricket
by James Lawton
Dewi Lewis Media £9.99