Master of the broad perspective

You could be forgiven for thinking that a man who owned 3000 cricket books and lived alone with a cat called Trumper would lack that crucial quality of perspective needed in any great writer. And if, furthermore, he cheerfully owned up to being so attached to his old bats that one could be found in every room of his house, you might well assume that this was someone oblivious to CLR James's oft-quoted dictum: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"

Yet Gideon Haigh - for he is the man with the groaning bookshelves, the quaintly named feline and the serial willow addiction - is quite clearly the possessor of a hinterland as vast and sprawling as his native Australia, one that illuminates his dazzling writing on cricket.

This new collection of Haigh's words, from this magazine, as well as Cricinfo, the Guardian and a number of Australian publications, amply demonstrates the ability, present in all the great chroniclers of the game, to call on a bewildering mix of reference points, cultural, commercial, political, even culinary, to illustrate their work.

So we get mentions of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm sitting happily alongside ones of the Beach Boys and the American political commentator Walter Lippmann. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama is just as likely to get a name-check as Freddie Flintoff; and Haigh surely remains the only man capable of dragging TS Eliot into the debate about technology for umpires.

The majority of pieces in this collection were published in the past couple of years, which gives them extra currency at this tipping point in the history of the sport. In "The Game's Afoot", for example, he delivers what may well be the finest essay yet penned on Twenty20. Musing on the likely damage to cricket's ancient arts and crafts if the shortest form of the game gains in influence in the next two decades, he writes: "There may have been a few more Dhonis; probably a great many more Uthappas. But can you imagine another Sachin Tendulkar, with the discipline to budget for innings by the day, with a defence as monumental as his strokes are magnificent?"

He is equally brilliant on the iconography of Australian sport, gently parting the thick fog of myth enveloping the baggy green cap, sagely assessing the cricketing and cultural significance of Don Bradman and tracing the reasons behind Australia's decade and a half of world domination. And because Haigh still plays - even if he makes no attempt to exaggerate his own competence or that of his team-mates at South Yarra CC - he remains interested in the mechanics of cricket and not just its personalities and folklore.

There is a fine article on the art of the leave, which includes this startlingly original observation: "Many games involve hitting a ball. Only cricket also involves not hitting the ball to such a significant degree."

There is a campaign afoot - one that I have been assiduously pursuing for some time - to amend EU employment laws so that companies are legally bound to allow their staff to extend their lunch breaks on the day of publication of a new Haigh column on Cricinfo. The cover blurb proclaims him "one of the best living writers on cricket" and many will feel that, if anything, that understates the case.

Inside Out: Writings on Cricket
by Gideon Haigh
Aurum, pb, 288pp, £8.99