Morning Everyone: A Sportswriter's Life

Simon Hughes has intrigued me since he wrote a list some years ago of things he wanted to achieve before he was 30. Among them were to experiment with chocolate body paint and to take part in a threesome. On the field, for Middlesex and Durham, Hughes was known for never quite realising his potential. Whenever I see him on the television now, in his mid-forties, a part of me wonders if he was successful with any of his dearly held ambitions off the pitch.

Hughes, of course, is best known as The Analyst. When Channel 4 covered cricket in this country, he was the man with the shiny head and the big-collared shirts who sat in a darkened van talking over the top of a freeze-frame close-up of Glenn McGrath's cocked wrist or Simon Jones' braced front knee. He did the job extremely well and his contribution was one of the reasons why Channel 4's televising of the game was so refreshing.

Long before the TV work Hughes had won the William Hill sports-book-of-the-year award in 1997 for A Lot of Hard Yakka, his brilliant account of the occasional highs and many lows of life as a professional cricketer. Morning Everyone is the sportswriter's version and much of it is as good as his prize-winning effort.

Twelve years have passed since Hughes gave up playing cricket but he retains some characteristics of the accident-prone sixth-form clown that so infuriated his captains at Middlesex. Despite getting older, the cock-ups and calamities abound, making Hughes likeable - as he probably realises himself - and his book so readable.

Some of the special moments are his on-going (and now resolved) feud with that sternest of judges, the cricket writer Michael Henderson. The pair had a serious fall-out over the correct use of the word `staccato'. There is a very funny postscript to Hughes's old anecdote about Ian Botham's ignorance of cheese-ordering in a restaurant and a hilarious yet unrepeatable account of a conversation between the charming and well-spoken former Sussex skipper John Barclay and the libidinous West Indian batsman Chris Gayle.

Chocolate body paint aside, Hughes' dearest wish, and the compliment he would most like, is to be known as a sports journalist rather than a former cricketer who writes. Derek Pringle has managed it; so has Mike Selvey; Mike Atherton will do it. Hughes is not there yet and he acknowledges that, when the pressure is on, he has occasionally submitted copy that is "disconnected cliché-ridden garbage" - the journalistic equivalent of seeing your slower ball flying out of the ground for six. As with his playing career, Hughes may end up one step short of the summit.

But it is possible to pay him a different compliment. After a long day in the office I took Morning Everyone into the bath with me at about 11.30pm for a quick browse. I was still there reading it at a quarter to two the next morning, happily wrinkled, when my wife came looking for me.