Better watched on TV

Cricketers are easier to fall in love with than any other sportsmen. It is do with the amount of time they are on TV. While footballers and rugby players get only an hour and a half in front of the cameras, the length of a cricket series flushes out the characters, imperfections and nuances of our men in white.

This is why we feel we already know Stuart Broad, despite his age of 23. Even his ambiguities are creeping in: thoughtful but impatient, mature but stroppy. He is articulate in interviews, happy to think about his answers. All of this exposure allows us to feel part of cricket's inner circle in a way we never can with Wayne Rooney or Danny Cipriani and their respective sports.

It is a shame then that, as with most cricket autobiographies, the ghost-written My Side of the Story: Bowled Over - An Ashes Celebration offers as much insight as Ian Wright's football punditry. But what were we expecting from a book with three titles?

There are only three paragraphs on the Pietersen-Moores fall-out while another is devoted to why the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver used to put a cricket box on his face to pretend to be Darth Vader. But it has to be remembered that this is a sporting autobiography by a man so young he pretended to be Matthew Hayden in his back garden.

It has the look and feel of a desk-diary and, in essence, that is what it is. Broad's early life as a son of the Test cricketer Chris and his progression from batsman to bowler at Leicestershire is skimmed over to get to the real-selling point: a Test-by-Test account of the Ashes, padded out with lots of lovely pictures.

While the retelling of the Ashes offers little new, the reader does get the impression that Broad is frustrated by his changing roles. Is he a strike or stock bowler? Does he bang it in, bowl variations or stick to line-and-length? Broad says he wants to be like McGrath but his captain and coach appear to have other ideas. Perhaps the best thing in the book is provided by a trip to the cinema. A few weeks after Chris Broad survived the Lahore attacks last year, father and son sat in front of a cinema screen watching a shootout during an action film. "I turned to Dad and watched him shaking. His face was completely white. I have never seen him like that."

It is a striking insight into the life of a cricketer at the end of the Noughties. That is pretty much all you will get, though. For any more it may be best to keep watching him on TV.

My Side of the Story: Bowled Over - An Ashes Celebration
by Stuart Broad
Hodder & Stoughton