Where's the alternative?

The publishers of this heavy book describe it as an alternative account of the history of the game. If by the phrase `alternative account' they mean one stuffed to the gills with misprints and typos, then they have hit the mark. Barney Spender, who put the book together, is quoted as saying that "We hope that `Ground Rules' will be the most celebrated and talked about cricket book ever published." For his sake I hope he is wrong.

It's not that it's really a bad book. Spender has assembled a fine array of writers, including Christopher Martin-Jenkins (whose name is spelt wrong in the contents page), Richard Hobson, Donna Symmonds and Test players such as Steve Waugh, Andy Flower, Kumar Sangakkara and Sourav Ganguly, to tell the story of Test cricket in their countries through the story of some of the Test grounds. A lot of what they write is interesting, fresh and revealing, and the photographs are stunning and unusual, like the one of Michael Slater going out to bat at Chennai wearing an `ice vest', or of the Basin Reserve in Wellington, `the only cricket ground in the world that doubles as a roundabout'.

We learn that Eden Park in Auckland and Eden Gardens, Kolkata were named after the same man, George Eden, afterwards Lord Auckland. It was fascinating to read of the different people honoured at Kensington Oval, Barbados - there's not just the Garfield Sobers Pavilion and the Challenor Stand, but also the Malcolm Marshall End, the Joel Garner End, the Herman Griffith Gates to the car park, and the John Goddard Exit, and plenty more besides. I enjoyed the anecdote of Prince Christian Victor, the only member of the Royal family to have played first-class cricket, who hit 205 while playing for the King's Rifles against the Devonshire Regiment at Rawalpindi in 1893, the first ever double century on the sub-continent.

The story of VVS Laxman's epic innings against Australia is worth retelling from Sourav Ganguly's point of view, and Geoff Boycott's version of the immortal Michael Holding over which got him sixth ball is worth hearing: "Aye, `twere grand over, but if I `adn't been at the crease, we would have been 0 for 6." Donna Symmonds, the West Indian broadcaster, in particular shows us the soul of her people when she writes of the cricket, and Sourav Ganguly is very good on Eden Gardens, where his father was secretary of the Cricket Association of Bengal, but too much of the book is yet another run through the great innings and bowling analyses of Test history, hardly the stuff of an `alternative account'.

That's really the trouble. The book is trying too hard to be different, but it ends up as just another cricket book. Overall, taking out the scores of misprints, which grow to be annoying over 464 pages, the book is a good read, but alternative it ain't. The various crowd troubles over the years at the National Stadium in Karachi are glossed over with such sentences as "a full scale battle between the police and students ensued with tear gas and gunshots livening up the Karachi air." The years of South African cricketing exile are summed up in the sentence, "South Africa enjoys a rich if occasionally chequered history on and off the field." And what about this one? - "Away from the politics, the Harare Sports Club is still the kind of ground where you can hear the rustle of the butterflies amid the tranquillity." Come to think of it, maybe that is an alternative take on dictatorship.

Look at the positives: the photographs are excellent, the statistics are, it seems to me, very accurate and pretty up to date (including this year's England v South Africa Lord's Test, but not the Oval Test) and CM-J even manages to quote Bob Dylan. It's also heavy enough to cause damage when thrown at the cat. One final gripe: why does a book that bases its whole reason for existing around the Test match grounds not feature one on its cover? The whole production looks like the first effort from a new publisher (which it is), and there's plenty of room for improvement. But maybe the spark is there.

Rating: 2.5/5

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