Ramachandra Guha: Why it’s more difficult to be a successful Test cricketer than a great T20 player |
I am a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association, and I live down the road from the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Yet when the opening game of this year’s Indian Premier League was played there last week, I was at home, not watching the action on television but reading a recently published book on cricket, albeit about a rather different kind of cricket from that promoted by the IPL. The book was Scyld Berry’s 500 Declared: The Joys of Covering 500 Cricket Tests.
The first person to watch 500 Test matches was the great Richie Benaud, 63 of these as a player, the rest as a journalist and commentator. Scyld Berry was the second, and also the first to cover 500 England Test matches live, working variously for The Observer, The Sunday Correspondent, The Independent on Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Daily Telegraph.
His book moves seamlessly through the decades, from England playing New Zealand at Trent Bridge in June 1973 to England on tour in Rawalpindi in October 2024. Along the way, he provides the reader illuminating vignettes of brilliant spells and match-winning innings, of richly diverse crowds and even more diverse landscapes. He notices much more than the cricket, as when he writes: “I compare Bengal to Italy: the temperament, love of food, literary culture, where Tagore has similar stature to Dante but is rather more recent.”
Berry first entered the press box while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. He provides crisp portraits of the titans of English cricket journalism in the 1970s: John Arlott of The Guardian, John Woodcock of The Times and EW Swanton of The Daily Telegraph, with the pompous Swanton comfortably coming out worst.
As the narrative develops, he wisely – or prudently – does not offer comparable assessments of his own generation of cricket writers. Rather, he focuses on the play and the players, giving us sharp sketches of (among others) Ian Chappell, Geoffrey Boycott, David Gower and Kevin Pietersen as cricketers and human beings.
Throughout the book, Berry displays an acute understanding of sporting techniques and how they have changed over the years. In one striking passage, he draws our attention to the unanticipated consequences of helmets. Introduced at first to aid batsmen cope with hostile fast bowling, helmets have, he argues, been even more helpful against spin, allowing batters to sweep balls........