Australia '63 by Alan Ross (Book Review)

There are no punches pulled in the introduction to this tour diary, the author describes the series as one of the dullest and most disappointing that he has covered. It's an unconventional approach and one that you might have thought would send up the red flag of all publishing red flags. And yet such is the richness of the prose, the acuteness of the observation and the broadness of reference, that such trifles seem, well just that. 

Ross's earlier work, Australia '55 is considered the pinnacle of tour diaries but it must be said that the freshness of the subject matter and the quality of the cricket played in that series provided valuable assistance. Here Ross has fewer natural advantages at his disposal, but he still produces an emininently readable account which strays frequently and pleasantly but not excessively on to non-cricketing matters as he pounds the bitumen of the eastern and southern seaboards in an improbably reliable Morris Minor taking advantage of the long gaps between Tests. He elegantly savages Australian architecture of the time, quietly gushes at the new wave of antipodean painters and affectionately recounts a day in the company of the genial Arthur Mailey.

Much of Ross's match analysis reflects on the timidity of the batting. He attributes this to self-centredness on the part of the individuals concerned but also to a collective lack of urgency and positivity. He would not, I feel, have been a great fan of Dominic Sibley. The soreness of his disappointment is a recurring them, even if he finds some mitigation in postscripted reflections. Both sides possessed stellar names who would be or had been great but few were at their peak in 1963. An England side containing Cowdrey, Barrington, Graveney, Trueman and Statham could hardly be considered weak but only Trueman and Barrington produced performances to justify their reputation. In a series full of dull cricket, the showmanship of the Yorkshire fast bowler, something perhaps forgotten or overlooked by those of us who never saw him play, alone provided the author with moments of lighter entertainment and opportunities for gentle whimsy.

Our deepest disappointments are always reserved for those whom we regard most highly and Ross cannot have been alone in expecting that two teams captained by Richie Benaud and Ted Dexter would produce brighter, more enterprising cricket. But as Ross points out in his postscript (in typically Ross style he admits it was written some weeks later on a beach in Mexico!) there was then, and certainly is today, a tendency to view Benaud as a happy-go-lucky character willing to risk losing if it gave the chance of victory. Ross reminds us that Benaud was far more hard-nosed and pragmatic than that. 

These gentle realignments of popular theory are typical of a writer who whilst capable of tough criticism and trenchant views never loses sight of the player's perspective and the hidden stresses and strains which are so easily ignored or played down. He is never gratuitously harsh or mean-spirited, never sacrifices fairness for a killer line. A true polymath, his prose has the flow and rhythm of the poet, the curiosity, cultural awareness and nose for the off-beat fact of the best travel writers, whilst his eye for detail and keen analytical mind is that of a seasoned cricket journalist. 

They don't make cricket books like this any more. There are probably only a few who could write them and they simply don't have time; it was a slower, gentler era but in Ross' company never dull or ponderous.