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.

Feeling is the Thing that Happens in 1000th of a Second by Christian Ryan (Book Review)

Most cricket books can probably be squeezed into one broad category or another but there are few that simply refuse to be pigeon-holed, Beyond a Boundary is an obvious example. Feeling is one of those outliers.

Christian Ryan doesn't search for any deeper meaning to the game or attempt to place it in a wider context. Instead he presents it from an entirely fresh perspective, a new light if you will, without flash or airbrush, where cloud cover doesn't affect swing but the colour, or lack of, of the image before us. Through months of conversations, Ryan disects a year of photography, the Ashes summer of 1975, by the outstanding Patrick Eager, the foremost cricketing photographer of his and perhaps any era.

I was first introduced to Eager's work at a young age through his collaborations with Alan Ross, pictorial accounts of eight international summers, seven English, one Australian. Through Eager's effortlessly atmospheric snaps and through Ross, the poet, with his  smooth, Bordeaux-rich prose, I became intoxicated with the game without even realising how. Flicking back through those pages again now, the reasons are clear.

Ryan has a different style to Ross, his is sharp and fresh, like a Chablis - you probably couldn't drink a lot of it, but every mouthful is worth savouring. And his approach here is simple enough: allow Eager to explain his process - the science, the technique, the gear; then show the reader, and remind the artist, of the art within.

Eager, in keeping with many at the pinnacle of their fields is reluctant to assign design to his most successful images with perhaps the exception his most famous one, that of Jeff Thomson, that envelops the front and back covers. He continually refers to luck as his greatest ally - just repeated cases of being in the right place at the right time. Ryan gently disuades him of such unjustified modesty. 

In fact it is unfair to say that Ryan doesn't look for deeper meaning and wider context, he does, but at the macro level. He forensically analyses each photo, diligently researches the stories behind them and gently jogs Eager's memory for the inside story as he goes. He also adds just enough details on the man and teases out sufficient personal reminicences to fill out the artist's character without the book ever feeling autobiographical or indeed biographical. It is a thin line, expertly trod.
 
Eager's success rate seems particularly remarkable given the technical limitations of the era. Most of the time he had one shot at getting the perfect image and then would have to wait until the following day to know whether he got it. Again this is where his plead of 'luck' falls flat, only an intimate knowledge not just of light, angles etc but of the game, the grounds and the players themselves could produce such gems so regularly.

My biggest gripe and it was an immediate one, was the size of the book itself. I had assumed a book centred around a selection of photographs, and especially one that retailed at 20 pounds, would be large enough to allow the reader to peruse the images without the aid of a magnifying glass. No doubt cost was at the heart of it, but unfortunately it does make this unusual but worthwhile project feel a little cheap, and neither Ryan's words nor Eager's many iconic images deserve that.