Book review: Fast times in the world of cricket writing

Three recent books delve into the thrills and dangers of fast bowling and find some surprisingly subversive politics along the way.

The story of Clive Lloyd’s famed West Indies team is retold in Simon Lister’s new book Fire in Babylon. Evening Standard / Getty Images

To the newcomer, cricket can appear a fairly inactive sport. There is more energy and colour in its shortest formats but ultimately it operates to episodic rhythms. A ball is bowled, producing a limited spurt of physical activity involving some but not all players and, then, nothing until the next ball.

Players stand still for long periods – in fact, for batsman standing still is key.

As a child, it was this sense of inactivity, of participating in a sport in which you did not really have to run around that I found off-putting. In stark contrast stood football.

Ultimately what drew me back was fast bowling. Testing speed, requiring endurance and ultimately, done right, flexibility; what more could a young boy want? Fast bowling, I have long thought, is what makes cricket edgy and appealing.

"It's like having a superpower – it's a surge, an urge," Simon Jones writes in his excellent autobiography The Test – My Life and the Inside Story of the Greatest Ashes Series.

Jones, who was born in Wales, was an integral part of the English team that won the 2005 Ashes and was renowned for his fast bowling. But he played only 18 Tests and, because of injuries, no more after 2005 – an account of which forms the basis of this book; this last act was in one of sporting history’s greatest battles. Jones is cricket’s debris, living and broken proof of the toll fast bowling takes on the body. Cricket is littered with such men – Shoaib Akhtar, Shaun Tait, Jeff Thomson – whose bodies were capable of extreme feats but not quite capable of sustaining them.

In fact Jones was injured so often he developed a heightened recognition of the entire register of pain: that which he could play through, that which he could not and that which others doubted was real, but which was. It’s here that the book is most human – thanks in no small part to his collaborator Jon Hotten, who is among cricket’s most elegant writers.

Yet still he would not trade his talent and who would? Fast bowling is about power, and that power is two-fold: it is capable not only of ending a batting life, but also of ending human life – most recently, in November 2014, when the Australian batsman Phillip Hughes was struck by a bouncer. It’s a brutal truth but an even more brutal one is that a fast bowler does not balk at that power.

Any fast bowler will tell you, and this writer will testify, that breaking a thumb is sometimes more satisfying than taking a wicket. Those were almost the exact sentiments of Jeff Thomson, perhaps the fastest bowler the world has seen, when he made his Ashes debut late in 1974: “I enjoy hitting a batsman more than getting him out. I like to see blood on the pitch.”

Thomson's bowling in that series – and the quote – is cricket legend, marking the start of an era of superfine fast bowling. Both are revisited in a pacey retelling of Ashes history in Gentleman and Sledgers – A History of the Ashes in 100 Quotations and Confrontations.

Few modern writers are as readable as the author Rob Smyth (“Dennis Lillee didn’t have a face like thunder; he had a face like the apocalypse”), and he treats a potentially fusty, stale format with a contemporary style and wit. It’s no coincidence that some of the most enjoyable vignettes relate to feats of fast bowling, such as the one about the Australian Mitchell Johnson in the Ashes series of 2013 to 2014. “Get ready for a broken f***** arm,” the captain Michael Clarke told an English batsman about to face Johnson, at once helping cricket relocate that sense of physical danger that all sports ultimately need.

As a Pakistani though, ultimately I grew to understand that fast bowling was about far more than just bowling fast – or at least it could be.

In Pakistan, especially, fast bowling was an aspiration, and a marker of identity – if you could, truly you were somebody. Around that time, with General Zia Al Haq in power, the country’s cultural expressions had been squeezed dry. The film industry had receded from public space. What music there was, struggled for lack of an industry.

Into the vacuum of celebrity stepped fast bowlers, foremost Imran Khan, who looked good enough to be both actor and pop star, and certainly lived the life of one. How could any young boy not want to be like him, bowling fast, leading Pakistan to triumph and playboying his way through London’s social whirl? There followed a generation of young men who knew deep in their hearts that an ability to bowl fast could change their standing in life.

In part, bowling fast was a political act. For Imran and others, bowling the old colonial ruler England to defeat was more than just sporting victory. Nowhere, though, has fast bowling been so clear a political expression than in the great Caribbean fast bowlers of the 1970s and 1980s. They are at the heart of Simon Lister's Fire in Babylon, a book inspired by the 2010 documentary of the same name, both examining the sociopolitical forces that led to the rise of one of cricket's greatest teams.

Here, fast bowling created a country. Well, not literally, but it did unite a region: the West Indies, it is worth noting, exists as a single entity only in cricket. Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Colin Croft and Malcolm Marshall emerged from different Caribbean islands, but on the field they were united in response to the racism that was embedded in the sport and the countries they played against.

On one level, of course, the captain Clive Lloyd gathering these supreme fast bowlers together was just a sporting tactic. The West Indies had undergone a lean period and Lloyd was particularly scarred by a defeat to India in 1976 in which three spin bowlers let him down. He simply wanted bowlers who could get him wickets. But as these men came together, it became clear they were more than a pace attack. In England, for example, during the 1976 series, the large British Caribbean community saw the touring West Indians as an awakening of sorts.

“You see, to me, growing up in London, this wasn’t how black people should look,” says the British DJ Trevor Nelson in the book. Nelson is referring to the swagger of a man like Viv Richards, who was not a fast bowler but, as a destructive batsman, effectively as good as one.

Few were more keenly aware of what this rise meant, set against movements of black liberation, than Richards himself. And it is his quote at the start that sets the tone: “Cricket is more than a sport, it is a political and social process that requires detailed investigation.”

As, he could have added, is fast bowling.

Osman Samiuddin is a sports writer at The National and author of The Unquiet Ones – A History of Pakistan Cricket.