Hero worship takes many forms. Some love larger than life, as Bonnie Tyler sang, others prefer “honest and modest”, as Peter Roebuck says of Harold Larwood. Some are wowed by raw talent or seduced by beauty and flair. There are the imitators and the obsessives, the autograph hunters and the wannabes, finding heroism or idolatry in the underdog or the lame duck.
They are all in this book. This is an assortment of cricket essays, compiled from The Wisden Cricketer magazine’s ‘My Favourite Cricketer’ series, which has run every month since early 2005. The idea for the feature is sadly not my own but that of my friend and colleague Sambit Bal, the editor of the world’s leading cricket website Cricinfo.com, who kicked off the series in the now defunct Wisden Asia Cricket magazine.
It is a simple concept that offers endless variety. The players selected range from the all-time global icons to the self-effacing, small-town hero. Sometimes these apparently contradictory archetypes merge into one, such as Frank Keating’s Tom Graveney or Gillian Reynolds’ Brian Statham.
The writers are also an assortment: journalists, broadcasters, cricketers, critics, novelists, actors and so on. All they have in common is a love of cricket and an ability to articulate it. There are those who observe from afar; there are childhood obsessions; some have subsequently met their heroes; for a few this has been an adulthood admiration, a rekindling or reassessment of childhood passions.
As much as this book is about hero worship, it is about inspiration. It is about the reasons and the circumstances in which people came to fall in love with cricket. “The first time is always the best,” writes the aforementioned Keating, whose luscious prose has adorned the pages of The Guardian for decades.
One of cricket’s many unique qualities is its ability to reveal personality. The length and pace of the game (even its shortest format) and the individual battles within a team context create an environment in which spectators, either at the ground or on television, can feel uncommonly close to the participants. And of course this proximity creates bonds, whether they be of curiosity, affection, disenchantment or simply a sense of feeling that one knows the players.
A five-day Test can stretch over 30 hours’ playing time if it goes its full distance, which is an awfully long time for 22 individuals to be in the public gaze. And even when a player is not actually on the field, he might be waiting to bat and at many grounds visible to the audience, especially so on television. So every emotion, every personality quirk, every mundane tic or affectation is exposed to the watching public.
It is this apparent accessibility, and indeed vulnerability, of cricketers – even today in the ultra-professional and protective age – that captures our hearts and minds so readily. And so we are drawn in and before we know it we are hooked.
John Stern
Editor, The Wisden Cricketer
www.thewisdencricketer.com