And there's a little person in a bunker under a pitch who records the ambient audio of matches on reel-to-reel. It's full of lists, discussions of statistics and style, and features endless references to Sri Lanka's 1996 World Cup victory. Tailing a course of murky sporting oblivion, it has explanations and diagrams of cricketing points (wicket, follow-on, Duckworth Lewis), some factual and some discursive. Chinaman amalgamates their obscure fates and a swathe of other half-true stories from Sri Lankan cricket into the story of a left-arm unorthodox and his resolute biographer.

Of the latter, Sridharan Jeganathan, Roshan Guneratne, and Anura Ranasinghe, fringe Sri Lankan spinners from the 1980s who all died young and forlorn, are likely unfamiliar. From recent figures such as Rory Hamilton-Brown, and others doleful, like Richard 'Danny Germs' Austin, to those of more parochial standing. Think to those cricketers you have known and willed on who never followed through at the elite level. It's the story of potentially the greatest cricketer who ever lived proving not to be.

A bright place to start when discussing cricket fiction is the most convivial of these, Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew.Ĭhinaman is a novel of talent not realised. There has been a recent spate of highly literate, fun, international and engaging novels concentrated upon the sport. Upstanding here is the nostalgic village-cricket schmaltz of Hugh de Selincourt's The Cricket Match.Ĭricket fiction is not only the stuff of odd recesses and antique periods, though. Evergreen in the game, too, is celebrating an England of green fields surely more emerald than ever was the case in life. Anthologies of cricket's gilded writings tend toward literary pedigree, such as All-Muggleton's jolly trouncing of Dingley Dell in Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers. Arthur Conan Doyle's Spedegue's Dropper has a schoolteacher bowling 50 feet upward for the ball to fall vertically onto the stumps. 'How different would English summers be without slip fielders?' Jennie Walker's 24 for 3 contemplates. Screeds of it, in fact, with a curious abundance of thrillers and murder mysteries stretching from Dorothy Sayers' Oxford Blue amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey to Ted Dexter's Testkill.Īs is often the case with artistry, novelists tackle cricket in a manner one might not otherwise think up. There is more cricket fiction than is probably thought to exist.

The legend of pradeep mathew