NINETY-NINE per cent of this book is a shrewdly insightful memoir of watching test cricket across six decades — and there is much material on which to draw: in reporting on 500 England tests, Berry has watched more test cricket than anyone else alive.
So, in this book, you will find telling personal anecdotes about cricketers from eras stretching from Hutton and Boycott through to Strauss and Stokes: his range is staggering, and his insights into cricket are incisive. For example, he argues that, while the introduction of helmets for batters was initiated by the need for protection against fast bowling, it actually revolutionised the possibilities of batting against spin: the slog sweep one would have avoided playing, fearing a top edge into one’s face, was now a safe option against a spinner.
The meanderings about journalistic life itself are rather self-indulgent, but the observations about cricket are brilliant, and strewn across the pages like confetti. This would make a great Christmas gift for your cricket-loving cousin.
Yet then there is the one per cent. Across two pages, Berry lays out a barely veiled accusation that the Indian team threw the Mumbai Test against England in 2006 as part of a betting scam. This match is widely regarded as one of English cricket’s greatest ever away victories, and was achieved against an Indian side including Tendulkar, Dravid, Kumble, Sehwag, Dhoni, and Harbhajan.
If Berry is correct, then it is the biggest scandal in cricket’s history, bar none; if he is wrong, it is an ugly smear on the reputations of some of the greatest cricketers who have ever lived. To toss out this allegation in such an underhand manner is outrageous; either he should make it stand up — and he had 20 years as a cricket journalist in which to find the evidence — or he should never have published it. He cannot have it both ways.
The Revd Robert Stanier is Vicar of St Andrew and St Mark, Surbiton, in the diocese of Southwark. He is captain of the Southwark clergy cricket team.
500 Declared: The joys of covering 500 cricket tests
Scyld Berry
Bloomsbury £22
(978-1-3994-2586-5)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80