"I jump into a sand pit for a living"
On form
Return to the book list for titles beginning with 'o'.
Mike Brearley. London, Little Brown, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4087-0735-7
The book is hard to categorize – cricket anecdotes meet psycho-analysis. In the first chapter, Brearley quotes from the Bible, Zen, Tolstoy, the philosopher David Hume and Shakespeare – that really sets the scene!
He describes form as “an elastic concept, even slippery. It spreads out into creativity and change of heart at one end, while loss of it descends into breakdown at the other”.
For me, the book is at its most interesting when he looks at cricket situations analytically. At one point he describes facing an Indian opening bowler whom he was struggling to play. He called for a quick single: “I was run out, one hour into the match. A dreadful mistake, which arose out of my anxiety and my wish to get to the other end”. He follows this with an account of Mike Gatting facing Malcolm Marshall who had a lethal away swinger. Gatting was determined not to edge one and as a result was LBW twice not playing a shot. Brearley is not critical of Gatting saying that in county cricket Gatting would have played the two balls with the middle of the bat. In the test situation, the occasion got the better of him.
Brearley admits that like Gatting “When I walked onto the big stage of Test cricket I was often too tense, and made mistakes that I would not have made when facing similar bowling in county cricket” adding “I think much of this chapter of accidents reveals a mixture of insecurity, arrogance and naivety”.
Brearley also makes the fascinating admission that he was “more willing to admit to failings in cricket than in other areas of my life”.
Not your average cricket book but full of thought-provoking analysis.