Gideon Haigh's Inside Out
Not only is Gideon a great Aussie bloke but he is a highly talented and skilled writer whose limits know no bounds! Well, that’s not entirely true. If he could transfer his literary skills onto the cricket field he would surely be playing alongside Punter, Pup and Mitch but they don’t and he doesn’t! This is probably a good thing!
Inside Out is his latest offering; the usual sharp wit is there as is the effortless writing that we have come to know and love in recent times. Haigh is up there with Cardus and is without doubt “the don” of our time as far as authors go. Enough flattery, he gets enough! The articles are taken from a variety of sources that include “The Australian”, Cricinfo and Wisden Cricketer.
The book takes a detailed look at the administration, Bodyline’s 75th anniversary and a whole host of articles on Sir Donald Bradman to name but a few. In the book Gideon claims the best book written on Bradman is by Irving Rosenwater “The book is as superior to all other Bradman biographies as Bradman’s average is to those other batsmen”.
Putting Bradman to one side, Gideon devotes an entire section to commenting on various articles and books that have been published over time including Jack Fingleton’s “Cricket Crisis”. Fingleton’s book, published in 1946, is a retaliatory publication aimed at the bow of Sir Pelham Warner’s 1942 offering “Cricket between the two wars”. Both men give their account of that infamous dressing room incident that centred around the Australian captain Bill Woodfull and Sir Pelham Warner. Of the Australian captain, Fingleton with one hand commended his skipper as a fine fellow and with the other claimed “but Bodyline was a grim and ruthless battle into which a leader of mild gentility came somewhat poorly equipped”!
The modern form of the game is, as you would expect, covered in great detail. His thoughts on the twenty 20 phenomenon and its expansion to India and the highly successful IPL, or should that be renamed for one year only to SAPL?! The conflict between Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan gets a look in with two articles culminating in all that monkey business. Symonds it appears has played his last representative cricket for Australia and will no doubt bring out a biography that Haigh can dissect in the seasons to come.
So that’s it. Another Haigh collection comes to a close and is certainly a longer more fulfilling read than one of Gideon’s innings! Let’s hope we don’t have too long to wait to read what the genius has to say next and given that the 2009 Ashes are just around the corner we won’t have long to wait.
A wonderful collection of insightful articles covering the old fashioned cricket in the days of Ponsford, Bradman and Fingleton and the enigmatic characters of modern cricket.
[...] the Ashes in Australia in 1934 and 1938. (I’m indebted to Gideon Haigh’s excellent book Inside Out for [...]