Rating: 4/5
Review:
Very enjoyable - eventually
I eventually enjoyed this book very much. I have a lot of respect for Simon Hughes's knowledge of the game and have enjoyed his previous books. He can write very well, and when he does he is interesting, insightful and amusing - as he is pretty consistently in the latter two thirds of this book
The problem came for me in the first hundred or so pages which are liberally sprinkled (in fact I would say seriously infested) with silliness which isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is. Here's a random sample of an interesting little nugget, ruined for me by the subsequent "joke" complete with exclamation mark: "C. B. Fry also developed a fascination with the Nazis and once spent an hour chatting to Hitler, trying, and failing, to persuade him to form a cricket team. He spent so long explaining the lbw law it drove Germany into invading Poland. The Second World War was all C. B. Fry's fault!" There's a limit to how much of this I can take, but there was enough good stuff to keep me going - shortly after this, for example, there are several really fine, insightful and flippancy-free paragraphs on Frank Woolley, his possible similarity to David Gower and what it was like bowling to Gower.
Fortunately, the tom-foolery peters out as Hughes begins to talk about things he really knows and cares about (from about the 1920s onward) and the final 200 pages or so are full of insight, analysis and really interesting and amusing anecdotes. His accounts of the Bodyline and D'Oliviera affairs are simply excellent, for example, and he draws brilliant portraits of some of the greats of the game.
Overall, a very good book and well worth reading for anyone interested in cricket - just be prepared to negotiate a wayward opening spell.
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