{"id":17385,"date":"2026-11-03T13:12:06","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/?p=17385"},"modified":"2026-11-03T13:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:12:10","slug":"is-this-the-weirdest-most-beautiful-cricket-book-ever-written","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infinitysport.asia\/news\/is-this-the-weirdest-most-beautiful-cricket-book-ever-written\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this the weirdest, most beautiful cricket book ever\u00a0written?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Cricketers
Photo: Chloe Knott, Danehouse\/Getty Images<\/code><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Christian Ryan can write. He has a gift and a passion. His gift is the way he brings a page to breathing life with his words \u2013 and his passion? Cricket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Review: Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun \u2013 Christian Ryan (Allen & Unwin)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Certainly it is cricket, but cricket is never only cricket. Perhaps football is sometimes just football. Cricket, however, always makes more room for life than is reasonable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its pace, at least at test cricket level, is openly unathletic, counted out in sessions between hearty meals and nearly half the players in a match aren\u2019t even on the field for most of the game. They watch the game they\u2019re playing in or find ways to distract themselves while the game goes on. Not surprising that the game leaves so much room for more than sport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And cricket is played at so many levels, in so many bits and pieces of unoccupied space around cities, in country towns, down lanes, on beaches, and in paddocks. It cascades through any society that takes it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The slow and the fast, the pedantic and the powerful, the inspirational and the technical, the generalist and the specialist, the stylist and the statistician, all find their grooves in the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cricket Ryan has a passion for has expansive room for the magnificent failure, the obscure genius, the lost soul and the kinks of fate that can end in unspent potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His earlier biography of former Australian Test captain Kim Hughes, voted the best cricketing book ever in Wisden Cricket Monthly, is a compelling account of failure after failure while being an intrigued and affectionate portrait of one of Australia\u2019s most brilliant, flawed cricketers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading Ryan\u2019s book on Hughes, it is almost as if he would have had to invent him if he didn\u2019t exist. Ryan seems to relish writing about how close the clumsy can be to the elegant, the brainless to the brilliant \u2013 and how cricket is a near-perfect vehicle for the most human of stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In his new book, Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun, Ryan risks all. It might be the most unreadable cricket book ever written, or it might be the cricket book that cricket has always needed if it is to be comprehended for its mystically poetic power: its embrace of all the ways in which we can fail at life but win at being alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book weaves idiosyncratically through the stories of at least 11 men and women whose lives were defined, if only briefly, by cricket. It begins with John Watkins, an Australian spinner who never made it beyond one Test match in the early 1970s. Then it moves to the gifted Trinidadian Shervan Pragg, killed in a road accident at 20. Woven into the accounts of lives is John Maley, the groundsman who prepared Kerry Packer\u2019s \u201cdrop-in\u201d pitches for the rebel World Series Cricket competition matches, played from 1977-1979. (Each pitch was prepared off-site in a greenhouse and then craned in on a concrete bed to the hollowed-out centre of the assigned oval.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no actual order of presentation (despite the list shown as a table of contents), for conversations are interrupted and then resumed hundreds of pages later. Or suddenly we are back with Shervan, John or \u201cWatk\u201d (Watkins) on a whim. As a reader you either go with the flow, or you must pay the kind of obsessively detailed and loosely rhythmic attention Ryan is paying to his movement through these lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others featuring in the book are Ray Robinson, an Australian batter who played in only one Test match, in 1936, in a team captained by Don Bradman; Padmakar Shivalkar, a slow left arm bowler of genius with flight who took more than 500 wickets for Mumbai between 1961 and 1988 but was never selected for a Test match; Ken Vowles, a batter who impressed in Australian national youth sides in the late 1980s but whose career never took off; Frank Parr, the mid-20th century English cricketer who preferred the life of a jazz trombonist; the Pakistani all-rounder Wasim Raja; Jack Collins, an Australian whose short career as a Test umpire was terminated in 1975 when West Indies captain Clive Lloyd complained about some of his decisions; and two women, the Trinidadian batter, Jane Joseph, whose photo is perhaps the most powerful image in the book, and Donna Carmino, another Trinidadian whose 30-minute international batting career was incredibly brief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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