16 Best Cricket Books That Survive Knowing the Result

C L R James was a Trinidadian writer, a historian of revolutions, a cricket correspondent and one of the sharpest minds of his century, and he put all of it into one book. Half of it is his own childhood: a boy whose bedroom window looked onto a cricket pitch, a mother who read novels, a school that handed out English manners along with cover drives. The other half is an argument that cricket is an art form and that West Indian cricket was politics played with a bat, building towards his campaign to have Frank Worrell captain the side. It reads like a very clever man talking across a table.

Guha opens with the Parsis who first took on the British in Bombay, moves through the Hindu, Muslim and Parsi teams of the old Quadrangular tournament, and builds the book around Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit bowler good enough that upper caste teammates had to share a field with him and still made him drink his tea outside the pavilion. From there it runs into Gandhi's objection to communal teams, the arrival of a national side, and the long fight over who owns the game. Proper history with footnotes, written by someone who clearly still watches every ball.

In 2004 India toured Pakistan for the first time in fourteen years and Bhattacharya went along, young and mostly unknown. What came back is half cricket writing and half travel writing, and the travel half is better than most travel books about the subcontinent. He eats, argues, gets lost, meets Pakistani fans who fight him for the restaurant bill, and watches a series that eventually went India's way. The cricket description is the finest I have read from an Indian writer. He can make a spell of reverse swing feel like weather changing over a city.

W G Karunasena is a retired cricket journalist with a failing liver and one obsession: proving that a left arm spinner called Pradeep Mathew was the greatest bowler Sri Lanka ever produced, and working out why he was erased from the record. The book is a fake investigation, complete with diagrams, feuds, and a gloriously bad tempered narrator. Under the jokes it is about Sri Lanka during the war years, about a father and son who cannot talk to each other, and about how a country quietly writes people out of its own story.

Astill covered India for The Economist and used cricket as the lens for everything else: liberalisation, a middle class that could suddenly afford tickets, caste inside the club system, the politics that runs the boards, and the gambling economy shadowing every match. He goes to a Mumbai maidan where boys bat on coir mats, to a rural academy, to a franchise auction where players are bought like cattle with better haircuts. The reporting is the strong part. He is neither sentimental about the IPL nor sneering at it, which in 2013 made him almost alone.

Samiuddin runs the story from partition onward: a country inventing a Test team before it had the stadiums, Fazal Mahmood at the Oval in 1954, the Imran Khan decade, the invention of reverse swing, the fixing scandals, and the 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore that pushed international cricket out of the country for years. He is very good on the national mood, a kind of collective delirium that arrives without warning and disappears the same way. Affectionate and unsparing at once, which is the hardest register to hold for four hundred pages.

Jack Iverson was a Melbourne estate agent who taught himself to spin a ball with a bent middle finger, worked the grip out while flicking a table tennis ball around an army camp, and arrived in first class cricket in his thirties with a delivery batsmen could not pick. He played one Ashes summer for Australia, took it apart, and then his career fell in on itself almost at once. Haigh follows him all the way to a sad end and turns it into a study of what happens to a man who is briefly, accidentally, the best in the world at something.

Hans van den Broek is stranded in New York after his wife takes their son back to London. He is lonely in the specific way of a man with money and no plan, and he drifts into weekend cricket with Trinidadians, Pakistanis, Indians and Sri Lankans, then into a friendship with a Trinidadian dreamer who wants to build a real cricket stadium in the city. The prose is slow and lovely, the plot is thin on purpose, and the cricket is the immigrant's game played in a country that does not know it exists.

Brearley captained England, most famously through the 1981 Ashes when he got Ian Botham back to his best, and he went on to become a psychoanalyst, which tells you the sort of book this is. He works through the actual job: setting a field, reading a bowler who has stopped trying, handling a player better than you, deciding when to declare, managing your own doubt in front of ten people who can smell it. Every principle comes attached to a real match situation, so it never floats off into management speak. Corporate India has been quoting this book for decades without crediting it.

Wigmore and his co-author Freddie Wilde explain the cricket most of us actually watch: why the six became a percentage play, how leg spinners turned into the most valuable bowlers alive, what a data analyst does in a franchise dugout, how West Indian players built global freelance careers while their own board fell apart. They talk to coaches and analysts rather than legends, so the book explains decisions instead of retelling matches. It is the closest cricket has come to a Moneyball, and it argues its case better than Moneyball did. It won Wisden's book of the year.

Hawkins wrote about betting markets for a living, noticed that odds sometimes moved in ways matches could not explain, and went looking for the people setting them. The book takes him to bookmakers in India who handle enormous sums on a single game, to anti corruption officers who cannot touch them, and to the uncomfortable question of what a player is worth to someone who wants a specific over to go a specific way. He is careful about what he can prove and honest about what he cannot, which matters in a subject that attracts wild claims.

In Cape Town in 2018 an Australian player was filmed working on the ball with sandpaper, and the fallout removed a captain, a vice captain and a coach inside a week. Lemon covered that tour and wrote fast, but this is not a cash in. He traces the years of sledging, of a team told to play right up to the line, of administrators who wanted the aggression and the sponsorship money at the same time. He is funny, genuinely angry, and very good on how a dressing room talks itself into something stupid.

Trescothick was England's best opening batsman of his generation and he left tours, more than once, without any public explanation that made sense at the time. This book is the explanation: a stress illness that arrived as sleeplessness and panic and made touring impossible, in a decade when nobody in the game had the words for it. He writes about county cricket, about his father driving him to matches, about the 2005 Ashes, and about the particular dread of an airport departure gate. Plain, unshowy writing, and it broke something open in the sport.

Berkmann is a music journalist who plays extremely bad cricket for a team of extremely bad cricketers, and the book is about the madness of doing that every summer of your adult life. There are chapters on the bowler who cannot bowl straight and knows it, the batsman who averages four and blames the light, statistics as a form of self harm, and the deep private joy of a fixture washed out. If you have ever played any organised sport badly with your friends, the recognition is constant and slightly painful.

Gavaskar wrote this early, soon after the West Indies tour that made his name, and he wrote it without a ghost. The tone surprises people who only know him as a broadcaster. He is funny, competitive and rude about people he did not rate, including officials and a couple of teammates. There is the famous story of him being swapped with another baby in a Bombay hospital and spotted by an uncle who remembered a mark on his ear. The cricket is 1970s cricket, no helmets and long sea crossings, and the voice belongs to a young man who has decided he belongs.

Tendulkar's autobiography, written with Boria Majumdar, walks through a career that ran twenty four years: the Shivaji Park childhood, the tour of Pakistan at sixteen, his father's death during the 1999 World Cup, the back injury and the tennis elbow, the 2011 final at the Wankhede. The detail is real and the cricket is accurate. What is missing is the man. Almost every chapter reads as though it passed a legal check and a reputation check before it reached the page, and the one section that made news, about a difficult coach, only proves the rule.