An anthology of cricket writing compiled by Michael Roberts, an anthropologist based at the University of Adelaide. Most of the pieces are Roberts' own articles on the game, gathered here alongside reprinted work by other cricket writers — Peter Roebuck, Mark Nicholas, Harsha Bhogle, Mike Coward, Tony Cozier and Sambit Bal among them. The collection is illustrated throughout with photographs.
The largest group of essays concerns Muttiah Muralitharan: his bowling action, the no-balling of it, and the long argument over the law on throwing. Roberts returns to the subject repeatedly across the book, and the surrounding dispute — technical, legal and public — forms the spine of the volume.
Beyond that, the essays range across the uglier and more political edges of the sport as it was played and watched in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Subjects include abuse by players and by crowds, death threats, bomb blasts, match fixing, the effect of the tsunami, arguments over team selection, and the politics of world cricket and the bodies that govern it. The pieces were written close to the events they describe, and read as contemporary commentary rather than retrospective history.
Roberts came to cricket writing from an academic career in Sri Lankan history and anthropology; his other books include Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period and Confrontations in Sri Lanka. That background shapes the approach taken here, which treats cricket as a subject with social and political weight rather than purely as sport, and keeps the Sri Lankan game in view alongside the international one.
The book will suit readers following Sri Lankan cricket through the period in which the national side became a settled force in the international game, and anyone with an interest in the Muralitharan controversy as it was argued at the time. It also serves readers interested in how cricket is written about — the inclusion of pieces by journalists and commentators from Australia, the Caribbean, India and England places Roberts' own essays beside other voices on shared subjects.
Collected cricket writing of this kind, focused on Sri Lanka and published for a Sri Lankan and international readership, remains uncommon, and the volume is of interest to collectors of the country's sporting literature.
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