This paen to cricket opens with a scene worthy of Douglas Adams: a scratched-together cricket team on the Ross Shelf, observed by Leopard Seals, with players fighting the attentions of Skuas and penguins—and, as the title says, losing to the last.
It doesn’t hurt that the tale is told by someone who could stack up to Adams, either. I was giggling through page two and three, and stayed for more.
Imagine that you always wanted to play cricket. Badly. But that your first chance came at university. And that chance came, not through an established team, because no-one wants an adult player who’s never taken the field before, so you decide to get a bunch of equally hopeless players together and get beaten around the local pitches by teams of players who (horror!) actually know what they’re doing.
Along the way, you discover a number of things. One is that there’s a fundamental tension between two types of crap player. One crap player will happily play like shit and still work their arse off anyway, because even if your best isn’t good enough, isn’t giving it a go the main thing? Others have a different view; if you aren’t likely to win anyway, do badly; take pride in how crap you are. Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Hell, snatch crushing defeat from the jaws of honourable loss.
The author called his team the Captain Scotts because he has a soft sport for glorious, did-my-best failure. As one might imagine, a certain amount of the book involves the tension between the club members who subscribe to that idea, and those who take pride in being no-hopers (and resent any effort to, well, make one).
The meat of the book, though, is the travel: the club ends up going abroad to India, and, ultimately, arranging to play cricket in all the continents. Most matches are lost, of course, but there are victories, and the doing is the thing. Harry Thompson is a good writer, and his highs (a victory here, bonding with opponents there, a sublime time in Argentina) and lows are wonderfully told; we are with him in wishing to sink into the ground when some of his team members forget, as he puts it, that it is no longer 1932 and Indians are under no obligation to cope with the appalling rudeness of random white people who show up in their country. It is witty, well-written, and more complex than one might expect; descriptions of the countries and the reaction of the players put me in mind of the best bits of P.J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell.
I’m not sure how accessible the descriptions of cricket are to anyone who has a less-than-casual aquaintence with the game.
I cannot, above all, stress how funny parts of the tale are. I was in hysterics reading parts of it. I highly recommend it if you have even the faintest interest in cricket and a love of good writing.
Just one word of warning: the end will tear your heart out.
