Cricket Fiction Is Atrocious

Bad Idea

Do you remember the last time you went to the fiction section and found a good novel about Cricket? No, me neither, and there's a reason for that. It's virtually impossible to write an interesting, realistic narrative about a fictional game of Cricket. Some have tried, but the results have been spectacularly awful. A very good example of this is a novel written by the great Gary Sobers himself, name 'Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade.' The book is cloying to the point of making you sick. I recommend if you ever come across it, you head in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. Great though he may have been on the Cricket field, Sobers was not the same class with pen in hand.

Though it is hardly his fault; the genre is almost non-existent and for many good reasons. I have put some thought into why Cricket fiction is so appallingly bad, and these are some of the answers I have come up with. Firstly, the audience is uncertain. Sobers' book was aimed for children, which gives it a very inane tone throughout. Children's stories have to have general moralising elements and everyone should get a fair go. If you were to aim it at older readers, you would be hard pressed to keep them interested. You would have to make the Cricket a secondary element to the book, with main plot and character developments occurring, for the most part, away from the game.

Secondly, you face a problem with characters. Every game of cricket requires at least 24 people- two teams of 11 and two umpires- plus everyone else involved. It leaves the author in the difficult position of striking a balance between keeping his description realistic and not overcrowding the story with players. Furthermore, when it comes to the action you don't get the same one or two people doing everything- Cricket is a team game, but players contribute at different times, in different games, and it's all very random. Trying to portray this accurately without being repetitive is another challenge.

Thirdly, there are only so many ways you can describe the game itself. Sure you can have commentaries on Cricinfo that give you endless descriptions of every ball that keep it relatively interesting; however a lot of that is the other things they talk about, rather than the very matter-of-fact descriptions of the game. A novel could not simply go on describing the action of a game forever, it would get tedious. It would require very fine balancing of how much to talk about, how much to leave out. On the flipside, a very general description can be equally boring and vague. So it's not an easy task. 

Finally, the game is stranger than fiction. For anyone who doesn't believe that, could you have even dreamt of an international captain biting into a ball in an ODI, or could you have invented a character as complex yet simple as Chris Martin? There's just no predicting what can happen in the game and that makes it remarkably hard to recreate in a fictional setting. Anything new you make up will seem outlandish, anything old will seem boring. 

So that's a fairly grim outlook for anyone interested in writing some Cricket fiction. On the other hand there is a vast multitude of journalistic, quasi-journalistic and satirical writing about Cricket in the world. Satire seems to be one medium where even fictional Cricket writing can be acceptable. Take for example the play Outside Edge by Richard Harris, of which there was fantastic version made for TV with Paul Eddington and Prunella Scales. This was a humorous play based around a cricket game at the village green. However, the action on the field was coincidental and the plot moved around the characters off the field. Attempts to make it into a Sitcom seem to have been very misguided.

Anyway, my advice to aspiring Cricket writers out there: don't try to make it up, it will sound awful. If you do want to write something, have a dig at real people, it's much more fun!

Q.E.D.