Why non-fiction books need their indexes

I'm coming across increasing numbers of new non-fiction books that lack an index. No doubt it's done to save costs, but I wonder if it's a false economy.

Not only is a book without an index less satisfactory after you've bought it, but that lack makes you less likely to buy it in the first place.

I can't be the only person who, faced with a promising new title in a bookshop, turns to the index and looks up a couple of relevant topics I know something about. What the books says about them gives me an idea of the author's thoroughness, judgement and originality.

Without an index it's much harder to gain this insight, which makes an impulse purchase less likely.

Besides, the absence of an index means there are none of the juxtaposed entries I so enjoy.

The other day I turned up a Liberal Democrat Voice post from 2010 in which a number of bloggers made their choice of Christmas books.

My choice was Electric Eden by Rob Young, which is a history of the folk rock genre. I ended by saying:

The book has a wonderfully complete discography to guide your own exploration of folk and folk rock, and the most engrossing index I have ever come across. Richard Jefferies stands next to Jefferson Starship. Traffic next to Thomas Traherne. Steve Winwood next to Gerrard Winstanley, It reads like notes towards my own vision of Britain.

But the real master of unlikely couplings in indexes is Mike Brearley. In included a collection of finest work in one of my JCPCP columns:

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil;
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris.

Evgeny Lebedev and Ian Botham have lowest Lords attendance, records show

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After making our Headline of the Day Award to the Guardian, the judges added a rider saying the obvious thing to do is to hand Botham's peerage to Mike Brearley.

The Joy of Six 1322

"Like in all families, there will be differences and even outright conflicts; still, its members feel the bonds of their family resemblance, orienting their ideas and inclinations, both domestically and on the world stage, to a shared ideological purpose." Victor Shammas on the growing club of far-right, hardline nationalist and fascist political leaders that is working hard to transform the world.

"Any assessment of the Reform-Tory battle leads inexorably to the conclusion that Badenoch has not only failed to alleviate her party’s existential predicament - she has deepened it. The Conservative Party’s polling since the July general election tracks on aggregate graphs as a bell curve. The party gained at Labour’s expense during its protracted leadership contest. It peaked as Badenoch assumed the mantle of leader. It has declined since." Josh Self foresees panic in Conservative ranks.

Ana Isabel Nunes writes in praise of legislative theatre: "A form of community-based theatre that gives participants an opportunity to actively explore, analyse and transform their lives through drama and roleplay."

"English cricket has always been a brutal thing, cruel even to its elite players. Mike Brearley’s remark that the Bazball attitude is a reaction to depression is still the most interesting thing anyone has said about it. ... Bazball seems basically to be about being in a group and feeling good. It’s deeply relatable. Don’t you want some of that too?" Barney Ronay on Bazball as a death cult.

Taylor Parkes enjoys The Professionals: "What The Sweeney is to worn-out mid-1970s Britain (tin ashtrays, floral headscarves, bent-faced men in grey slacks and platform shoes kicking each other in the bollocks), so The Professionals is to the very late 70s and very early 80s: huge microwaves, Harrington jackets, Eddie Kidd in a neon nightclub drinking Harp from a glass with a handle."

A London Inheritance visits North Woolwich: "A station, pier, pleasure gardens and causeway."

Mike Brearley: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

A piece of unashamed hero worship from the JCPCP. You may recognise some of this from posts on this blog, but then I have always regarded one function of a blog as being acting as a writer's notebook.

Such was Mike Brearley standing in 1981, his last summer as captain of the England cricket team, that the writer of a letter to the Guardian claimed to have seen him set the field and then "look up at the sun and indicate that it should move a little squarer".

For me, it was a wonder to have a representative of liberal North London occupying the most prestigious position in what can be a very Tory game. It was as though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn were leading England out.

Of his 31 tests as England captain, Brearley won 18 and lost only 4; and in that summer of 1981, he resumed command when England were a test down to Australia. Under his leadership, the team reeled off three consecutive wins, with a previously despondent Ian Botham playing like a cricketing Superman.

His path to the England captaincy, despite his public school and Cambridge background, was not a conventional one. He made enough runs for the university and Middlesex to be picked for the 1964/5 England tour of South Africa at the age of 22, but after that – as a postgraduate student and then a lecturer – he played for Middlesex only in the university vacations, like at old-fashioned amateur.

Brearley showed his mettle in 1968 when the England selectors left the mixed-race Basil D’Oliveira out of their party to tour Apartheid South Africa to avoid a political row. He insisted on seconding the motion condemning the selectors at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which was then the game’s effective governing body.

Soon afterwards, he became a lecture in philosophy at Newcastle University, in thrall to the later Wittgenstein like most young academic philosophers of his generation. I spent most of Brearley’s reign as England captain studying the subject at York, and we discovered that he had unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship there.

“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re slightly disappointed in me,” said the man who had got the job instead. We weren’t, but even liberals are allowed to have heroes.

******

By the time Brearley retired from cricket in 1982 he was already training as a psychoanalyst, and he was later to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Fans and journalists were interested in how his psychoanalytic studies had informed his captaincy – the Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously said that Brearley had “a degree in people” – but Brearley himself has emphasised that there was an effect in the opposite direction.

In his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, he writes:

Playing cricket, and captaining, taught me a lot about what makes players tick, both those on the same side and opponents, and it stimulated my interest in what others and I myself feel, how we respond to pressure, how we impinge on each other, and so on. 

There are of course two main features of the job of captaincy – one to do with tactics and strategy, the other to do with human relations. the latter calls for personal qualities of empathy, truthfulness and courage.

But not everyone was convinced. Brearley recalls one patient asking him: “How can a little boy like you, playing latency games with other little boys, have anything to offer a mature woman like me?”

Why an educated man should spend his time playing games is a question that clearly occupied Brearley even before he turned to psychoanalysis as a profession. His first cricket book The Ashes Regained, an account of his first series as England captain in 1977 written with the journalist Dudley Doust, includes a chapter on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element of Culture. 

This may have nonplussed readers more interested in how Brearley persuaded Derek Underwood to bowl over the wicket at Greg Chappell in the second innings at Old Trafford.

In Turning Over the Pebbles, Brearley discusses the writings of Wilfred Bion and his belief that a game must be played purely for its own sake. Bion wrote in his memoirs:

Games were in themselves enjoyable. I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies – such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and keeping a fit body the for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind.

 For Bion, unlike Brearley, even being captain detracted from the game.

******

One of the great things about Mike Brearley’s books are the indexes. His willingness to discuss psychoanalysis, philosophy and high culture alongside cricket produces some striking juxtapositions: 

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris;

******

‘The best leaders are great teachers,’ says an article I’ve turned up in the Harvard Business Review, and there was always something of the teacher about Brearley. A photograph that shows him, perched on a windowsill, answering questions at a press conference as England captain could easily be of a friendly young academic leading a seminar.

As captain of Middlesex, he challenged the dressing-room ethos that young players should be seen and not heard. If the county was fielding and the game was in danger of drifting, he would start asking his players, the younger ones included, what they thought he should do.

Some youngsters welcomed this more than others, and I’ve recently heard two of them talk about Brearley’s approach. Simon Hughes, now a cricket journalist, had thought “Why’s the England captain asking me what we should do?” – he rather sounded as though he still thinks that – and felt vindicated when the bowling change he suggested failed to bring a wicket.

By contrast, Mike Gatting, who was a teenager when he made his Middlesex debut, remembered being flustered the first time Brearley turned to him – “But I made sure I had something sensible to say the next time he asked me.” Gatting went on to captain England himself.

Fred Titmus goes to the opera

In his latest book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, Mike Brearley writes of being an intellectual among professional sportsmen and turns it into a reflection on the accident of our birth:

Similar cynicism came my way when I was doing philosophy in my early days playing cricket for Middlesex Fred Titmus, the senior player (whose first game for Middlesex in 1949 coincided with the first of my father's two games, so that after Fred played in my last game at Lords In 1982 he was able to say he 'saw the father in and the son out'), would prod me with questions like: "This philosophy that we're all paying for, what's it all about?" He was being sarcastic, goading, but he was genuinely curious. 

I took his curiosity seriously, and tried to give some sort of answer. In other lives, with different backgrounds, Fred might have been doing philosophy and I might have been born and brought up in King's Cross and had left school at fourteen, and learned cricket, football and boxing at a local boys' club. (I once had a spare ticket for Benjamin Britain's Peter Grimes, and asked him if he'd like to go. We sat in the gods, and Fred was taken with it.)

Brearley talked to the Australian cricket journalist Gideon Haigh about this book and his life for the podcast Cricket, Et Cetera. It's well worth a listen.

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"I was 20 the first time I was prescribed antidepressants. I had gone to the doctors during January in rainy, miserable Manchester complaining of flu. Somehow, I came out of the appointment having been diagnosed with depression and prescribed a course of SSRIs. But in fact I didn’t have a mood disorder, and I didn’t need to go on medication." Lucy Kenningham on why almost one in four adults are being prescribed antidepressants.

Simon Nixon asks how long it will be before Britons wake up to the national disaster that is unfolding in the stock market. "Around the world, stock market indices are being drive to new highs by what the Financial Times recently described as a global investor “risk reset” reflecting growing confidence in the global recovery. ... The exception is Britain, where the FTSE 100 is up just 2.4 per cent."

"Britain is home to hundreds of apple varieties, at least 30 in Sussex alone. Yet even in peak apple season, you are more likely to find apples imported from Europe, New Zealand and South Africa in your local supermarket." Ali Ghanimi looks for ways be can do better.

Oliver Keens says technological change means children are losing their independent access to music.

Adam Scovell watches Hidden City, Stephen Poliakoff's directorial debut: "As a thriller shot through with an interest in the forgotten parts of the capital, in many ways Hidden City taps into the unfolding trends of the period for psychogeography – the wandering fascination with urban environments first defined by Guy Debord."

"Only once, on the eve of the Old Trafford Ashes Test in 1977, did Brearley successfully twist Underwood’s arm by showing him hand-drawn diagrams of field placings that the England skipper insisted would be in play should he consider changing his angle of attack. By game time, after some convincing, Deadly was on board. He took 6-66, the old devil." Phil Walker pays his tribute to Derek Underwood.

Tony Greig: England's greatest allrounder of my lifetime?

Who's been England's greatest allrounder in the years I have been following test cricket?

They say a true allrounder has a batting average higher than his bowling average. So here are the four obvious candidates ranked with that in mind. The second column is batting average, the third is bowling average and the fourth is the former minus the latter.

Tony Greig           40.43    32.20   +8.23

Ian Botham          33.54    28.40   +5.14

Ben Stokes          35.48    31.99   +3.49

Andrew Flintoff     31.77    32.78   -1.01

I'm not that surprised by this outcome, because we seem to have forgotten just how good Greig was. As the video above shows, he was afraid of no one and could take the attack to the very best bowlers, yet he also once spent seven hours in India scoring a century that set up a test win.

Greig could swing the ball and, though his pace wasn't express, his height meant he could get awkward bounce. He could also bowl off spin, once taking 13 wickets to win a test and draw a series in the West Indies.

He was a fine fielder anywhere and formed part of what I think is the best England slip cordon I've seen - Brearley, Greig, Hendrick - in the 1977 Ashes series.

And he was an inspirational captain - I've heard Mike Brearley say that he made you want to play well for him.

I saw the first day of England last game before Greig took over the captaincy from Mike Denness. This was the Edgbaston test of 1975, which was Graham Gooch's first. My memory is that Gooch spent all day at long leg and no one spoke to him.

Contrast that with the video of Phil Edmonds's debut later in the same series that I posted recently. Encouraging and celebrating, Greig is everywhere.

England's greatest allrounder of my lifetime? Quite possibly.

Turning Over the Pebbles: Another Mike Brearley index

They don't just have the Hallaton Helmet in Harborough Museum. Among many other things, there's a nice little exhibition about Ladybird Books and the world of work.

And in the library I found a copy of Turning Over the Pebbles, Mike Brearley's latest book, which I need to read for a thing.

A Mike Brearley book, of course, means another post here about its index. Because Brearley's habit of discussing his careers as a philosophy lecturer and psychoanalyst alongside his cricket career leads to some striking juxtapositions in the index.

There's less cricket in Turning Over the Pebbles than in previous books, but its index still still has its moments...

• Bede, Venerable
  Bedser, Eric
  
  
• counter-transference
  Cowdrey, Colin
  
  
• Fletcher, Keith
  free association
  
  
• Hendrick, Mike
  Heraclitus
  
  
• Hume, David
  Hutton, Len
  
  
• Locke, John
  Long, Arnold
  
  
• pleasing others
  Pocock. Pat
  
  
• Ramsey, Frank
  Randall, Derek
  
  
• Snow, C.P.
  Snow, John
  
  
• Trueman, Fred
  Trump, Donald
  

Podcasts: The Optimists of Nine Elms and Mike Brearley

ITV used to broadcast Clapperboard, a film magazine programme aimed at children and introduced by Chris Kelly. As I remember it, it was better than most film programmes for adults.

One item I remember in particular is a report from the set of the 1973 Peter Sellers film The Optimists of Nine Elms that featured him playing the ukulele, though I don't think the clip they showed is the the one above.

My reason for writing about the film tonight is that I've come across a really good podcast about it. It's an episode of Goon Pod, a podcast devoted to the Goon Show and the solo careers of the four original goons.

The blurb for it says:

Between 1970 and 1975 Peter Sellers made films which mostly fell flat commercially, and some of which didn't even get released, but there was the odd little gem and The Optimists of Nine Elms, directed by Anthony Simmons and based on his novel, is perhaps one of Sellers' most personal films. 

The task of embodying Sam, a washed-up old music hall entertainer, prompted Sellers to channel both his father and his great hero Dan Leno and look back to his youth, trailing around theatre after theatre with his parents, soaking up the patter and the hoary old routines, the songs and the stagecraft. 

There is also a rawness to the film, as in the scene above where the actors perform in front of a real throng of Fulham supporters.

******

As you have probably gathered by now, I'm a Mike Brearley fanboy. He spent the summer doing the rounds of podcasts talking about his new book Turning Over Pebbles, and the best interview I have heard from that tour is the one with Gideon Haigh on Cricket, Et Cetera.

Mike Brearley comes up with another fine index

We know that Mike Brearley wider intellectual interests give rise to the best indexes going - see his On Cricket and On Form. I bought another Brearley book, Spirit of Cricket, today and am not disappointed by the pairs of names its index contains:

Archer, Jofra
Aristides the Just

Bedi, Bishan
Beethoven, Ludwig van

Gaskell, Elizabeth
Gatting, Mike

Jardine, Douglas
Jesus Christ

McCullum, Brendon
Machiavelli, Niccolò

Muralitharan, Muttiah
Murdoch, Iris

Titmus, Fred
Torah

Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Woakes, Chris

Mike Brearley on Tony Greig, cricket and psychoanalysis

Mike Brearley is the only England cricket captain to become president of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

While he, a son of liberal North London, led England in the late Seventies and again in the famous Ashes series of 1981, it was though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn had been put in charge.

For a while in the Sixties he was a philosophy lecturer and just played cricket in the university vacations like an old-fashioned amateur. He lectured at Newcastle, and while I was doing my philosophy degree at York we found out that he had also applied for a post there too.

I recall the late Roger Woolhouse, who had got the job instead and was liked by everybody, saying he couldn't escape the feeling that we were slightly disappointed in him.

The whole of this Royal Society of Medicine video, where Brearley talks to Simon Wessely, is worth listening to, but I have picked out the section where he talks about Tony Greig.

This is because Brearley, as ever, is enlightening on his subject, and also because Greig's achievements as a captain and allrounder have been forgotten. His test figures bear comparison with Botham, Flintoff or Stokes.

Martin Amis is no Mike Brearley

I got interested in Martin Amis's collection The Rub of Time when I saw it had an index. With his love of both high and low culture, Amis had the potential to produce indexes every bit as good as those you find in Mike Brearley's books.

It's the juxtapositions I look for in an index: the unlikely couples who find themselves paired in consecutive entries.

Sadly, Mart let me down.

Yes, he showed promise, and I enjoyed:

Camilla (Parker Bowles), Duchess of Cornwall
Camus, Albert

Keane, Roy
Keats, John

Sade, Marquis de
Sampras, Pete

but there weren't many more. Maybe tennis just isn't as literary game as cricket?

Anyway, hurry off and enjoy the indexes of Brearley's books On Cricket and On Form.

When Mike Brearley was about the best young batsman in England

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History has decided that Mike Brearley was a great captain, particularly because of his effect on the 1981 Ashes series, but never a test batsman.

But it did not always look that way at the time. As I once blogged, Brearley was selected for an England touring party as early as 1964, when he was aged only 22. You can see him in the photograph above in the middle of the back row, next to a bespectacled Geoffrey Boycott. The two of them were to play their last test together in 1981,

Brearley was not picked for any on the tests in South Africa that winter and was soon playing only in the university vacations, like an old-fashioned amateur, because he was lecturing in philosophy at Newcastle.

While I was studying philosophy at York, we found out that he had also applied unsuccessfully for a lectureship there. The late Roger Woolhouse, who had got the job instead, claimed he couldn't help sensing our slight disappointment in him.

Mike Brearley returned to playing full time as Middlesex captain and was still a good enough batsman to be picked for England under Tony Greig in 1976. He was one of the experienced heads favoured by Greig in what he saw fit to call his campaign to make the West Indies "grovel".

Brearley did well enough to be selected as vice-captain for the 1976/7 tour of India that winter. So when Greig was sacked for his role in the establishment of World Series Cricket, he was the natural choice a captain for the 1977 home Ashes series, which England won with surprising ease.

The rest, particularly his second coming in 1981, was history.

Mike Brearley turns in another great index

One of the charity shops had a copy of Mike Brearley's book On Form, so I have another good index to celebrate.

As I said when looking at an earlier index of his, Brearley's willingness to bring wider intellectual interests into his cricket writing leads to some wonderful juxtapositions.

And On Form does not disappoint, its index offering:

Bowlby, John
Boycott, Geoff

Burke, Edmund
Burns, Neil

Carter, Angela
Cartwright, Tom

Gower, David
Gramsci, Antonio

Hutton, Richard
Huxley, Aldous

Lillee, Dennis
Lincoln, Abraham

Thomson, Jeff
Thorndike, Sybil

Titmus, Fred
Tolstoy, Leo

Mike Hendrick (1948-2021)

The death of Mike Hendrick today will not have come as a surprise to anyone who read Mike Atherton's unexpectedly moving article on the England team that won back the Ashes in 1981.

Atherton told us that Hendrick had been suffering from liver and bowel cancer for a long time and, in his own words, was "in the departure lounge, but the flight has not left yet".

Hendrick was a fine seam bowler with career figures to prove it. In tests he took 87 wickets at 25.83 and in first-class cricket 770 wickets at 20.50.

One oddity of his test record is that no bowler has got so many wickets without taking five in an innings.

There were those who said this confirmed the impression that Hendrick was a uniquely unlucky bowler who beat the bat over and over again without finding the edge. Others said that if only he had bowled a little fuller and a little straighter he would have taken even more wickets.

Hendrick was playing when I saw my first day of test cricket - the fourth and final day of the 1974 Edgbaston test against India. England took eight wickets to win by an innings and Hendrick got three of them.

He was also part of the most exciting day's play I have ever seen live - England's victory over Pakistan in the 1979 World Cup. You can see the four wickets he took in the video above.

And below you can see a long interview with Hendrick about his career that he recorded only last month.

Later. I should add that Mike Hendrick was a superb slip fielder. He would scoop up any chance that came near him with his big, seam bowler's hands and make difficult catches look easy.

I remember Mike Brearley, Tony Greig and Hendrick from the 1977 Ashes as the finest England slip cordon I have seen. But Graham Roope, who was generally regarded as the best slip catcher in the country in those days, played in the last two tests of that series, so there must have been changes to accommodate him.

Test Match Special wants every boy to show house spirit

Marking Test Match Special's 50th birthday back in 2007 I said:

Though Brian Johnston died a national treasure and did seem in an exceptionally happy mood in his last few summers, he could be Blimpish and sometimes made the commentary box sound like the staff room of an undistinguished private school.

Today there is a keen new master on the staff. Simon Mann has no time for slackers. Everyone must show the right spirit. Those who don't must be made an example of.

Back in the 1970s it was Fred Trueman who fulfilled this role and it was the number of no balls that shocked him. No professional should bowl them, we were told. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Various ways of punishing bowlers who sinned were proposed. As I recall, the most popular was making the penalty ten runs rather than one.

This would have damaged the game, because of the risk that young tearaway fast bowlers would be turned into medium pacers to make sure they didn't give away runs.

And were no balls so terrible? We accept that an Olympic long jumper will sometimes overstep the board. Why is it so terrible for a fast bowler to overstep the crease?

The best fast bowling I have ever seen from an Englishman, Bob Willis's 8 for 43 at Headingley in 1981, happened after his captain Mike Brearley told him not to worry about no balls and to concentrate on bowling fast.

These days it is slow over rates that outrage the Test Match Special team. Again penalty runs are advocated and there is talk of making sides field one short. 

Already captains can be suspended, which led to what Vic Marks called "confirmation that the world is indeed prey to nitpicking jobsworths capable only of reading the manual rather than delivering common sense"as Jason Holder was banned for the third and final test last winter after leading the West Indies to an unassailable two-nil lead over England.

As if anyone in the Caribbean cared about the over rate after that.

And during the second test against Pakistan a few days ago Test Match Special went into meltdown because time was lost to rain and bad light.

This is England. It happens from time to time. You can ask the umpires to be a bit more sceptical about what constitutes dangerous conditions, but there is no need to make a nonsense of the game by changing to a different ball if it gets dark.

What these cures from the TMS team have in common is that they would be harmful to cricket than the original disease.

That team should spend a bit less time giving their opinions and a bit more describing the cricket that is taking place in front of them.

But I get the impression that some of them would be happier watching schools cricket where everyone shows house spirit.

Mike Brearley on the demon bowler Geoff Boycott

Geoff Boycott bowling at the death in a world cup match? It really did happen.

I once blogged my memories of the occasion - I was there - and recently posted a video of it.

Here's how Mike Brearley remembers the day:

It was in the final group match that Geoff Boycott’s bowling became invaluable. We had always planned that he would bowl – it was not an off-the-cuff gamble, and he had already taken two wickets against Australia. But against Pakistan he took the decisive last two just as they looked capable of winning. In the past, Geoffrey has been reluctant to bowl due to his back injury and his desire to apply himself to batting. But in this competition he visibly enjoyed it and was more useful than I could have ever hoped.

I once read that Brearley had a theory that batsman hated the idea of getting out to Boycott so much it made them play him with exaggerated care and slowed the scoring rate.

England vs Pakistan: The cricket world cup 40 years ago

Ten years ago I wrote about my memories of watching England's Headingley victory over Pakistan in the 1979 cricket world cup:

It was a typically seam-friendly Headingley wicket and England, batting first, made only 165 - the highest scorer was Graham Gooch with 33. I remember Sikander Bakht bowling very well for Pakistan. 

What followed was a display of the tactical genius of the England captain Mike Brearley. He had four frontline seamers and he bowled them out to take wickets. Mike Hendrick's figures were particularly good: 12-6-15-4. 

The game ended with Phil Edmonds and Geoff Boycott bowling at the Pakistani tale and England squeaked home, bowling them out for 151. 

A lesser captain - indeed almost any other captain - would have fitted Edmonds' overs in somewhere in the middle of the innings, taken the pressure off the Pakistani batsmen and lost the game.

I have found the highlights of that day on YouTube. It shows a different style of cricket to the one we shall see at Lord's later today: one much closer to the test game. But that may be in part a function of the superiority of ball over bat that day.

The video does show that my memories were more or less correct. Geoff Boycott did bowl at the death while wearing his cap.

Sadly though, my suggestion that he had it "turned back to front like Benny Hill's Fred Scuttle" turns out not to be correct.

Mike Brearley On Cricket and the joy of a good index

I love a good index, and Mike Brearley's willingness to bring his wider intellectual interests into his cricket writing gave me high hopes for his new collection On Cricket.

And I was not disappointed. Because it features such juxtapositions as:

Barrington, Ken
Bartók, Béla

Fowler, Graeme
Freud, Sigmund

Hogg, Quintin
Hogg, Rodney

idée fixe
Illingworth, Ray

Pietersen, Kevin
Pinter, Harold

Sutherland, Joan
Swann, Graeme

Verity, Hedley
Virgil, The Aeneid

Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Woakes, Chris

If you like good indexes too, I can also recommend Electric Eden.

Mike Brearley's All-Time XI

This blog's hero picks his strongest team from the cricketers he played with or against.

I'm pleased to see a place for Abdul Qadir, the great Pakistani leg-spinner who had already done much to revive an apparently lost art before Shane Warne came along.