Odds and elevens

The Penguin Book of Cricket Lists by Gulu Ezekiel
(Penguin India, 188pp, Rs 200)

There was a time when cricket was not a round-the-year affair. Fans had time to indulge in compiling quirky lists, dream XIs, and the like. In this day and age, though, it is left to the obsessed to think up lists such as an all-time World Ambidextrous XI (two teams: one of players who bat left-handed and bowl right-handed, and one of players who do it the other way round), or an XI of players who have religious names (Laxman Sivaramakrishnan would easily get lifetime membership if such a club were to be founded).

Writing a book exclusively dedicated to lists, some quirky, some serious, is a tricky path to tread. What is of interest to one fan may fail to tickle another. And even if one has enough material, one ends up with heaps of names, and the write-ups that accompany them become crucial to the book. Especially in one such as The Penguin Book of Cricket Lists, which uses pictures as sparingly as captains have the bowling of, say, Mohammad Kaif.

About half the lists here are of the sort that will make the readers want to come up with some of their own, such as the best XI of players with alliterative first and second names. Then there are lists that are three to five clicks away on any cricket site - the highest totals, individual scores, best bowling performances, and so on. These readily available stats-based lists don't offer the reader anything new, and sort of undermine the other, trivia-based, lists in the book.

Thankfully, not all the lists are XIs, else some interesting trivia would have failed to make the cut. There are lists of umpires who have played Test cricket, players named after famous cricketers, Test cricketers who changed their names, the tallest and shortest cricketers, to name a few.

There's no denying that this book is the product of a mind that keeps thinking cricket long after the games are over. Gulu Ezekiel says in his preface that it was over 35 years in the making. Be that as it may, the standard here is not uniformly high. And, too, better production and editing ("George" and "Giffen" are not alliterative, they merely start with the same letter) would have made for a stronger offering.