John Gascoigne (ed.)
Over and Out: Cricket Umpires And Their Stories
Penguin, $23pb, 331pp, 0 14 300041 1

Gideon Haigh
The Vincibles: A Suburban Cricket Season
Text, $19.95pb, 217pp, 1 877008 35 4

WHEN YOU BUMP into people who know Gideon Haigh — and that happens a lot in Geelong — they will tell you about his encyclopedic knowledge of cricket, his dedication to detail and his casualness with money. I want to add to this list of his idiosyncrasies a delicious ability to turn the mundane into the magnificent. For this is exactly what The Vincibles is to we weekend warriors — a magnificent vindication of our very existence.

I will try not to descend into hagiography, but right from the title — a clever play on the epithet given Bradman's 1948 side — this book starts out as beautifully as Trumper V. in full cry. Some bits are so cleverly constructed they have to be read twice, even thrice, to be fully appreciated:

We look, accordingly, very rusty, not to say crusty. Big John's first over for the season includes a full toss metres above the batsman's head, and a triple bouncer that zeroes in on point. I wear one in the chest when I get into position to hook, then remember I don't hook. 'Jeez, you're tough,' comments Tommy, my partner. 'No,' I confide, 'just crap.'

This is the reality of being smitten by cricket for all but the select few. At fifty years of age, I simply can't imagine not playing cricket on Saturday, something I have been doing since I was fourteen. Not only would I miss batting and bowling but the exchanges between people with whom you share your smittenness — or the challenges of just getting underway. We don't play on carefully manicured grounds. Only last week, we had to dig a trench almost the length of the Suez, or the sewers, to drain the water around the concrete and plastic wicket just so play could start. The 'super-sopper' was a couple of old towels from the boot of someone's car.

It is a lively, humorous, even glorious reality for the intimates, even though we don't often get the star treatment that Haigh has managed for his colleagues at the Yarras, a Melbourne club. That vast chunks of decent literature could be dedicated to the, theoretically at least, simple act of putting up the practice nets says much about Haigh's gift with words, comedy and detail. Team selection in the lower ebbs of cricket is not about careful pondering of players' strengths and weaknesses. It's simply about numbers — have we got enough? For captains and chairmen of selectors, it's damn hard work ringing around on the boss's phone Thursday and Friday to find XI players, let alone a competent XI.

Haigh has managed to turn it into a hoot of nicknames and ex-wives and unwanted pizza orders. There is, for the serious-minded, also social commentary, much of it anti-bloke, but in such a way that blokes' blokes won't mind that much because Haigh is clearly one of them and thus entitled to say these things:

The first day of our season in the Yarras' Fourth XI, and Two Dads is disgruntled. 'I gave up breakfast with my wife and the possibility of a root to play today,' he complains … Two Dads is bowling gamely. But running up into a freezing gale he's hitting the bat as hard as a meringue. To jolly him along, I inquire what six with his wife is worth exactly. He muses: 'Five-for.' A big statement, perhaps this includes breakfast.

Haigh has written great works, particularly the biography of Warwick Armstrong, The Big Ship. Compared to that, with its paperback cover and slim nature, this story about club cricket in Melbourne ought to be a potboiler. But it's not. It's a book of universal relevance to the armies of people who keep not just cricket but Australian sport going with their generous allocations of time and alcohol.

That I can write all this amazes me. I should dislike young Gideon intensely. It was always my aim to write the definitive work on Warwick Armstrong, for the obvious reason. And I have been putting together a modest list of stories on the Newtown Sixths (premiers three years in a row … Invincibles!) with the aim of one day collating them into something more permanent. Gideon's trumped me on that, too. In my book, he could only get away with it by producing something brilliant … and the bastard has!

A BOOK ON UMPIRING seems to defeat the whole purpose of umpires. If they are doing their jobs proficiently, they should not be noticed. But they are people with egos and ambitions, too, and more than a few go out of their way to be noticed. Witness Dickie Bird. As big as these egos can sometimes be, John Gascoigne's publishers thought it wise to put a picture of Shane Warne on the cover just to attract the browser's eye. Once obtained, this is, beyond Warne's rounded form (the cover photograph is pre-diuretics), a pleasant collection of umpirisms rounded out nicely by essays from international umpires such as Mel Johnson, the no-nonsense Queenslander, and Robin Baillhache, whose pen pics of Kim Hughes, Viv Richard et Al(lan) Border make fascinating reading. Rarely do we get the umpires' view of these great characters of the game, but they see them even more up close and personal than the Channel 9 cameras. In the end, Gascoigne has managed a bit of a Haigh: taking something that might seem pretty ordinary and making it a good read, one of those books you can jump into almost anywhere and find something to keep your interest until the train or tram gets you to where you're going — probably to watch the Yarras play.