Rain Men: The Madness of Cricket

by Marcus Berkmann (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $3.25

  This book is aimed at the fan; at the person who listens to the Test Match on a motorway and narrowly avoids crashing whenever somone takes a wicket; at the weekend player who happily gives up his valuable afternoon to be given out for 0 by the umpire and who can't quite remember the lbw law. However, unlike most cricket books (gentle, elegiac, full of photographs of village greens circa 1850), this book is realistic. It accepts the great unspoken truth of cricket: that the other team are only there to make up the numbers and that the people you're competing with are your teammates. It shows the game as it is really played, and analyses the mystique of such diverse elements as the misery of Test match attendance, professionally eccentric commentators and the pointlessness of Merv Hughes' moustache.

• Used

  paperback
  

  $3.25

  There are many cricket books, and they are all the same. 'Don't Tell Goochie', autobiographical insights of nights on the tiles in Delhi with Lambie and the boys; 'Fruit cake days', a celebrated humourist recalls 'ball' - related banter of yore; and Wisden, a deadly weapon when combined with a thermos flask. Rain Men is different. Like the moment the genius of Richie Benaud first revealed itself to you, it is a cricketing epiphany, a landmark in the literature of the game. Shining the light meter of reason into cricket's incomparable madness, Marcus Berkmann illuminates all the obsessions and disappointments that the dedicated fan and pathologically hopeful clubman suffers year after year - the ritual humiliation of England's middle order, the partially-sighted umpires, the battling average that reads more like a shoe size. As satisfying as a perfectly timed cover drive, and rather easier to come by, Rain Men offers essential justification for anyone who has ever run a team-mate out on purpose or secretly blubbed at a video of Botham's Ashes.

• New

  paperback
  

  $12.26

  There are many cricket books, and they are all the same. 'Don't Tell Goochie', autobiographical insights of nights on the tiles in Delhi with Lambie and the boys; 'Fruit cake days', a celebrated humourist recalls 'ball' - related banter of yore; and Wisden, a deadly weapon when combined with a thermos flask. Rain Men is different. Like the moment the genius of Richie Benaud first revealed itself to you, it is a cricketing epiphany, a landmark in the literature of the game. Shining the light meter of reason into cricket's incomparable madness, Marcus Berkmann illuminates all the obsessions and disappointments that the dedicated fan and pathologically hopeful clubman suffers year after year - the ritual humiliation of England's middle order, the partially-sighted umpires, the battling average that reads more like a shoe size. As satisfying as a perfectly timed cover drive, and rather easier to come by, Rain Men offers essential justification for anyone who has ever run a team-mate out on purpose or secretly blubbed at a video of Botham's Ashes.