Bowled over.(Any Old Eleven)(Book Review)

Any Old Eleven, by Jim Young; Cape Weed Press (PO Box 63, Warburton, Vic.), 2001, $16.95.

RECENTLY, on a flight from Melbourne to New York, a director of BHP, not known for his unruly behaviour on long-haul flights, was politely requested to tone it down--his guffaws were annoying the other business-class passengers. He was reading Any Old Eleven, Jim Young's book about a pub cricket team, and this is a very difficult book to read quietly.

It's a clever thing to write a book that entertains the expert as much as the ignorant, that amuses the aficionado as much as the amateur. And this is particularly clever when the subject matter is sport. It is relatively easy to captivate the converted (like the above-mentioned director of BHP), but people like me who have a strong antipathy to sport are difficult to dazzle.

P.G. Wodehouse did it with golfing stories, and now Jim Young has done it with cricket. Any Old Eleven is a hilarious account of a pub cricket team playing in a church competition. A pub team playing in a church competition is an interesting juxtaposition in itself and shows how desperate the churches were to make up the numbers. Jim Young recounts some quite un-Christian behaviour by some of the church teams who seem to believe that the point of the game is to win.

I confess that this style of cricket might just be the sort of sport I could learn to appreciate. Team training (which was taken far more seriously than the match itself) took place on Friday night in the public bar of Naughton's Hotel; the post-match debriefing likewise. Much serious lubricated discussion ensued, touching on many deep and meaningful aspects both of this week's match and the game in general.

Clearly, the Naughton's Old Boys (otherwise known as the NOBs) were not your average suburban cricket team. Rather than follow the trend of appointing a sports psychologist, the NOBs appointed a dub philosopher. "His beard proclaimed a depth of wisdom that was borne out by his pronouncements," Jim Young assures us. He provided "all the gravity and sagacity we could cope with".

One of the endearing features of this class of cricket is that often there is no official umpire and a volunteer must be found from among the players. Inevitably, at some stage, the umpire must make decisions about his own team. It is a difficult job to declare your mates out, if not at the time, then certainly when it comes to the ...