GK Chesterton wrote Tremendous Trifles, essays on everyday life. Next Man In is the story of the tremendous trifles of cricket, an attempt by the author to show that "there is much to be enjoyed in cricket oddities quite apart from the glory of the play itself".

Bowlers knocking all three stumps out of the ground; bowlers knocking out the off stump and leg stump but leaving the middle stump standing (as when Mike Hendrick dismissed Madan Lal in 1974); lightning, earthquake, snow holding up play; a Test cricketer starting an over as a left-arm bowler and finishing it as a right-armer (Hanif Mohammad, in case you wanted to know), and much, much more. Like all good books of reference, you can start Next Man In at any point, and go in either direction. You can digress profitably, start and stop, and restart. You are guaranteed both information and entertainment as the book takes you through the laws of the game and their strange application or fascinating corollaries. Did you know, for example, that Godfrey Evans once ran six - with Brian Close - in a Gentlemen v Players match?

Cricket eccentrics, the quick-witted and sharp-thinking, figure in the many stories in the book, but it is not a Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not type, where the accent is on the bizarre alone. These are flesh-and-blood stories, some of which may have easily repeated themselves in your local cricket matches, and that is the strength of the book. That, and the enormous research that has gone into digging out the relevant background stories to each of the laws. Brodribb, one of the most interesting writers on the game, was, not surprisingly perhaps, an archaeologist.

But it isn't just the laws. It might come as a surprise, for example, that the reverse sweep was first attempted in 1881 by the English batsman AN Hornby (in a Gentlemen v Players match). He was bowled, which is just as it should be; proper punishment for playing the game's ugliest stroke.

Next Man In is a treasure trove, a settler of bets, a soother of nerves, an endorser of our worst fears with the simple message: It has happened before.

From the book:
Perhaps one of the oddest 'bowled' decisions was suffered by John Inverarity playing for Western Australia v South Australia in Adelaide in 1969-70. Before he had scored, he was bowled by a ball from Greg Chappell, but the ball had been deflected in the air by a passing swallow. The bird was killed, and the batsman was walking ruefully away when he was recalled by the umpires, and went on to score 89.

Next Man In
by Gerald Brodribb
Putnam, 1952

Suresh Menon is a writer based in Bangalore

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