A terrific maiden knock

Reviewed by Rob Steen

In keeping with all these Booker-Orange-Whitbread awards, this terrific maiden knock by England's most bookish Test aspirant is worthy of any number of prizes: Most Awful Subtitle, Least WH Smith-Friendly Subject, Most Ambitious Book By A County Cricketer, Most Productive Dinner Enjoyed By A County Cricketer.

The aptest, though, would be in the category of Bravest Publishing Venture. Better yet, when our Mr Smith went to Washington (and Boston and gangsta LA), and found that the commonalities and contrasts between cricket and baseball vividly reflected the planet's most special special relationship, he fully vindicated his sponsors.

The dinner in question was in Massachusetts, where our Ed happened to chance upon a fellow guest who, upon hearing of his plans for a book about the world's finest ball games, offered to introduce him to Nelson Doubleday, co-owner of the New York Mets.

So "ET" is invited to work out with the Mets. Bobby Valentine, their volatile manager, chucklingly calls him "a cricketeer". Cue culture clashes: home-run clouters make more in a month than Steve Waugh will in a whole career, to name the most blatant. Then there's spring training in Florida meets pre-season in Canterbury; Paul Nixon's matchwinning four off his old mucker Darren Maddy and Robin Ventura's gamewinning homer off former team-mate Turk Wendell; a Norwich Union League decider versus a "Subway" World Series between the Mets and the Yankees. Unlike any cricketer, arguably since Mike Brearley, Smith has a hinterland. The story digresses into US politics and the state of mind in New York City after 9/11.

He covers most of the angles - practical and historical as well as philosophical (baseball is both cricket's "bastard" and "spiritual cousin"). Pressing a case for greater mutual awareness, he also unearths some nuggets. George Bernard Shaw, I learned, "much preferred the rough and tumble of the diamond to the ironed whites". (GBS was also pro-sledging: why shouldn't fielders "put a batsman off his stroke ... by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability"?)

ET Smith the writer echoes Ed Smith the batsman: elegant, concise, beige rather than rouge. Babe Ruth's act and impact are compared to Bradman's, rightly and deftly so: while The Babe, who died in his early fifties, suffered from "a surfeit of humanity", The Don's death left us "illogically surprised ... we half-imagined he might beat death too".

Indeed, perceptiveness is rife, notably about the self-delusional traditions of both sports: "Though (baseball's) first official set of rules was only codified in 1846, within a decade Walt Whitman would announce: `Well - it's our game ... it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.' Swift work for a new game," Smith writes. Perhaps, he argues, no other sport belongs more firmly "to one country's self-invention". Sound familiar? Isn't that how we in England sometimes talk about cricket?

One could be picky. Overlooking baseball's elastic timeframe, and the way it heightens drama, is lax. Ditto missing the link between baseball and one-day cricket, where dabbles in the multi-innings form, as a means of sustaining tension, could yet become a plunge. Most oddly, in examining approaches to batting, the matter of the flat surface of the cricket bat v the curved as in baseball is ignored: it has, after all, been suggested by a scientist that middling a baseball hurled at 90mph is the most daunting task in sport (the boffin, one assumes, was of the sensible view that resisting Mike Tyson does not constitute a game of anything).

He might also have delved deeper. No connection is made between the way the statisticians mirror national traits: that so much more spews forth from baseball's Beardless Wonders seems to me to reflect a society where trying hard can never be a vice. Then again, knowing he would still have to share a dressing-room with Min and Nicko, maybe he decided against being too pretentious.

One more grumble. He uses the initials ET, which may be an intentionally witty Anglo-Americanism, reeking as much of Titmus FJ as EB White and J Edgar Hoover, but ET ... Ed, a Yank's abbreviation of a Limey name - not to mention the one by which most people outside the Kent dressing-room know him - would have been smarter.

The literary ambitions do not stop here, but the goal, he stresses, is to be "a writer not a sportswriter". The relief in the press-box should be profound.