Kate White reads Bloomsbury Sport’s latest cricket book.
Scyld Berry’s debut Test in a professional capacity was a false start. Aged 19, and fresh from his first-year exams at Cambridge, he took the train to Nottingham for the second day of the opening Test in a three-match series between England and New Zealand. It was 1973, and he was to be the amanuensis of E. W. Swanton, of The Daily Telegraph, responsible for phoning in the great man’s reports to copytakers in London, keeping his hip flask of whisky replete with ice and answering readers’ letters. After the test, incensed by an insensitive remark Swanton made about the death of his mother, Berry tendered his resignation – and it was not until four years later that he covered his second test, this time as a journalist in his own right.
Berry’s first brush with cricket writing had come when Ted Heath was Prime Minister, Ray Illingworth had just regained the England captaincy and the press box was a very different place from today. Smoke hung in the air. There were no screens, no replays, no computers, no data and no scorer. Swanton’s reports were handwritten, and telephones had to be hired, or charges reversed, to call in copy by the 7pm deadline.
By the time he covered his 500th England Test, against India at Old Trafford last summer, the technology had changed beyond all recognition, as had the press boxes, now almost uniformly air-conditioned. The media centre at Lord’s is “almost as hermetically sealed as a spaceship,” Berry writes.
But while 500 Declared: The Joys of Covering 500 Cricket Tests charts innumerable changes, it also traces many common threads. “The strange thing is that, the more the means of transmission has changed, the more the copy itself – a report on Australia scoring 320 for three at the close of day one, or why England have collapsed against spin – stays the same.”
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The book is as much a travelogue as a work of sports writing, visiting almost every corner of the cricketing world. Covering his first England tour, in Pakistan in 1977, Berry travelled ten days ahead of the England party, to visit places he might not otherwise have seen, catching a dawn flight to the hills of Chitral, before taking a one-square-foot space in the back of an open four-wheel drive to cross the Lowari Pass at 10,000 feet.
In a neat circle, Berry’s experience of England tours began and ended in Rawalpindi; Pakistan, like a first love, holds his heart. But he writes illuminatingly about everywhere in between: the juxtaposition of the paradisiacal beaches of the West Indies with the islands’ oil industry and legacy of slavery; his visit with Mike Brearley to an orphanage in Kolkata; the joy of the church band playing in Port Elizabeth during England’s first tour after South Africa’s readmission in 1996; and the Antarctic winds blowing into Christchurch (New Zealand being the one country where Berry would happily accept those hermetically sealed press boxes).
Galle, in Sri Lanka, wins first prize for best cricketing backdrop, with its fort built by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch, and now a World Heritage Site. The best view in Test cricket from a press box goes to Centurion, in South Africa, “behind the arm and under a covered roof which yet allows the sun and air and reactions of the crowd to circulate”.
Against all of these backdrops, there is the cricket. In a tidily catalogued journey through decades, locations and numbered Tests, Berry reconstructs famous matches, moments and personalities using his own notes and recollections. As both a journalist and a ghost writer, Berry has had unparalleled access to the thoughts and reflections of key England players.
When England won the third Test in Karachi in 2000-01 – their first Test victory in Pakistan since 1961-62 – Mike Atherton had batted 579 minutes for 125 runs. He usually wrote his own Telegraph column post-match, but was so tired that Berry had to go to his hotel bedroom to write it for him, with an exhausted Nasser Hussain also present. “Test cricketers hold it together while walking off at the end of a day; we never see them keel over in the dressing-room or hotel,” Berry writes. “Far fitter than the rest of us, yet still human.”
Ben Stokes’s match-winning 135 not out at Headingley in the 2019 Ashes series is Berry’s pick for the greatest England innings, not only of his time as a cricket journalist, but ever. He describes it as a “diptych, two masterpieces in one,” as Stokes scored three off 73, before accelerating to add 132 off 146. “It was perfection,” he writes. “Over the course of five and a half hours Stokes achieved human perfection, and not many of us in our whole lives attain that state for even a few seconds.” Standing at the front of the Headingley press box, Berry turned to his colleagues and remarked: “Greatest innings ever played for England.”
Along the journey, the book picks out milestones of the shifting face of Test cricket. The advent of helmets, neutral umpires and DRS, and the rise of the limited-overs game are all woven into the story. Berry was the first to reach the milestone of covering 500 England Tests (and a handful of neutral matches besides) and his passion for and enjoyment of cricket is evident throughout this unique portrait of the game. In the early pages, he describes his role as “a pleasant vacation job”, admitting that “essentially, it still is.”
For 25% off, order the book at bloomsbury.com and enter the discount code WISDENBLOG25 at checkout.
Kate White is Assistant Editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
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