Gideon Haigh’s Odd Men In…..

Gideon Haigh, the Australian cricket writer has just finished writing a series of Odd Men In columns on Cricinfo. I was very disappointed to learn that he will not be writing this column for a while now. Odd Men In was one column which i always enjoyed reading.

In a sport dominated by individual personalities, Haigh wrote about several cricketers who are outside the normal discourse about cricketers. There was not the statistical brilliance of Bradman or the magnetism of Sobers…… Haigh wrote instead about Roy Marshall, Dilip Doshi, Ajit Wadekar, Vincent Van der Bijl, Dennis Amiss, Wasim Raja and others… In Haighs own words –

Tendulkar. Lara. Botham. Richards. The Waughs. This is a fortnightly column in which they, and other eminences of the game, will be studiously ignored. I mean, enough already! Stars get enough kudos and cash, not all of which they deserve. Remember the ICC Super Series? (Malcolm Speed, of course, would prefer you didn’t)

Odd Men In – a title shamelessly borrowed from AA Thomson’s fantastic book – concerns cricketers who have caught my attention over the years in different ways – personally, historically, technically, stylistically – and about whom I have never previously found a pretext to write. Perhaps you saw them too, or have heard or read of them; perhaps they are simply a name in a table of statistics. Whatever the case, they’re cricketers who didn’t fit into the Great Man Theory of Cricket History, but who to my mind are overdue a few words.

I eagerly await the next Odd Men In series. I can think of lots of cricket who are overdue a few words – Padmakar Shivalkar, Salim Durrani, Mansoor Ali Khan of Pataudi, Vinoo Mankad, Conrad Hunte, Jeffrey Stollmeyer, Clairmonte DePieza (i hope i spelt that right), Christiani, Shackleton and many other figures from all those scorecards i used to read when i was younger. Then, they were merely names from a bygone era. It would be interesting to know of the people behind the names. Some players like Farokh Engineer – the last Parsi cricketer to play for India, Salim Durrani – whose name still causes Pataudi Jr. to look back in regret at the cricket of one her thought would be the Indian Sobers. And what of Andy Sandham, whose wife stitched him a vest made of foam to provide a rudimentary chest guard for him during the 1929-30 English visit to the West Indies? Sandham was Test crickets first triple centurion.

Cricket probably has the richest literature amongst all sports, as almost all cricketers write about their time in the game. However, these are out of reach of the average reader, because most cricket fans are unlikely to buy too many cricket books, and because a lot of these cricket books are now out of print. Haigh’s series has broadened the world of journalism in cricket. Stats pieces, match reports, news reports, opinions etc. all have their place, but as a contribution to crickets literature, Haigh’s articles are quite priceless…

I would encourage everyone to read Odd Men In

I also wait eagerly for Mr. Haigh to resume this series….

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