Tale of maverick spinner a real page turner

The tale, in so far as it is a tale, is mostly narrated by a drunken sportswriter (you can tell this is a work of fiction) called W G, who races to complete his investigation against the death sentence enforced by the state of his liver.

Mathew is brilliant, elusive, evasive, coarse, subtle, romantic, obstinate and easily swayed, a perpetual underdog. He is also a Tamil (like Muttiah Muralitharan) on an island dominated by the Sinhalese. He is morally upright, he makes many mistakes. He can bowl like anybody, left arm or right arm, and it takes him an age to find his individual brilliance.

Even after he has done so, he meets enmity and resentment. His greatest triumph — the finest bowling performance of all time, according to W G — is seen by only a handful of people who for ever after deny it. Mathew turns on the Sri Lankan cricket authorities and then vanishes. He is always an underdog.

In a sense, then, Mathew is Sri Lanka: flawed brilliance self-stifled on an island seldom at peace with itself. The book leaps madly from point to point, in a manner superficially chaotic but ultimately coherent. It has some of the flaws of Mathew and W G: it has most of their brilliance as well.

This is the only bit of cricket fiction I have read that has serious ambitions and that carries real weight. It is also a great read. Cricket is a sport full of books; this is as good as anything I have on my shelves. A mixture of, say, C. L. R. James, Gabriel García Márquez, Fernando Pessoa and Sri Lankan arrack. The last is a thrillingly dangerous drink distilled from the sap of unopened coconut flowers.

There is a copious list of acknowledgments at the back of the book and I was delighted to find myself among them. Don’t know what I did, but I’m glad I did it.

I also found a highly resonant name: N. B. D. S. Wijesekera. For a moment I wondered if this was my old, late, friend Nalin, self-styled (and styled by many others too, mostly bearing the same name) as the black sheep of the family.

Nalin was, like W G, a maverick genius of a journo with a great fondness for arrack. I stayed at his house in Sri Lanka and we met often in England, where we drank whisky. I contacted Karunatilaka, who said that Nalin was his mother’s cousin, though he is not one of the Wijesekeras in the acknowledgments. Still, it’s a connection of a sort, and I relished the book more for that.

The Sri Lanka cricket team are on their way to this country to play three Tests and five one-day internationals. I look forward to a great series.

I hope, dear reader, that you enjoy it, and that you enjoy Chinaman as well. Both experiences are essential to anyone with a taste for maverick genius.

Pressures of a man’s world

The England cricket team dragged themselves home after damn near half a year on tour. I wonder what the hardest thing of such a tour is? The constant strain of striving for form, being for ever on show, the stresses of losing, the stresses of winning, the distance from home, the anxieties about loved ones, never being your own master, telephone conversations that go wrong, the claustrophobia of hotel life, hotel food, that terrible nostalgia for home, getting fed up with each other?

All in all and taking one thing with another, I think the thing that would bring most of us to despair is the absence of women. Oh yes, maybe the odd flirtation, maybe the odd adventure, but that’s not the same as living in a world full of women. Instead, you are constantly surrounded by blokes, with nobody but blokes to satisfy your emotional needs. That, surely, is the greatest deprivation: that combination of being locked in a situation of intense proximity but very little intimacy.

It’s not a job many of us would take on and the England team’s mad performances at the World Cup showed how hard it is — a bunch of fine cricketers driven nuts by the length of the tour.

Terry back where he never belonged

The thing I don’t get about the John Terry business is Fabio Capello’s insistence that Terry has “been punished enough”. I never thought that his sacking from the England captaincy was a punishment. I thought it came about because Terry’s behaviour showed that he was an inappropriate person for the office. I assumed the sacking took place not as punishment but as self-protection.

After all, if the treasurer of the parish hall committee borrows funds to put on a dog, you remove him from office not as a punishment but because he has shown himself unsuitable for the job. Terry has shown his talent for team disruption, by the business with Wayne Bridge and his public challenge to Capello. Now he is back with the armband, setting the troops all the example they could wish for.

The best enemy we could wish for

Ricky Ponting has stepped down as captain of the Australia cricket team, and I mourn his passing. A great batsman, a wonderful cricketer, and a truly awful captain. He had a great record when he had Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath in his side, but then so would I. If Warne had been in charge in 2005, England would never have won the Ashes.

Australia’s defeat in 2009 with a young team showed Ponting’s vulnerability and the most recent Ashes series, when England won 3-1 in Australia, was nothing less than a personal disaster. We will never appreciate Ponting’s brilliance as a cricketer in this country, because we will always remember him as the losing captain in three Ashes series. As sporting enemies go, he is perhaps the best we’ve ever had. We will miss him.

• No sooner does the FA start to reignite the Respect campaign than Sir Alex Ferguson disrespects it. Richard Scudamore and his like are only trying to stop people like Ferguson from looking like idiots. Whingeing is never pretty and bullying does not win Respect from anybody. Ferguson should be grateful.