‘Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun’ might be the weirdest, most beautiful cricket book ever written

Christian Ryan can write. He has a gift and a passion. His gift is the way he brings a page to life with his words – and his passion? Cricket.

Certainly it is cricket, but cricket is never only cricket. Perhaps football is sometimes just football. Cricket, however, always makes more room for life than is reasonable.

Its pace, at least at test cricket level, is openly unathletic, counted out in sessions between hearty meals and nearly half the players in a match aren’t even on the field for most of the game. They watch the game they’re playing in or find ways to distract themselves while the game goes on. Not surprising that the game leaves so much room for more than sport.

And cricket is played at so many levels, in so many bits and pieces of unoccupied space around cities, in country towns, down lanes, on beaches, and in paddocks. It cascades through any society that takes it up.

The slow and the fast, the pedantic and the powerful, the inspirational and the technical, the generalist and the specialist, the stylist and the statistician, all find their grooves in the game.

The cricket Ryan has a passion for has expansive room for the magnificent failure, the obscure...

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