A fun book for cricket fans and even baseball people

Much recommended by the Right Off the Bat Project is The Wit and Wisdom of Cricket, 2012, anonymously compiled, and published by Prion/Carlton: A collection of some of the best quotes from players, pundits and avid followers past and present. Here is a sample….

“Casting a ball at three straight sticks and defending the same with a fourth.”—Rudyard Kipling, poet and imperialist

“Find out where the ball is. Go there. Hit it.”—the great early twentieth-century batsman Ranjitsinghi’s three precepts of batsmanship. Who said cricket had to be complicated?

“Cricket. A sport in which contenders drive a ball with sticks in opposition to each other.”—Dr. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language

“Only his mother would describe him as an athlete.”—Derek Pringle, mediocre cricketer and journalist, on Ashley Giles, a less mediocre cricketer and now head coach of the English one-day squad

“It’s all a matter of inches—those between your ears.”—Arthur Milton, cricketing brain

“The sound of the ball hitting the batsman’s skull was music to my ears.”—Jeff Thomson, Australian fast bowler and terror of English and other batsmen in the 1970s and 1980s

“Cricket is basically baseball on valium.”—Robin Williams, comedian

“I don’t think I can expect to take that seriously a game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.”—Tom Stoppard, playwright and deep thinker

“Personally, I have always looked upon cricket as organised loafing.”—William Chesterfield, grasping the essentials of cricket

“How can you tell your wife you are just popping out to play a match and then not come back for five days?”—Rafa Benitez, Spanish soccer coach, clearly not grasping the essentials of cricket

Glen McGrath (fast bowler): ‘Why are you so fucking fat?’
Eddo Brandes (batsman, facing Glen McGrath): ‘Because every time I fuck your wife she gives me a biscuit.’

“You can have sex either before or after cricket—the fundamental fact is that cricket must be there at the centre of things.”—Harold Pinter, playwright

“There can be no normal sport in an abnormal society.”—Stance of South African Cricket Board

“When you are black you never really know what is inside another man’s heart.”—Viv Richards, West Indies cricket giant and social commentator

“Say that cricket has nothing to do with politics and say that cricket has nothing to do with life.”—John Arlott, the greatest English cricket commentator

“Exact, enthusiastic, prejudiced, amazingly visual, authoritative and friendly.”—Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet, on John Arlott

“The last positive thing England did for cricket was to invent it.”—Ian Chappell, Australian cricket captain

“What is human life but a game of cricket?”—The Duke of Dorset (1777)

“No cricketer I have ever known was able to write well.”—Alex Bannister, journalist