Review: 10 for 66 and All That

This autobiography of one of Australia's most mercurial cricketers was first published in 1958. I read it a few years later, while at high school in the early 1960s and an absolute sponge for anything relating to the sound of leather upon willow.

It must have made an impression, because there were plenty of lines and incidents from it that I could vividly recall even without rereading this 50th-anniversary edition — above all, the whimsical chapter on his first confrontation, in a Sydney club game, with the legendary batsman Victor Trumper.

After a week of imagining scenarios that would prevent Trumper from turning up to bat for Paddington against Redfern, the magical moment arrived and the expectation was universal that young Mailey's legspin would be put to the sword. And so it seemed when a perfectly pitched stock delivery was dispatched effortlessly to the boundary.

Mailey decided to try his far-from-perfected wrong 'un and delivered "the ball I had often dreamed of bowling". It deceived Trumper in flight, stranded him down the pitch, zipped back between bat and pad, and had him comprehensively stumped.

"It was too good for me," were words that should have delighted the tyro, but Mailey saw it differently: "There was no triumph in me as I watched the receding figure. I felt like a boy who had killed a dove."

The chapter says a lot about the humanity and humility of the young man who eventually played 21 Tests between 1920 and 1926.

That number of Tests over seven years would probably rate him a "part-timer" these days, when there are sometimes 15 or 16 Tests scheduled for the Australian team in a calender year. By my calculations, though, Australia only played 23 Tests in that period.

And he took 99 wickets, giving him a strike rate of about 4.7 wickets per Test, only just less than Shane Warne's 4.9 and considerably better than Richie Benaud's 3.9.

But I think that Mailey cared much more about the art of his bowling than he did about statistics — with the exception of an innings against Gloucestershire in 1921, when he conjured all 10 wickets at a cost of 66 runs and provided himself with the perfect title for his memoirs.

And very insightful memoirs they are, too. His analyses of characters, events and trends are joyfully concise, pithy, honest and, I'm sure, largely accurate.

An excellent example is Mailey's take on the future of cricket in a post-television world:

"With the introduction of televised matches ... it seems certain that attendances will show a further drop altough the interest in big cricket may be greater. Heavy charges for the right to televise will of course make up for the loss in gate money, but if the charges are unreasonable it is quite possible that powerful television corporations will buy up Test teams lock, stock and barrel and 'can' the match distribution through cricket-loving countries. What Hollywood did with actors I suppose television can do with cricketers. One can paint a fantastic picture on the possibilities of Television v Cricket board wrangles of the future."

And remember, Mailey penned this in 1958, just a few years after television arrived in Australia and nearly 20 years before Kerry Packer spirited away the Chappell brothers, Lillee, Marsh and most of the world's other 50 leading players to World Series Cricket.

Not bad crystal-ball gazing from the self-depracating cricketer-cum-journalist-cum-cartoonist-cum-butcher who had outside his shop a sign declaring "Arthur Mailey, he bowled tripe, he wrote tripe, and now he sells it".

10 for 66 and All That is a great read — a bonus is the inclusion in the book of many charming caricatures penned by Mailey himself — and deserves a place in every cricket lover's library.

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