The All-Rounder and the Leg-Spinner

On Warne
by Gideon Haigh
Penguin, 2012, 224 pages, $35

The dust jacket of Gideon Haigh’s On Warne reminds us that the Australian once anointed Haigh “the finest cricket writer alive”. This was no fluke; the Guardian has applied the same appellation.

It’s a fine tribute to a significant career and would fit nicely on a headstone. And yet, by the end of On Warne, the reader is left to wonder whether Haigh should be satisfied with it. For such is his talent that he is in danger of being typecast as a great cricket writer when he could very well be called one of Australia’s finest non-fiction writers full-stop.

Haigh is not a cricket analyst in the ordinary sense, although his understanding of the technical and tactical details of the sport is vast. In a chapter headed “The Art of Warne” (and no, that is not hyperbole) Haigh dissects Warne’s bowling run-up as if it’s a three-act play. Haigh’s command of statistics helps us understand the tension between Warne and his leg-spinning rival Stuart MacGill. And Warne’s “ball of the century” has never been more vividly described.

Yet Haigh’s true talent is perhaps best described as something like film criticism applied to cricket. He lends meaning to a transitory and often superficial piece of popular culture, using it as a vehicle to tell us something unexpected and often wise about the participants and about us as observers. To cite just one example: you haven’t really understood the modern Australian game’s veneration of the baggy green cap until you’ve read Haigh’s polite but pitiless dissection of Steve Waugh’s personality. And just as a good film critic will find something interesting to say about the most disposable blockbuster, so Haigh finds significance even in a T20 game or a Warne tweet. The meaning is there if you know how to look for it, and Haigh knows.

For instance, Haigh sees Warne as a cultural touchstone because of his association with Aust­ralian suburbia (unusually and refreshingly for an Australian public intellectual, Haigh likes the ’burbs). The insight is then married to a skill with the English language which is seldom bettered in Australia, even if there’s the odd moment when you feel Haigh might have swallowed the dictionary.

Haigh is a touch disingenuous about the dist­inction between Warne the man and Warne the cricketer. Having excused Warne’s serial marital betrayals in ways that will surely risk the ire of female readers, Haigh brushes the whole explanation off by saying that his argument is mere speculation, since he doesn’t really know Warne, and that anyway, “I only wished to watch him play cricket”. But if that’s so, why go to such lengths to defend Warne for his rooting and sledging? Haigh bemoans modern society’s tendency to find excuses for its own misbehaviour, yet he seems to do just that for Warne’s bone-headed behaviour towards opponents, women and bookmakers, and for his flirtation with diuretics, which led to a one-year ban for drug use.

Occasionally you feel as if Haigh himself has doubts about applying his talents to a mere game. At the close of On Warne he writes slightly defensively that, “by several rigorous measures, [cricket] may even be judged quite trivial”. But he reassures himself that being “the best at something that there has ever been” is no trivial matter. If that is true of sport itself, it could also be said of writing about it. Haigh might have cited the philosopher Roger Scruton, who wrote that “the surplus of interest in the world which spills over into sport is the mark of rational beings, who are satisfied with supremely useless things”.

So Haigh is not wasting his talent. It would be an act of snobbery (towards Warne) and philistinism (towards cricket) to argue that the subject of Haigh’s book is unequal to its author. Warne the player and Warne the public phenomenon are both worthy of serious scrutiny, as Haigh’s short book proves conclusively. But what On Warne also suggests is that cricket may not be a big enough subject to do justice to Haigh’s talent. On Warne is so good and yet promises so much more that it tempts a thought: somewhere inside Gideon Haigh, is there a truly defining book about Australia? Perhaps it is a history or a deep social critique. Would a twenty-first-century answer to Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country be out of his reach?

Should such a book never materialise, Haigh’s admirers will have no cause to complain. It is better to turn out a masterpiece about a trivial subject than to write a trivial book about a weighty one. So if Haigh does nothing but produce more volumes of the quality of On Warne, we will still be in his debt. But Haigh’s list of publications is already so richly varied—at the age of twenty he wrote a history of BHP, later a volume on James Hardie Corporation, and last year an illustrated doorstop of a book called The Office: A Hardworking History—that we know he is no specialist player but a true all-rounder. We now await the book that confers upon him Sobers-like stature in the history of Australian letters.