by Mayukh Ghosh
One of the points often used to highlight the supremacy of cricket over other sports is its rich literature.
While it is true that the game has produced some fine writers and quality books, it is perhaps hard to brush aside the fact that it has not been able to be very inclusive.
Women’s cricket suffered for a long time but, of late, has become popular. An area that still lacks the recognition it deserves is the cricket played by/in the non-Test playing nations.
And, quite naturally, the custodians of the ‘rich literature’ never quite bothered about cricket played by/in the ‘minor’ countries.
It would be wrong though to say that there is absolutely nothing in this regard. Books on American cricket were published more than a hundred years ago. JD Coldham wrote a highly collectible volume on German cricket. Similar volumes were written on cricket in Canada, Ireland and Scotland.
And Ole Mortensen did well enough to get a slim book written entirely on him.
But definitive histories of cricket in these countries are rare.
Jake Perry must be given credit for writing two books charting Scotland’s cricket from a variety of angles.
It was not by design, though.
“I was born in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands but have lived in Scotland since 1987, when I came up to Edinburgh University to study Music. I arrived a cricket fanatic – my formative memories are of the West Indies in ’76, of Tony Greig (my favourite player when I was young) and Ian Botham hitting it into the confectionery stand and out again in 1981 – but I knew nothing at all about the Scottish game. That changed when I got involved with my local club, Penicuik CC: founded in 1844, it was clear that there was a whole world there to explore.”
Jake was just a fan for a very long time and then things began to change rather quickly.
“Journalism was never something I’d particularly thought about – it was something other people did, in the newspapers and on TV. I was always an avid reader as well as watcher of the game, but I was inspired by writers like George Dobell, Jarrod Kimber, Tim Wigmore and the concept of ‘fans with laptops’, as Jarrod called it, to have a go myself and begin to explore something not many others were writing about.
“The history of Scottish cricket is as long and rich as almost any other country in the world, full of connections to the greatest names in the history of the sport and stories of skill and accomplishment that are largely unknown, even to fans pretty well-versed in the game.
”One of my first pieces was about Misbah ul Haq and his time in Scottish cricket playing for Penicuik: I was well-placed to be able to interview the players who had played alongside him in 2003 and piece together the story of the five appearances he made for the club. That went a bit viral, being picked up in Pakistan and by All Out Cricket and The Cricket Paper amongst others, and on the back of that Ben Fox, then media manager at Cricket Scotland, got in touch and asked if I would like to do some work for them. It’s all gone from there!
“Nowadays I co-present The Cricket Scotland Podcast as well as write features, previews and match reports for the website. I have commentated, too, for the Scotland v Sri Lanka ODIs in 2019 and again for ICC TV at the Cricket World Cup League 2 series against Nepal and Namibia in July 2022. All while juggling my full-time job as a music teacher in a high school located just outside Edinburgh! It’s a difficult balancing act sometimes, but one thing the situation allows me to do is to write about the things I want to write about without having to worry about the commercial side of things. I don’t rely on my writing for all of my income, so I can give my full attention to wherever the story is. Scottish women’s cricket is a particular passion of mine, for example – I’m lucky enough to represent the interests of the team on the board of the Scottish Cricketers’ Association, too – and I’m very happy to be able to give it the proper attention it deserves. In many ways I’m in exactly the same position as a lot of the players I’m writing about, too: I balance the demands of another job with my cricketing life.”
Jake realised that there wasn’t too much written work on the Scottish game and decided to change things.
“I’m also driven to add to the literature around the Scottish game: there isn’t a great deal out there! You could describe my first book, The Secret Game – published in 2020 by Chequered Flag – as an episodic history of Scottish cricket, in that it follows a chronological path through its history through the stories of some of its clubs and personalities.
”It was an absolute joy to write, and in it I tried to convey something of the social history of the Scottish game as well as the sporting, of just how much cricket is woven into the fabric of Scottish society: much longer-established than football (which owes much of its early development to Scotland’s cricket clubs, who formed football teams to give their cricketers something to do in the winter) and despite its image, cricket is a game that has always cut across social barriers in Scotland.
”That understanding has been lost a bit in recent times – as in England, cricket has suffered from an association with private schooling and privilege, unlike the so-called ‘people’s game’ of football – but that reality is still very much there. Just go to Kelso, or Aberfeldy, or Meigle, or Freuchie, or, indeed, Penicuik: all places I write about in the book, these clubs and so many others are very much a product of their communities, and I wanted to shine a light on that once again.”
The Secret Game was a great start but Jake soon realised that it was not enough.
“The latest book, which I’ve co-written with Gary Heatly, tells a different sort of story. When I was thinking about what to include in The Secret Game, top of the list was the story of Scotland’s triumph over England at The Grange in 2018. But when I thought a little deeper, I quickly realised that this was a story to which I couldn’t possibly do justice in a single chapter: the win was the culmination of a process through which the team found the means to unlock its potential, which of course then continued into the Men’s T20 World Cup just gone, in which it became the first Scottish team in history to reach the second phase of a major global tournament.
”And so Playing With Teeth was born. I started to write it as a lockdown project – it was something I could do from home as it’s largely interview-based – and then I got Gary on board after I’d written the first part of the book because it was clear that the lockdown wasn’t going to a short-term thing. Gary is a freelance sports journalist so had time on his hands too: he also writes for Cricket Scotland, so we’d reported on much of the story together in ‘real time’, so to speak, but this was our chance to delve into the bigger picture that lay behind it.
”It’s that bigger picture that fascinated us both. In Scotland we have a team that has a very similar core of players today as to when the story of Playing With Teeth begins in 2013: just as talented, just as committed, but producing a very different brand of cricket on the field. I think it was Ben Crenshaw who said that the most difficult distance to tackle in golf is the one between your ears, and what Scotland had undergone was a massive shift in mindset and culture. ‘Glorious failure’ has long been a thing in Scottish sport – Google it and you’ll find plenty of references to the Scotland football team – and while it isn’t a term that has ever really applied to the cricket team, which has always held its own and more in the Associate world, I wondered if that culture in Scottish sport - that ‘having a good go’ and showing ‘Braveheart spirit’, even if you didn’t get over the line in the end, was good enough - had played its part. At the heart of the story is a team that said, no, that isn’t us, we aren’t prepared to accept that, and we can see the results that then came: from one win over a Full Member in the modern era (Bangladesh in a one-off T20 in 2012) we had five in the space of thirteen months, culminating in that win over England in 2018, followed by Scotland reaching the second stage of a World Cup tournament for the first time in its history.”
I asked Jake how he’d describe the book for the interested readers and his answer should intrigue the serious followers of the game.
“It’s a story that exists on several levels. It’s the story of a team and its results on the field, but it’s also about mindset, culture and leadership too. It’s a cricket story, but it applies to other sports and to other walks of life as well: what is a positive, winning, productive culture? We both had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope people will enjoy reading it, too.
”There’s one more thing to say about it, too. The book is dedicated to the memory of Con de Lange, whose presence is still very much felt within the team and the wider Scottish cricket community today. Con captained the side to the win over Sri Lanka that provided the first real evidence of its change, but his influence stretched way beyond what happened on the field. He was an exceptional person as well as cricketer, a lovely man who was so generous with his time: Playing With Teeth is a tribute to Con, and we very much hope he would have approved.”
The book is available from publishers Pitch Publishing and from the usual outlets.