awkins is a good listener, and has a sharp ear for the speech of his Indian sources. He is commendably self-aware about the privilege he is afforded in India as a white male Briton, and wholly free of condescension. As one bookmaker tells him, "All the world sees English people with a different view, Indian people are seen with a different view...If you contact someone they will respond to you, if I do it they won't."
He is not always well served by his editors. The book is riddled with typos and there is one point at which a whole paragraph appears to be missing. This is a shame, because there is more to this book than scandals and explanations. There is a winning description of a group of Muslim boys playing a game of tennis-ball cricket in Mumbai's Oval Maidan:
"The bat might be a piece of wood and the stumps bark found in the undergrowth around the edge....A bowler, lithe and graceful, charges in with the promise of a memorable action only to deliver a blatant chuck. ...
'Yes! Yes! You English person!' Hanif, who must be about 15, shouts to me. 'Come be umpire please, please?'
... Hanif gives me his mobile phone and sunglasses to hold as he returns to his run-up, whipping up the dust once more and delivering a blatant 'throw' ... It is fast...too fast for the batsman, who hits the ball straight up into the air to be caught by the wicketkeeper...There is much celebration. But I have my arm outstretched to denote a no-ball.
'No-ball? No, no, you are wrong!' Hanif laughs as everyone bar the batsman looks at me aghast.
'You are throwing it,' I say. 'Bowl properly.'
'Yes, you right. I am very sorry. I do it properly,' Hanif replies, shaking my hand. 'You are very fair to me.'"
Hawkins is not as rigid a moralist as this suggests. He writes sensibly of the pressures on international cricketers, pointing out, for instance, that Sri Lanka's cricket board, in serious debt after the World Cup, was unable to pay any of its employees, players, administrators, and janitors, for several months afterwards. And in the English county game, he observes that many players earn considerably less than the national median wage. Faced with the offer of "more than a third of his salary for bowling badly in one over" – "one measly over to boost a measly wage" – "it is no wonder that cricketers may say 'what is the harm?'"
It is a good question: what is the harm? Well, for one thing, it's just not cricket. But that answer, Hawkins is clear-sighted enough to see, has only ever had rhetorical force. He notes, more realistically, that it rarely ever stops at that measly over. Or, as the Middlesex spinner Ollie Rayner puts it, if you do it once, "They've got you by the balls". Indeed.