THE story of pace bowling in the modern game has necessarily to be mainly about one team - the West Indies. Telling the tale can take several forms, especially when someone from outside the Caribbean provides the account.
Many countries were frankly jealous of the West Indies run of success in the late 1970s, the 1980s and mid-1990s and forgot about the tactics employed by their own players to get into a winning mode. Clive Lloyd and his four-man pace battery gave them enough ammunition to talk of intimidation ad infinitum. In today's parlance, one would call them whingers.
Wilde, an English journalist, is thankfully not prone to taking sides. He has set out to investigate the way in which fast bowling has dominated cricket since Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson left a number of shell-shocked batsmen in their wake. And he has done it skilfully,and professionally. There is no bias, no carping, no whingeing. He has done this job well.
Wilde's book covers the period from the early 1970s right upto 1994, the period when spinners slowly started coming back into the game - people like Shane Warne, Anil Kumble and Mushtaq Ahmed had started proving themselves to be match-winners and the West Indies assembly line had shown signs of drying up. There are extremely readable accounts of different bowlers and the methods they employed to get batsmen out. The author examines the underlying battle between bat and ball from different perspectives and has pinpointed a number of great batsmen who had one failing - the inability to handle pace.
He is also brutally frank - to the extent of pointing out that the bureaucrats who run the game changed the rules thrice in order to stop the West Indies from dominating the game - first by front foot lbw rule in the 1950s when Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine were spinning their webs of deception; next by changing the front foot no-ball rule in the 1960s when Wesley Hall and Charlie Griffith were wreaking havoc; and finally by prescribing how many bouincers could be bowled per over towards the end of the 1980s. Thankfully, the last time it did not work all that well.
There is one chapter devoted to the greatest player of that period - Viv Richards. Though Wilde reckons the man should have retired a good bit earlier, he still places him on a pedestal for being the one player who dealt with pace with panache - as Joe Frazier would have done. There is plenty of detail about the injuries which batsmen suffered during this period but there is no glorying or carping about the gore that was spilt. And there are a number of excellent photographs of fast bowlers plying their trade.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a must read for any serious cricket fan. It is not the most current book about cricket (the most recent ones have made my stomach churn) but is extremely well written and basically is an honest attempt to tackle the subject which he has chosen. That's much more than one can say about 90 per cent of the books published these days.
The choice of cover is excellent - appropriately enough, it is adorned by a little man who was simply called Death - the late Macolm Denzil Marshall - bowling to David Gower who has already taken evasive action while Dickie Bird looks on. And after the words, Wilde has provided a number of tables to show the reader a lot of what he has written about; in this case, the statistics are not an adornment but a necessary part of the book. They are the coffee and cognac after a really good meal.