I am a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association, and I live down the road from the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Yet when the opening game of this year’s Indian Premier League was played there last week, I was at home, not watching the action on television but reading a recently published book on cricket, albeit about a rather different kind of cricket from that promoted by the IPL. The book was Scyld Berry’s 500 Declared: The Joys of Covering 500 Cricket Tests.
The first person to watch 500 Test matches was the great Richie Benaud, 63 of these as a player, the rest as a journalist and commentator. Scyld Berry was the second, and also the first to cover 500 England Test matches live, working variously for The Observer, The Sunday Correspondent, The Independent on Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Daily Telegraph. His book moves seamlessly through the decades, from England playing New Zealand at Trent Bridge in June 1973 to England on tour in Rawalpindi in October 2024. Along the way, he provides the reader illuminating vignettes of brilliant spells and match-winning innings, of richly diverse crowds and even more diverse landscapes. He notices much more than the cricket, as when he writes: “I compare Bengal to Italy: the temperament, love of food, literary culture, where Tagore has similar stature to Dante but is rather more recent.”
Berry first entered the press box while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. He provides crisp portraits of the titans of English cricket journalism in the 1970s: John Arlott of The Guardian, John Woodcock of The Times, and E.W. Swanton of The Daily Telegraph, with the pompous Swanton comfortably coming out worst. As the narrative develops, he wisely — or prudently — does not offer comparable assessments of his own generation of cricket writers. Rather, he focuses on the play and the players, giving us sharp sketches of (among others) Ian Chappell, Geoffrey Boycott, David Gower and Kevin Pietersen as cricketers and human beings.
Throughout the book, Berry displays an acute understanding of sporting techniques and how they have changed over the years. In one striking passage, he draws our attention to the unanticipated consequences of helmets. Introduced at first to aid batsmen cope with hostile fast bowling, helmets have, he argues, been even more helpful against spin, allowing batters to sweep balls they would otherwise have played in a more orthodox manner. Before helmets existed, writes Berry, the “fear of a top edge into the teeth was what stopped batsmen sweeping balls that were not heading down leg side”. But when helmets with grills and visors arrived, they fearlessly began to sweep, reverse-sweep, ramp and reverse-ramp good-length balls on the stumps.
This is a book marked by a dry wit, as when the author writes of the major cricket ground in Kanpur: “This was called Green Park, as the only thing in Kanpur’s city centre that was not the colour of dust.” Meanwhile, of England touring teams claiming that they would like to embrace the local culture, Berry remarks that this, more often than not, meant “heading to the nearest golf course”.
Berry’s judgements are astute, as when he notes that “the major critics of cricketers taking World Series money were themselves affluent”, as well as precisely worded, as when, on meeting Jack Fingleton in 1977, he describes him as being “Australia’s finest cricket writer to that point”, leaving room for us now, in 2026, to surmise that the mantle may have since been passed on to Gideon Haigh. The judgements can also be compassionate. Of Mushtaq Mohammad’s status as the youngest cricketer to score a Test hundred, Berry observes: “My guess is Mushtaq shed a couple of years in the chaos of Partition after leaving the Indian port of Junagadh for Pakistan — with all the advantages for a cricketer at junior or age-group level, advantages which a refugee in such circumstances deserves.”
Scyld Berry has spent time in every Test-playing country. He first visited Pakistan in 1977 and India in 1980, and has come often thereafter to the subcontinent. He offers an interesting political comparison between the two countries. As he writes: “On taking control of India, Jawaharlal Nehru had broken the back of the big landowners so they did not dominate politics. He sent the army to the barracks, to be placated with pensions, and he used American aid to build Institutes of Technology in the main cities, founts of learning which in return, have produced the majority of CEOs in Silicon Valley. Pakistan made none of these reforms (Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the country’s first leader, was too sick, even if he had wanted to). The Americans, instead, built air bases in Pakistan and used the country as an ally against India, Russia and China.”
Berry admits to a special fondness for Pakistan, since it was the first country he toured as a cricket correspondent. Nonetheless, from his many visits there, he concludes that “it inhibits personal growth and private enterprise. Unless you emigrate, the army will keep you under control: if you do not obey, watch your family disappear. It is a sterile society where men spend their time with men, women with women, without cross-fertilization.”
(I don’t believe Scyld Berry has revisited India in the past decade. Were he to come here, he might find that India has come closer to Pakistan in certain less-than-salutary respects.)
Though properly respectful of cricket’s geographical spread, there is in 500 Declared an inevitable though perhaps understandable emphasis on England’s Ashes wins, and in the year 1981 especially. I also thought there was a little too much about the author’s own cricketing exploits, of getting the odd Test player out in a pick-up match between a Press XI and a team of serving but mostly retired players. Nonetheless, this is a compellingly readable book, drawing on the author’s rich and unparalleled experience as a roving cricket correspondent, and on his wide interests outside sport too.
As I came to the end of Scyld Berry’s book, I wondered: could anyone in the BCCI’s ‘approved’ panel of commentators write a comparably interesting book on 500 or even 50 T20 matches they have covered? And would such a book — which might carry a foreword by that legendary fount of cricketing wisdom, Jay Shah — find many appreciative readers? The answers to both questions must be an emphatic ‘no’. The shortest form of the game is also the most debased — with the short boundaries, flat pitches, and four-over limit for bowlers heavily favouring bat over ball. There is a reason that matches over two innings and five days are called Test cricket; for they allow both batter and bowler to display the fullest range of their talents and abilities, while the variability in pitches and climate pose challenges absent in T20 and even One Day cricket. To be a successful Test player is far, far, more difficult than being a successful T20 player. Indeed, of the Indian playing eleven in the final of the recent T20 World Cup, only one person — the great Jasprit Bumrah — would command a place in the Indian Test team.
500 Declared brought back many memories of the Test matches I have myself watched, as well as of Test matches that I have followed on the radio or on television. When Scyld Berry watched his first Test at Trent Bridge, live, he was 19 years of age. I was 15, following the same match on my family’s Philips radio in Dehradun. Set a mammoth 479 to win, New Zealand lost their star batsman, Glenn Turner, early, but then their captain, Bevan Congdon, played the innings of his life, keeping the game alive through a dogged fifth innings partnership with Vic Pollard. Both men scored hundreds, Congdon mostly through orthodox strokes on the off-side, Pollard via heaves to the leg. After Congdon fell for his highest Test score, the dashing wicket-keeper-batsman, Ken Wadsworth, kept Pollard company for quite a while. Eventually both were dismissed, and the brave New Zealanders lost by 38 runs. The hero on the other side was the seam bowler, Geoffrey Arnold, whose figures — 53-15-131-5 — tell their own story of persistence and perseverance.
Fifty-three years later, I can still recall the main features of New Zealand’s thrilling fourth-innings run chase, as brought to me by the commentators on BBC’s Test Match Special. On the other hand, I wonder if those who saw the first IPL match of the season last week will remember anything of it a year from now, or even a month hence, when the Bengaluru inaugural will be lost in a blur of other matches likewise marked by top-edged sixes and clamorous cheering.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in