Article - The Sunday Mail (Brisbane) - August 5th 2006

Well-played Delivery
Mark Hinchcliffe
August 5th, 2006

IT IS impossible to get author/actor William McInnes out of your head as you read his novel about a bunch of social cricketers in suburban Melbourne.The rakish main character, Chris Anderson, seems to have been modelled after the tall and slightly awkward blokey author, best known for his appearances on television in Sea Change and Blue Heelers.

His book Cricket Kings lightheartedly revolves around just one day's fourth-grade cricket match, but with the background, reminiscences, daydreaming and action of the match itself, it holds the reader in a hypnotic daze, fairly similar to an engaging day's play.
McInnes obviously loves his cricket, delighting in its rhythm, the heat, the peace and tranquillity, the morality and the humanity. But his book is about more than cricket. It's mainly about people.

The main character, "Christo", is a bit of a dag. At least that's what his children think and his wife supports the notion: "He's a bit of a dag, your father."

And he is. A loveable dag who organises and captains the Yarraville West Fourths; a rag-tag bunch of misfit characters from the farting butcher to the music-loving bus driver, plus a couple of schoolboy ring-ins, both called Tim.

Cricket is central to Anderson's life. Even during working hours he is lost in thought worrying about getting enough players for Saturday's game. He comes from a family of cricket tragics and everything he does or says seems to relate to the game.

It affects his relationship with his son Lachlan, his view of the world around him and even his politics. When asked by a beautiful Marxist activist in his uni days whom he admired, he blurted out: "Allan Border."

Anderson is a moral man and plays the game in good spirit. He is disheartened when the opposition team elects to bat, despite him asking to bat first so they can muster two more players. Disheartened, but not broken. He rallies his team, inspiring them to "have a go".
But cricket is not the end of his moral view. During the drinks break in the first innings, Anderson and old friend Michael Martin ask for extra time to help an African woman who has been waiting at the bus stop all morning.

Martin, who has just returned from Africa where he worked as a doctor, is a troubled man with an addiction and a lack of purpose in his life.

The pair try to explain to the immigrant mother with her infant child that the bus doesn't come up that street on a Saturday and escort her to the proper bus stop. Anderson explains that cricket is like a bus timetable. "Odd."

McInnes also uses the game's action and the players' daydreaming to indulge in his personal views on interesting subjects such as drug use, our disposable society (it is hard-rubbish collection day), politics (each player takes up a former prime minister's name which provides interesting political asides) and the habit of cricketers to adjust themselves: "The great gift of Ian Chappell to Australian cricket. The art of adjusting."

Anderson has a very Aussie way of moralising and offers some great advice to Martin when he drops his pills and starts to cry about how tough life is since Africa.

"You'll be right . . . just don't come out crying because it'll look like we're sooking about the cricket," he tells him as the side reels from a 318-run first innings flogging.

But all is most definitely not lost for the Yarraville West Fourths.

In the end it is Anderson's encouragement to "have a go" which galvanises the day's play.
No, there is no Mighty Ducks come-from-behind victory. This isn't an American box-office hit, but a warm and genuine Aussie novel. I can't give the final result away, but I can say that only a cricket fan would understand the victory in the lack of an outright defeat.

"Cricket is a game that not everyone grasps," McInnes writes. "It has its odd place names, its silly mid-ons and silly points and short mid-ons and its square point. What sort of a game has a position called square point? It has its interminable delays.

"It's a game more watched than played these days, but it's a game that lets a point . . . be made and an honour won. You may not win a game of cricket, you can be soundly beaten, but there's still a victory to be had. If you know how to go about it."

The end-game moral becomes a rewarding conclusion to a light-hearted, yet deeply thoughtful novel on ourselves as modern Australians.

Well played, McInnes.

William McInnes is a guest at the Byron Bay Writers Festival today and tomorrow; he will also be at the Brisbane Writers Festival, September 13-17.