Up Close and Personal

GH enjoys an intimate cricket memoir

The intimate partners of athlete have been background, even marginal figures. The athlete’s chief connections are thought more properly to their teammates or their coach. Other relationships, often as not, are seen as distractions, or obstacles to be worked around. There are some exceptions - notably Andre Agassi’s Open (2009), which faithfully recounts his evolving romance with Steffi Graf. But Graf’s allure, of course, lay partly in her also being a champion. And, in the main, nobody reads a sporting autobiography to learn about the subject’s emotional life. Champions are seen as becoming champions by being married primarily to their sport.

This applies as much in cricket as elsewhere, where there is even the expression ‘cricket widow’ to evoke the cordon sanitaire round the game. The spouses of leading players of yesterday, meanwhile, have tended to hover just out of view. Jack Hobbs’s wife Ada [that’s her, above, with the Master] and Sir Donald Bradman’s Lady Jessie are among the very few to have had a vicarious public profile. Their task otherwise has been largely to keep the home fires burning, and to abide that what happens on tour stays there. The subtitle of Ian Botham’s autobiography was explicitly Don’t Tell Kath.

Which was ironic, because Kath tended to find out, as she recounted in a guarded but dignified memoir Living With A Legend (1987). She has proven, in due course, a remarkably steadfast partner, in a similarly long-suffering vein to Simone Warne whose Growing With Grace (2024) appeared a couple of years ago. Life, of course, has now moved on a little. The ‘cricket widow’ has been supplanted somewhat by the cricket WAG, a phenomenon first with England’s football team, of whom Victoria Beckham might be thought queen, Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney rival princesses. Originally fodder for tabloid media, they have become a phenomenon of the social media age, the rise of the personal brand and of the influencer, which allow a reflected renown….

….even after the original light source has been outgrown.

The doyenne in Australia is arguably Candice Warner. David constantly credits his iron woman wife with changing the course of his career by her exemplary dedication, while Running Strong (2023) offered her as an independent woman in her own right rather than merely a consort.

In the biggest market of all, meanwhile, Anushka Sharma, whose sixty-nine million Instagram followers compare honorably to her husband Virat Kohli’s 275 million, has been a pathfinder - once a lightning rod for criticism, now a kind of progressive mother of the nation. Mind you, discretion is a watchword, Anushka guards the Kohlis’ privacy jealously.

Nobody, too, knows a cricketer like their nearest and dearest, especially when their relationship has been entwined with playing. I often hark back to the passages in Steve Waugh’s books by his wife Lynette: the first Australian captain to welcome wives on tour also had Lynette contribute to his diaries and to his autobiography. ‘My Life With Stephen’, the last chapter of the latter, features a priceless cameo of her first visit to the Waugh household, cricket bat propped against the television to ensure it provided a continuous diet of ‘sport, sport, sport and more sport, with a bit of Kingswood Country thrown in.’ By their table manners shall we known them…..

The dining table was a large, pine, rectangular one and…never seemed to fit into the room quite right. It dominated, which seemed appropriate when I came to realise how important food was to an always-hungry family of four boys. If you were one of the last two at the table you had already drawn the short straw because the two chairs against the wall were an absolute squeeze to get into, and once you got them there was no getting out, as you were trapped by the gas heater at one end and the back of the lounge at the other. So the first rule of survival for meals was never to be late to the table….

There I was, seated in one of the good seats for my first meal with the family very excited but very quiet too. The TV was on and the conversation little. Bev had cooked the meal of the day: meat and vegetables. The plates had barely touched the table when there was a flurry and a clash of forks with food going everywhere. Next minute a piece of steak was flicked from Stephen’s fork and plonked right on my plate. ‘You can’t hang back here - get it while you can,’ said Stephen, stating what seemed the second rule. It was an eating frenzy. I just kept thinking, Oh my gosh, where am I? There was this frantic pace to meals, every meal, as if they’d not eaten for a week. Along with the unbelievable speed they could eat was the noise - the sounds of chomping almost drowned out the TV.

There are no such scenes in Puja Pujara’s The Diary of a Cricketer’s Wife (2025) - Cheteshwar Pujara has in common with Waugh only that they are great Test cricketers. These days, Pujara epitomises cricket values aslant the prevailing culture - a solemn commitment to Test matches against the T20 current, an air of permanence amid constant transience. In that respect, he seems an unlikely unbuttoner about his personal space; yet, it emerges, it was he who encouraged his wife to make use of journals she had been keeping of their life together. The Diary is sub-titled ‘A Very Unusual Memoir’; I should say it is unique, and among the more delightful cricket books I have perused recently.