Test cricket is to sport as Wagner’s Ring cycle is to music. Most people would regard them as interminable and even unfathomable. Yet the most arduous form of our national game provides something to its followers that Wagner’s series of operas notably lacks — laughter. It is often bleak humour, based on the frustrations of taking part in so-called “games” that last five bruising days with every prospect of failing to reach a decisive result; but then most humour of any note has always seemed to come from the contemplation of man’s inhumanity to man.

So perhaps it is not surprising that two of our most successful cricket writers, Simon Hughes and ­Marcus Berkmann, have produced books that attempt to capture the bitter comedy in the fact that England has spent most of the past half-century being humiliated at the sport that we gave the world.

Hughes, in fact, goes right back to the beginnings of the game, with the preposterous suggestion that it might have been invented by the French. Then it becomes clear that this is A Joke. I’m afraid that there’s a lot of this sort of thing in Hughes’s latest offering, but then, it is subtitled “an irreverent ­history”, which is a bit of a warning. When he details the suicide of one of England’s early cricket captains, Arthur Shrewsbury, in order to end up with the line “It was the original definition of a dead bat”, it’s clear that this is a book most suited to 15-year-olds — or perhaps middle-aged cricket fans with an adolescent sense of humour, which may indeed be a sizeable market.

It’s a pity, because Hughes’s account of his trials as an aspiring county cricketer who never quite made it to the very top, A Lot of Hard Yakka, is one of the best of all cricket books; the few memorable passages in his latest work are glimpses of his own encounters with the greats, such as David Gower’s infuriating diffidence as he mangles Hughes’s finest deliveries with shots of outrageous invention.

Both Hughes and Berkmann identify a common reason for England’s remarkable ability to lose to opponents with a fraction of our cricketing infrastructure: the appalling stupidity of those who run the county game, or who select the national side. According to Hughes, this was because for generations the game was bossed by snobbish amateurs who liked nothing better than to humiliate the poor professionals in their midst.

For him, this is encapsulated in the experience of bowling for Middlesex at Lord’s while being watched by the old-Etonian MCC panjandrum Gubby Allen from his chauffeur-driven Bentley: at one point the electric windows of the limousine are lowered, Allen drawls, “Too many no-balls, Hughes”, and then the windows go up again. One can see that this sort of thing could scar a man, but after Hughes’s umpteenth assault on the inbred toffs of the English cricket establishment, I was almost ready to take their unlovely side against the permanently bolshie professionals.

Then, however, you read Berkmann, and are reminded just how much we England supporters have suffered — and I mean really suffered, emotionally — as a result of the years of incompetent governance. It might be, of course, that our anger is based on a false belief that our cricketers should be the best in the world, and would have proved so, were it not for the fact that they are lions led by donkeys.

As Berkmann himself asks, in a sudden flash of painful realism, “Is it that England are a good team that sometimes played abjectly, or a useless team that occasionally played above itself? It strikes me now that we could have asked this question at any time since 1972. We are still asking it. Maybe we always will be.”

Berkmann’s account of the exquisite agonies of being an England supporter suffering almost continual humiliation at the hands of the appallingly highly motivated Aussies is not that of an ex-pro like Hughes: rather, it is that of a hopeless and hopelessly enthusiastic amateur — I know, I once played against Berkmann’s team — who wants to worship England’s finest, but is almost invariably let down by his idols. As a similar cricket tragic, all I could say as I turned over each perfectly judged page of pain was, rather in the style of Sybil on the phone to her friend in Fawlty Towers, “I know. I know. I knoooow.”

Now here we all are once again, on the verge of yet another Ashes series against the touring Australian side. As usual, their boys look meaner, harder and fitter than our boys. Yet still we believe, in a parody of patriotism, that we have some God-given right to win, and that a cosmic injustice will be perpetrated if the Aussies yet again come out on top. So we have to keep finding reasons to laugh, if only to stop the tears from flowing.

And God Created Cricket by Simon Hughes
Doubleday £20 pp352
Ashes to Ashes by Marcus Berkmann
Little, Brown £16.99 pp320

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