Cricket, Sir Donald Bradman once suggested, is a sport that teaches unselfishness. The reality was very much otherwise for Australian teams during the early 1980s. Kim Hughes, a flamboyant middle-order batsman from Perth, had been appointed captain for overseas tours, while a different captain took charge for home series. This leadership diarchy reopened some old wounds. Younger players like Hughes, who had remained loyal to the ancien régime of the Australian Cricket Board, received little respect from the grizzled veterans who had chosen to ply their trade with Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket just a few seasons before. Dressing-room rivalry sometimes spilled over on to the playing field. At practice sessions, the fearsome fast bowler Dennis Lillee regularly targeted his young captain’s head.

Hughes was at the helm for the disastrous Ashes tour of 1981. At Headingley, the coruscating strokeplay of Ian Botham propelled England to an unlikely win; ten days later at Edgbaston, Australia was on the wrong end of another Botham miracle. Hughes received more than his fair share of blame for these defeats. But much worse was to come. The Australians were trounced in Pakistan the following year, and then performed dismally at the 1983 World Cup. Hughes eventually took the reins for domestic Test matches in 1984 but the rumblings about his leadership continued. After the Australians had been annihilated by the West Indian fast bowlers on a bouncy Brisbane green-top, Hughes tearfully resigned his captaincy at the post-match press conference. His Test career was in ruins. After being overlooked for Ashes selection, he led a “rebel” tour to South Africa, at that stage still banned from international competition because of apartheid. Hughes’s first-class career ended in relative obscurity, playing for the South African province of Natal until his retirement in 1991.

Many were quick to condemn Hughes as unmanly for the way in which he resigned the captaincy. Christian Ryan’s book goes some way towards restoring the Golden Boy’s lustre. In his prime, Hughes was one of the most entertaining batsmen in world cricket. No spectator is likely to forget the massive six he clouted at Lord’s in 1980, or his trademark tactic of charging down the wicket to attack spin bowling. A combination of swashbuckle and balletic footwork brought him nine Test centuries, but he also had a tendency to throw his wicket away at crucial moments. Ryan has endeavoured to paint his subject warts and all. Hughes was an affable colleague but he could also be insufferable (after dispatching a ball to the boundary, he would often loudly congratulate himself). This is an unauthorized biography, so much of its information comes from interviews with lesser-known players. As such, it is a valuable archive of the professional cricketer’s lot during the 1980s – paltry wages, petty officials, vermin-infested hotels and astonishing levels of alcohol consumption. As in many books of this ilk, the prose can sometimes be overblown (at one point, a batsman facing the new ball is likened to “a farmer skinning a buffalo with secateurs”). Nevertheless, Golden Boy provides a fascinating account of Australian cricket’s leanest years. For all his mercurial talent, Hughes finished with an unspectacular Test batting average of 37. As his truncated career suggests, captaincy is often the quickest route to the dustbin of cricket history.

By contrast, the fast bowler Glenn McGrath’s place in the annals of his sport seems much more secure. Until his retirement in 2007, McGrath played a crucial role in Australia’s domination of both Test match cricket and the more frenetic limited-overs form of the game. During his thirteen-year career, McGrath captured 563 Test wickets, a record number for a pace bowler. This was achieved largely through accuracy and doggedness; McGrath never possessed the lightning speed of Caribbean champions such as Andy Roberts or Malcolm Marshall, but in many respects was just as intimidating. Line and Strength is a testament to the game’s new spirit of professionalism. International cricket is now played virtually all year round; as a result, disciplined athletes like McGrath generally prefer to lift weights instead of lagers.

Sporting memoirs tend to be formulaic. Usually they record some sort of personal triumph against the odds, related in a soporific style with a few nuggets of homespun philosophy thrown in. Though Line and Strength follows this well-trod path, it also manages to convey some of the sheer strangeness of cricketing life (one recent Australian coach, for instance, required his players to recite poetry at team meetings). The most touching parts of the book, however, concern the long illness suffered by McGrath’s wife. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997, Jane McGrath worked courageously to raise community awareness of her disease; there was an extensive public outpouring of grief after her death in 2008. It is a tribute to McGrath’s strength of mind that he was able to play with such distinction in these grim circumstances. But compared with the anguish of a loved one’s illness, bowling to the likes of Sachin Tendulkar must have seemed easy.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now