The Cricket Statistician No 195

42 son, a face that did not seem to fit was that of David Frith. The humbug of ‘early retirement’ at least gave him time to research and write some of his worthiest books. In a sense David Frith is what so many of us might have aspired to in our wilder dreams. But he made it happen. Autograph book always in hand, he made it his business to accost the heroes of his childhood. Bert Oldfield’s sports shop was a regular Mecca and being given the wicket-keeper’s touring blazer set Frith off on the memorabilia trail. A mission to have every new book signed by its author assisted introductions and, with a talent for converting acquaintances to friends, he was soon seeking out some of cricket’s more interesting and elusive personalities, SF Barnes, Harold Larwood and Eddie Gilbert among them. Always focussed on the man behind the cricket stats, Frith was building up an unparalleled collection of tape recordings long before his wider reputation was made. No doubt cricket’s establishment figures can field a few who will brand Frith a prickly character, and his Anglo-Australian background can be unfairly and sometimes inaccurately referenced. As one who has shared with him battles to persuade The Cricketer of ten years ago to mend its ways and to get the ICC to breathe sense into its early efforts with DRS, this reviewer may be biased in the other direction, sharing, for instance, a wish for more descriptive powers and less cake in the TMS box. Moreover, to one born in the same year, there is a poignancy in Frith’s descriptions of childhood in the War with memories stirred of our heroes of the early post-war age – Randy Turpin from the boxing ring, Split Waterman from speedway, and the peerless Ruby Murray wooing all of us on the radio. This is a story well told with arguments well presented and many private emotions graphically shared with readers. The book, seen in electronic proof form, is largely free from typographical errors. The camera, Frith asserts, is man’s greatest invention. The photographs, all black and white, that he has now used, even those taken with his childhood Brownie, suggest that not just Arlott but Patrick Eagar too might have had a serious rival. Douglas Miller Hitting Against the Spin By Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones, Constable, pp388, £20, ISBN9781472131249, e-book £9.99 This is a book quite unlike any other that it has been my privilege to review. It is an analysis, based not only on vast quantities of data but also a deep understanding of the technicalities of cricket, of some of the recent and current trends in how the game is played, beginning with how England changed from being consistently poor performers in World Cup cricket, to winners of the tournament in 2019. If not quite an intellectual treatise, it is unashamedly cerebral in its approach, and the writers are not afraid to quote from Aeschylus and Ted Hughes as well as citing Oppenheimer and Zen. As the authors acknowledge, it is a book that could not have been written a few years ago: it is the power of analytical computer programmes that enable them to address such questions as how batsmen perform when on the front foot or when playing back (the answer surprised me), and the point at which it is impossible for a batsman to react in time to the