The life story of one of the most successful and controversial Test bowlers of the 21st century is intelligently told, and entertaining
Stuart Broad, one of the most successful and controversial international cricketers of the 21st century, exited the game with a magician’s flourish earlier this year. Racing against time to bowl Australia out in the final Ashes test, Broad switched the bails at the non-striker’s end (his ‘bail Mary’ trick, as he later called it) to change his luck. As you’ve probably seen in the endlessly-replayed clip by now, it worked.
Broad took the last two wickets to fall on that momentous afternoon, took a lap of honour and finished one of the most remarkable Test match careers of all time. As the man himself writes in his memoir, Broadly Speaking, “It (the bail-shifting) was an act that united two features that ran concurrently through my life on a cricket field but didn’t always naturally align — a desire to enjoy myself and a desperation to win.”
Tale spin
A career filled with such dramatic highs and lows (mostly highs, it must be said) deserved a truly entertaining memoir. Luckily for us, Broadly Speaking (Hodder & Stoughton, distributed in India by Hachette) fits the bill for the most part. The book is sensitive, even generous when it comes to Broad’s on-field opponents, although like any elite fast bowler he does give in to his competitive ego sometimes, especially when Australians are involved.
The childhood escapades, the boyhood feats on the field and the delayed-release maturity visited upon the man — all of these phases in his life receive equal attention in the memoir. It’s written with a keen eye not just on cricket (and football, for there are literally dozens of Premier League allusions) but also on the psychology of all high-level sports, the mindset and the intensity that become second nature for champion athletes.
Broad’s descriptions of arriving at his vocation — fast bowling — are charming and revelatory in the extreme if you are new to watching cricket. He’s also smart enough to acknowledge his privilege straight off the bat, in the opening chapter. Broad’s father Chris played Test cricket for England, too, and this opened doors for young Stuart (even after his parents split up and he no longer lived with his Dad).
On one such occasion, the teenaged Stuart needed money to go on an Australia tour. His father’s former Nottinghamshire teammate and one of the all-time-greats of the game, Kiwi all-rounder Richard Hadlee, stepped in, did a Q&A at Broad’s then-club, and raised the money that way. Later, when Stuart was early into his England career, Hadlee helped the young man shorten his run-up without affecting his pace or putting unnecessary strain on his back. To the typical first-class cricketer around the world, interventions like these must surely read like fairytales — Broad is self-aware and frames it exactly this way in Broadly Speaking.
The Bazball philosophy
Broad is similarly candid while talking about (drumroll) ‘Bazball’, Team England’s new, attack-first on-field philosophy (named after their coach, former Team New Zealand skipper Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum) that has garnered both fans and skeptics around the cricketing world. What I found especially interesting was the way Broad links the Bazball philosophy to the way his mother would ask him if he enjoyed himself after every single schoolboy game. He was never asked about how many runs he scored or how many wickets he took; it was always about having fun (he even calls it “Cazball” jokingly, after his mother Carol).
“Cricket under ‘Baz’ McCullum was so liberating. When people talk about Bazball, they are not referencing game plans and strategies. They are talking about cricket in its purest form. An environment in which the usual pressures associated with international cricket are conspicuous by their absence. It was the freest I ever felt on a cricket field and playing with no fear of failure suited perfectly the stage I was at in my life. Arguably, it also helped that between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-seven I knew exactly how I wanted to bowl, and retained confidence in delivering it,” he writes.
Carol also features prominently in one of the strongest passages in the book — the one where Broad talks about being diagnosed with asthma as a teenager. For those who are athletically inclined (and even the teenaged Broad hulked over his classmates) an illness like that is especially cruel and Broad discusses the issue with a light touch here.
The moment of the sixth sixer
But my favourite section — and I suspect this will be the case for a lot of Indian readers — is where Broad talks about the India vs England game at the 2007 T20 World Cup in South Africa. This was, of course, the game where Yuvraj Singh (after being goaded into a war-of-words with Andrew Flintoff) smashed all six deliveries of a Stuart Broad over for sixers, to Ravi Shastri’s rapturous delight on commentary. The moment of the sixth sixer is as well-known in Indian cricketing circles as Dhoni hitting the winning sixer in the 2011 50-over World Cup final.
Broad is hilarious and self-deprecatory in this passage and he has nothing but lavish praise for his tormentor Yuvraj Singh, whose stroke play he calls “unbelievable” and “mouth-drying” at one point: “I didn’t have a leg cutter at the time, but incorporated it into my repertoire pretty soon afterwards, shifting the cricket focus from dwelling on a painful past to a brighter future. I reviewed how I wanted to bowl going forward and being Yuvraj-ed probably put me off yorkers. I never really committed to being a yorker bowler, because I reasoned it was quite a difficult task for someone of six foot six. All the best yorker bowlers of my generation tended to be a bit shorter — Waqar Younis, Darren Gough, Dale Steyn and Jasprit Bumrah.”
That passage is not just smartly written, it has excellent cricket analysis towards the end and in retrospect, explains so much about Broad’s ODI bowling in particular. In short, it fulfils what I see as the three main objectives of a cricketing memoir — the ‘confessional’ tone, the hardcore technical analysis and the ‘life lessons’ aspect. The encounter with Yuvraj changed Broad at a fundamental level. He learned how to control his on-field emotions better. He learned how to back his skills under pressure and not try to attempt something flashy to prove a point in front of a cocky opponent. By his own admission, that night made him a better bowler and a better person.
Broadly Speaking isn’t always free from sporting cliché and well-worn themes of ‘redemption’ on the cricket field. But on the whole it is a very intelligent memoir, one which also happens to be supremely entertaining and more than fair to teammates and opponents alike.
