World Cup nerd nirvana

In A Complete History of World Cup Cricket, Mark Browning and James Grapsas set out on the Herculean task of chronicling every single fixture in the tournament's history in a way that is exhaustive but not exhausting. For the most part they keep the run rate ticking along nicely in this, the fifth edition of their weighty and authoritative tome.

The theme here is tune in, turn on and nerd out. Each match comes complete with a scorecard and detailed match report, many of which sparkle with overlooked and long-forgotten details. Each preliminary game is given equal weighting in approximate quantity of information, if not enthusiasm. It couldn't have been an easy task making anything interesting of the 1987 Australians going through the motions against Zimbabwe in Cuttack, but soon Bruce Reid is cracking Andy Waller (appearing here as "Chris", his middle name) on the bridge of the nose and you're back in the game.

As a primer to the upcoming 2015 tournament, it's full of the kind of trainspottery factoids vital to ensuring readers don't doze off. I can see myself using this as a reference text, revisiting many of the match reports. Thanks to Browning and Grapsas' eye for detail and colour, many entries pop with quirky tidbits. They have also called upon the first-hand accounts of players to supplement their diligent research.

We find out that the East Africa wicketkeeper Hamish McLeod was a Slazenger sales rep from Zambia, that Wasim Akram considered the memorable 1992 group photo shoot aboard the HMAS Canberra "a shambles" and the cost of the black-tie launch dinner "immoral", and then you wince at the story of UAE's captain Sultan Zarawani striding out to face Allan Donald without a helmet in his side's first game of the 1996 event and promptly getting sconed first ball.

The downsides are a little beyond the control of the authors. Rodney Hogg's foreword, slightly bizarre to anyone familiar with his usual stream of consciousness, reads like a particularly bland Wikipedia entry and sits at odds with the narrative flourishes on display elsewhere. A tournament as rich in visual stimuli as the World Cup might also have benefited from some photos, but I guess that's not the point of this endeavour.

This type of book, which has been perhaps unfairly sidelined by the broader brushstrokes of online resources, is something of an anachronism this late in the millennium but it's still a welcome addition to the groaning shelves of us diehards who don't mind swigging the hard stuff straight and often. Nothing worthwhile is overlooked.

Each tournament is given a thorough introduction and later a post-mortem that's perhaps a little short (incredible as that may seem in a 549-page epic), but the detail is always rich and this volume could well serve as the definitive argument-settler when it comes to World Cup encounters.

In regards to the prose, I detected throughout that one of the authors is perhaps more content to pat a few defensive strokes back to the bowler, where the other takes a longer blade to the attack, sometimes within the one essay. Thus, Ted Dexter is "semi-eccentric", Tony Greig wears "silly gloves", Ian Chappell's side is "slightly rough-edged", and the Headingley wicket for the 1975 semi-final "rather strange", whereas Andy Roberts is a "cold, unsmiling assassin", and that same Chappell side boasts "a pre-punk image in their disdain of certain conventions".

Sometimes those stylistic disparities meet in the middle with mixed results ("Gilmour wore a long-sleeved jumper to keep out the chilly wind, yet he immediately warmed to his task"). A question mark might well have "hung over Clive Lloyd's groin", but putting it like that conjured unintended mental images, and surely only Alan Partridge would describe a Mike Denness/Chris Old partnership as "batting mayhem". Still, many of the more intentional attempts to entertain readers come off the middle of the bat.

It's a beautiful thing, the World Cup. What's not to love about a tournament in which Clive Lloyd was once dismissed, decided his team was beyond salvation against Pakistan, and proceeded to hit the ales, unaware West Indies would pull off a one-wicket win? The result also provided a healthy payday for Lloyd's accountant Gordon Andrews, who plunged £150 on West Indies at 66-1. Imran Khan had missed that game, taking exams at Oxford, and his captain Asif Iqbal lay in a Birmingham hospital recovering from a haemorrhoid operation, something I wouldn't know were it not for Browning and Grapsas. It's also possible that I didn't need quite that much detail, but that's actually a great charm of this book.

When I think of the World Cup, my mind's eye conjures crystal-clear footage of Martin Crowe and Mark Greatbatch on the rampage in Napier during the 1992 tournament, which is my favourite for the entirely subjective reason that it was the first I watched on TV and the uniforms were brilliant. What this book does is fill all the gaps, particularly for the tournaments that occurred before my time. Raking up memories of Aamer Sohail, Brian McMillan, Eddo Brandes and Ken Rutherford is just the icing on the cake.

I noted that the stats for the original 1999 edition of the book were compiled by Mark Browning's son Ben, who, my own research reveals, is a member of Australian electro band Cut Copy. I guess that would make him Australia's only noteworthy rock star/cricket statistician. Given the man hours the authors have logged creating this labour of love, I'm sure they'd appreciate such attention to detail.

A Complete History of World Cup Cricket
by Mark Browning and James Grapsas
New Holland Publishers
560 pages, A$17.52 (paperback)