A conversational, guided tour of a golden age for cricket

Everybody who paid attention at the time knows that English cricket was a joke in the 1990s. Humiliation followed humiliation; scandal followed scandal; batting collapse followed bowling failure. The joke went round that the only difference between English wickets and buses was that you didn't have to wait for the wickets. They just came all at once anyway.

But then, towards the end of that decade, when Cool Britannia was all the rage, something happened. Or rather several things happened, and together they conspired to turn England from wooden spoons to world beaters. The appointment of Ian MacLaurin to run the England and Wales Cricket Board was a masterstroke: his leadership and rigour were magnificent, and he oversaw the introduction of central contracts for England players.

Equally significant, Nasser Hussain and Duncan Fletcher came together, as captain and coach, to instil a level of discipline and ambition in the England set up that had been absent for perhaps a decade. They defeated defeatism. But perhaps the most neglected aspect of England's renaissance in that decade was the televisual revolution brought about by Channel 4's broadcasting of cricket rights. That revolution was personified by Mark Nicholas.

I remember very distinctly, growing up in that decade and watching cricket fanatically, that the ECB were open about their desire to find a familiar, friendly personality to be the face of the game on television. In Nicholas they struck gold: someone who married dexterity and aplomb as a broadcaster with a professional past in the game and, above all, the irrepressible love and affection of a true fan. Fans of cricket don't come by halves. We are nuts, every one of us. But perhaps especially Nicholas.

It is that irrepressibility that comes across in his hugely enjoyable book, A Beautiful Game. Nicholas explains how the death of his father prompted him to throw himself into playing sport, and cricket specifically: how he found meaning, and learned his values, on the playing fields of village clubs and then across the county scene.

Nicholas was very nearly offered the captaincy of England, but instead ended up playing for England A, a kind of glorious Second XI, and he recounts his flirtations and frustrations with the top level of the game honestly. In a sense, the fact that Nicholas didn't have a long career in Test matches for England, while a sadness for him, is a huge advantage for the reader, because he approaches the game not with the holier-than-thou pomposity of a true cricketing great, but rather the accessible decency of someone who realises how privileged he has been to play to a professional level.

This, together with the conversational nature of the writing - Nicholas writes like he speaks, full of camaraderie, quips, jollity and English pluck - make the book a kind of fantasy guided tour of the past 30 years in the game, which happens to have been a golden age blessed by many legends and outstanding sides.

There are chapters on the hard yakka of the county circuit; on the best bowlers and batsmen he has faced in the middle and the nets; on making it as a media personality; and (a great indulgence for me, as a spin bowling obsessive) facing Shane Warne in the nets while staying with the Australian leg-spinner in Melbourne. All of these passages are written with a verve that give you a sense of being there with Nicholas.

As with all cricket books, there is a ready supply of anecdotage which varnishes every other page. But in my view the most affecting chapter concerns the monumental, sad but ultimately heroic endeavours of the Smith brothers.

Robin and Chris Smith were two of the most talented men ever to pick up a bat, and Nicholas grew close to them at Hampshire CCC, much as he grew close to the great West Indian fast bowler Malcolm Marshall. Robin played many times for England, a dashingly handsome player in every respect, whose appeal to many women helped make him something of a party animal. But little known to those of my vintage, he took to the bottle with a harrowing constancy when his playing days were over, so much so that he sank into both addiction and depression, and moved to Australia.

The glamour of sport at the top level is such that we often think little, as fans and followers of the game, of what happens to those who don't quite make it, or who are sullied by fatal flaws, or who - quite naturally - find the idea of retiring at 35 profoundly discombobulating. It was impossible not to be very moved by Nicholas's recollection of a reunion dinner he had with the Smith brothers, in which they toasted their good fortune in life, regaled each other with tales of cricketing derring do, and drank to Robin's thankfully now improving health.

That, of course, is what every fan of the game who saw Robin Smith bat would have wanted to do. In giving such fans a ringside seat during a great era of the game, and delivering his recollections in prose that could have come straight of the commentary box, Nicholas has done a huge service to a game already in his debt. He helped to lift English cricket out of the sporting gloom of the late 1990s; and now he has chronicled his era as if he were one of us. For that, every cricket nut, English or otherwise, should be immensely grateful.