Penguins Stopped Play
by Harry Thompson
John Murray, $195
Penguins Stopped Play is (yet) another volume about the antics of Captain Scott's XI, a cricket team of varying ability and fame, who were previously written about by Marcus Berkmann - he then formed a breakaway team and wrote a book about them, too. Three books between two men on ostensibly the same bunch of inept village cricketers could be considered just a tad over-indulgent, and although, after a plodding first few chapters, Penguins does raise a smile here and there, it suffers from an incurable problem: Berkmann got there first.
This is compounded by the fact that anyone who has played village cricket has a kit-bag of their own outrageous, amplified tales to tell, and much like listening to someone earnestly recount their youthful athletic exploits (' ... oh really? I once got to the Berkshire under-19s 2nd XI trials, you know') it can be plain boring. We've all got those stories, and just happening to have Hugh Grant in your side is little compensation.
That said, in isolation the book is not without charm. Once it progresses from the oh-so-entertaining stories about captaining the oh-so-entertaining Scott players at home and moves to the team's fractious world tour, things pick up. The characters are no longer all lovable rogues; the stories are more believable (and interesting); and there are a couple of pages devoted to Hong Kong, where Scott's men played against the Kowloon and Hong Kong cricket clubs, and did the usual tourist things. For some reason, there's a small, warm dollop of satisfaction gained from reading a book that touches on places with which you're familiar. Discovering that Scott's XI played against Guiting Power, an idyllic Cotswolds village that formed part of my young cricketing life, produced the effect again.