Game for a laugh

How do you regard cricketer Matthew Hoggard – Eng-land’s broad-backsided paceman who was an integral part of the 2005 Ashes-winning side?

Yorkshire’s stalwart, callously discarded by the national selectors after one indifferent game, like too many Tykes before him?

Or do you subscribe to the Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff school of thought, from the cover of the book: ‘Mad as a box of frogs!’ If Hoggy: Welcome To My World is anything to go by, the Freddie verdict is nearest the mark. I actually looked at the end of the book to see if the late Spike Milligan had participated somewhere along the line.

With chapter titles as diverse as Drinking For England, A Word From The Wife and Squashed By The Big Fat Lad you know from the start this is no ordinary sporting autobiography.

Of course you expect some of the standard stuff – cricket for Pudsey Congs at 11, Yorkshire at 18, England at 23, sixth in the all-time list of England Test wicket-takers.

But there’s no danger of being bogged down with the dull bits of the man’s early life when you reach England Calling by page 58.

In truth, the book may have started out with chronology as its spine, but once Hoggard, the man, takes centre stage, you’re whizzing around quicker than a Steve Harmison delivery as a humorous stream of consciousness takes you from the sublime to the ridiculous parts of his life – from the hat-trick against West Indies in Barbados in 2004, THAT series in 2005 (and exactly what Hoggard said to the-then Prime Minister Tony Blair), to getting a very ‘tired and emotional’ Freddie to bed on the last night of a tour.

As cricket autobiographies go it’s a refreshing change. Although as it has been written without a ghost it relies on its honesty rather than any technical skill, which allows the author’s personality to shine through.

It’s a different kettle of fish to his contemporary Marcus Trescothick’s Coming Back To Me, which won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award last year, and although this might not win the Pudsey-born man any literary awards, it will win him many more friends, and I suspect I know which ‘Hogfact’ (the book is littered with these gems of general knowledge) the man himself would prefer.

When Hoggard is casting around for a change of direction when his Yorkshire career ends – and let’s hope that’s not for a while – he could well follow the path of former Middlesex seamer Simon Hughes, who wrote a couple of books not a million miles away from this offering before beginning a very successful career in television.