Many things lead to addiction and obsessiveness, even madness, but one of the most surprising, and lasting, is cricket. You don’t even have to be any good (I know); it can still take over too much of your life.
Marcus Berkmann, a writer (how he finds time to write anything during the summer is a puzzle) is no great shakes at the game. His account of his annual batting-average varies, but he never claims even to approach double-figures. At university he and other cricket failures founded a necessarily doomed team called, with student gallows-humour, the Captain Scott Invitation XI. Berkmann wrote a book about this team’s misadventures called Rain Men. (‘A very funny book about some very sad men,’ Ian Hislop.)
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It seems that in the end they all grew to loathe each other so much — obsession plus competitiveness is near-lethal — that a breakaway team was formed later, called, with slightly more sophisticated gloom, the Rain Men.
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