Along with a barrelful of hype, cricket's World Cup comes with significant climate change-in an otherwise sedate environment of India's line-up of cricket books. The World Cup brings an unexpected hailstorm of releases and 2007's offerings include two that are meant to be giant cricket balls, two that aim to be comprehensive companions, one that could do double duty as a door stopper in Rashtrapati Bhavan and another that can fit into a jacket pocket.

Like hailstorms, it may all look spectacular but venture forth without a sense of timing (or a helmet) and serious injury is guaranteed. Every major sporting occasion has its attendant blitz of books but for all its verbiage, cricket's World Cup does not yet have a compendium to match David Wallechinsky's Olympic volumes.

PICTURE SPEAK

Devendra Prabhudesai, author of Cricket World Cup: Around the World In Seventy-and-a-half Days (Rupa), tries to buck the formula by highlighting 70 memorable World Cup matches: tight finishes, surprise results, and then those games that set a trend, like Sri Lanka's 1996 first round match against India in Delhi that forever changed the way batsmen opened the innings in the short game. Qaiser Mohammad Ali's World Cup Cricket Companion (Penguin) has interviews with players, coaches, umpires and officials at its end. Ashis Ray's One Day Cricket: The Indian Challenge (HarperCollins) is part India-centric memoir-part match summary. Peter Murray's World Cup Cricket (Murray Books) is the red herring of the lot: its attractive cover meant to look like a red cricket ball even has a seam that feels authentic. Inside, it is merely a collection of statistics and 27 randomly selected profiles and information about the World Cup that can be found on the Internet. Books shaped like cricket balls will catch the eye but they are murder on photographs. Murray has maxed out on the visual mutilations of batsmen and bowlers with arms and feet cut off.

The lone biography in the new bunch is Sourav Ganguly: The Maharaja of Cricket (Niyogi Books) by Debasish Datta. Lavishly mounted (and equally lavishly priced), it has some rare photographs to commend it. Ganguly's career has spawned an industry in deconstructionist discourse. Now that he has exhausted journalists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, probably only his own memoirs will do by way of illumination.

To be fair, of the bunch currently in circulation, neither Wisden's Age of Revolution (Penguin), edited by Stephen Moss, nor Caught & Told (Roli) co-authored by Sandeep Patil and Clayton Murzello was timed with the World Cup in mind. The Age of Revolution is an anthology of writing from Wisden between 1978 and 2006 i.e. since Kerry Packer turned the game from colonial indulgence to modern sport and match fixing brought the CBI into the frame. This was cricket's age of tumult when power and priorities shifted eastwards. Wisden's writings now are often more in sync with the times but there is enough in this tome to suggest that the worthies in Wisden had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the revolution.

Finally Caught & Told, without fuss or embellishment, documents Indian cricket's rich tradition of oral yarns. Just the thing to turn to during a change of innings or a break in play. Every cricketer at the first-class or international level has a funny, printable story to tell. This is an idea that lends itself to a sequel or two.

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