Athers takes a gamble

Gambling: A story of triumph and disaster by Mike Atherton (Hodder & Stoughton, 328pp) £18.99

Buy this book for £20 from Cricshop

Ex officio, England captains write books. Andrew Strauss has lately joined the club. Andrew Flintoff already seems to have produced more volumes than Barbara Cartland. (We still await Marcus Trescothick, who might be more interesting than some.)

"Write" is, of course, used here in the loosest sense. Few England captains bother writing their own books. Some, one suspects, do not even bother to read them.

The two great exceptions have, predictably, proved to be Cambridge men. Mike Brearley learned the difference between academic essay and a rattling good read from his collaborator Dudley Doust, who was eventually able to stand back as Brearley produced The Art of Captaincy.

And Mike Atherton's progress has been along similar lines. His early articles were as ponderous as some of his 'we're-in-the-cartagain' captain's innings. But he went on to produce an excellent autobiography. And now he has gone one better than Brears and written a book that has little to do with cricket.

The surprise starts with the cover, with the author posing fetchingly in his DJ, in front of a roulette table. It looks like a Hollywood publicity shot: Shock Choice As New James Bond. It is less of a surprise that Atherton really did do the hard graft. He studied the history and literature of gambling; he walked both the streets of Las Vegas and the Kilburn High Road; he made a bit of a Charlie of himself in a poker championship and attended a Gamblers Anonymous meeting; he talked to a wide range of engaging eccentrics and proved himself a skilled and sympathetic interviewer.

There is a load of good stuff in here - he even shares with us that in 1748 the betting book at White's Club recorded that: "Mr Boone bet Mr Rigby that his penis was within an inch as long as Mr Halsy's." Oh, cricket? You want to know about cricket? It rates a chapter, centred on the matchfixing scandal, but I was a touch disappointed not to learn more. And overall my reservation about this fine book is that one is left with a slight sense of cop-out. One of the colour plates is captioned "Derek and Elaine Thompson look contented at their Dorset home, and why not? Wouldn't you be with a couple of million salted away after picking six lucky numbers?" Maybe not.

The anecdotal evidence is that many big pools and lottery winners end up losing their friends, their marbles and - often - their money. And I still wonder, as a punter myself, about the more mundane questions thrown up by gambling. Will Britain 's present liberal attitude towards gambling (bizarre from an otherwise authoritarian government) increase the sum of human misery? And can it ever be right to bet on cricket or will it inevitably corrupt the game?

In the end, I felt, he could have stood back just a bit more. Now Athers has to take his own big punt. Clearly his celebrity opened doors during his research, just as it is used shamelessly on the cover. All of that is fair enough. But can he really stand or fall on his skill as a writer?

For his next book I suggest he raises the bar again and tries something where his fame will not help at all: "Through Uzbekistan in a Burka," perhaps. Mind you, the modern world being what it is, the first bloke he meets in Samarkand would probably be from Oswaldtwistle and say "Ee, Athers? Why did you declare with Hick on 98, then?"