Roderick Easdale Column: Mind Over Batter

Mind Over Batter by Graeme Fowler is an enjoyable cricket book, yet I can imagine an old schoolmaster of mine pointing out it doesn’t really answer the question. Not if that question is its subtitle of ‘mental strategies for sport and life’.

The blurb says: “Mind Over Batter is a personal quest to understand how his own mind works as he undergoes therapy for the first time. What he discovered surprised even him”. This is a good hook maybe, but it has little to do with the book’s actual plot.

It isn’t a self-help book, it is isn’t an instruction manual. It does indeed touch on the mental side of sport, but in an anecdotal chatty way – rarely full on, sometimes tangentially, often not-really-at-all. It’s a “pull up a chair up and lets have a jolly chat” book, and it works very well as that.

Graeme Fowler was a good commentator on Test Match Special back in the day and, with the help of journalist John Woodhouse, has produced a very readable, well-written book on cricket. But somehow it has a whiff of being conceived to extend the Fowler franchise, after the success of Absolutely Foxed than from a burning desire to address the question it poses in any depth or detail.

But Mind Over Batter is an entertaining and thoughtful, sometimes thought-provoking book ranging across several aspects of cricket. But don’t judge this book by its cover.

Mind Over Batter by Graeme Fowler is published by Simon & Schuster