Anyone who’s ever taken part in a Sunday cricket match will have some great stories to support the truth that it is the superior form of the game: trekking out each weekend to play hilariously named teams at wildly varied venues and pitches, some indistinguishable from a construction site, some Wodehousian idylls; turning up three players short and an hour late and yet winning with the help of a novice American plucked from the boundary rope who can’t hold a bat vertical but can slog thirty runs in an over. My own favourites as an amateur captain include a sumptuous half-century by a batsman high on magic mushrooms, the abject terror of it all heightening his senses, and one of my team-mates going to join the opposition for the remainder of a match, so furious was he that I had put him at nine in the batting order instead of his usual three.

Herding Cats contains many of these types of anecdotes involving the Authors Cricket Club, carefully compiled by its long-suffering captain. Perhaps in vain, he has attempted to bring some order to the task of leading his ragtag crew, describing his attempts to manage the egos, talents, hopelessness, camaraderie