No live action? No weekend games? No problem. As part of our new series, ESPN will each week recommend one book that you can dig into while in quarantine, in order to fill that sports-shaped hole in your heart.
Which is your favourite sports book?
Okay, I'm dodging the question and saying, let's talk about sports fiction. Fiction written around sport, which is hard to do and tough to find but, when done well, is unforgettable.
Okay, then, which is your favourite sports novel?
Have to dodge again, because highly-placed sources have informed me that Fidel Fernando is going to pick Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka, so I can't. Which is not fair, because it is spectacular and fearlessly full of in-jokes that only cricket-maniacs will recognise.
Pathetic. Our discussion ends right here.
Wait, I do have a favourite sports novel from 2019. That should work, right?
Oh God. Get it over with.
It's The Test by Nathan Leamon, published in 2018.
Doesn't matter. Finally. What did you particularly like about it?
It. Was. Like. Being. There. Inside an England dressing room during an Ashes Test. Inside stand-in captain James McCall's head. The reason Leamon has it down just so is because he's been there. In the England dressing room, as the team's data analyst. Data crunching is videos, numbers and thermal imaging etc. but Leamon has such finely-tuned antennae for human response and character, he could well be another kind of analyst. The M.J. Brearley degree-in-people variety. The book veers between the Test and everything leading up to it in first person, with all McCall's conflicts at play. Like a cracking Test, it all comes down to the final session in which the Ashes is to be decided. It is the authenticity of McCall's voice as cricketer and man in strife through the book, which is almost unnerving. Plus, the story works.
Others you would recommend?
Let's begin with the peerless Moti Nandy, Bengali sportswriter and novelist whose many books are a truthful account of Indian sport in the days before television and professionalism. There's a consolidated Hachette edition called Kick-Off: Stories from the Field, which contains his novellas, like Striker/Stopper and short stories.
You don't have to be a rugby fan (or an All Blacks obsessive like me) to enjoy Lloyd Jones' The Book of Fame, which is a fictionalised account of the All Blacks ("The Originals") first world tour in 1905-06 (played 35, won 34, the single defeat still contested over).
The cheekiest sports 'novel' around would have to be The Damned Utd by David Peace, a fictionalised account of the 44 days spent by the legendary Brian Clough as Leeds United manager. Clough's family apparently didn't like it, but it reads pretty real and they made a movie about it too.
For sheer surreal, though, try Centurion: The Father, the Son and the Spirit of Cricket by English professor Dr Pramesh Ratnakar. You'll never forget it.
The first sports book you remember reading?
Apart from borrowing (and then not returning 20 percent) of sports magazines off an older neighbour (Raju Mahanta, I am in your debt for a lifetime), it would have to be Sunny Days, which was definitely printed on blotting paper. It was like travelling with SMG, smuggled into his kit. Then Greatest: My Own Story, the Ali autobiography and a pirated edition of one of the thousands of Pele autobiographies/ biographies.
Your five sports books every sports fan should read.
Why only five? Life is long, macha. I promise not to OD on cricket here, but this monumental triptych is a must: CLR James' Beyond A Boundary, Mike Marqusee's Anyone But England, Ramachandra Guha's A Corner of a Foreign Field.
Then Susan Fornoff's Lady In the Locker Room - Uncovering the Oakland Athletics, which contained a frankly horrifying account of how a rare woman sports reporter in the US in the 1980s was treated by a baseball community and the baseball star who sent her a gift-wrapped rat. It had me counting blessings and showering gratitude on the professional company I kept in the 1990s.
Playing For Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made by David Halberstam is an ultramarathon in reporting and narration. After being ditched by Jordan who had promised him an interview, Halberstam spoke to one person connected to the superstar every day for two more months before hammering out this epic.
Golden Boy - Kim Hughes and the Bad Old Days of Australian Cricket by Christian Ryan because it confirmed everything I had imagined.
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football by David Winner was like being run rings around by Johann Cruyff et al.
Finally, This is Me by Ian Thorpe is like eavesdropping on the great swimming champion in intensive therapy.