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If Sri Lankans want to chronicle the love-hate relationship between their country and Australia on and off the cricket field, then 'Crosscurrents - Sri Lanka and Australia at Cricket' by Michael Roberts and Alfred James (published by Walla Walla Press and Mobitel, and priced at Rs. 900 incl GST, 168 pages) is the book for them.

With the Muthiah Muralitharan throwing controversy being enacted all over again at Adelaide in the current Carlton and United World Series Cup, readers of this book browsing through Part III will get a clear insight to the controversies that surrounded the team during their tour to Australia four years ago.

Part IV deals with 'Bombs and the World Cup' where Australia's refusal to honour their World Cup fixture in Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka's ultimate triumph over Australia in the World Cup final at Lahore are adequately dealt with.

The book concentrates more on the off field happenings rather than on the detailed match reports which can always be found in other publications.

As the authors admit in their preface, the books is 'an anthology of articles surveying the inter-relations between Sri Lanka and Australia at cricket'.

It further states, 'the survey does not purport to be comprehensive and its selections have been contrained by manageability and economics'.

The only outside contributors to the book are S.S. Perera, the former Sri Lanka Cricket Board recorder, who provides 'Notes on Sri Lanka's cricket heritage' in Part I and Richard Cashman, who writes of 'Australian relations with Sri Lanka' in Part II. The rest of the 11 chapters are taken up by the authors.

Most interesting and of value are the full scoreboards of matches played between Sri Lanka and Australia from 1884 to 1981 (there are 35 of them) and some rare black and white photographs gleaned from the scrapbooks of individuals dating back to as far as 1890.

The other two full scorecards are of Sri Lanka's two matches against Australia in the World Cups 1975 and 1996 - the only occasions they have met in the history of the competition. Both contests were memorable ones, the first seeing the totally unrecognised Sri Lankans taking on the full might of Lillee and Thomson and losing by 52 runs at the Oval, and the other, 21 years later, when Sri Lanka triumphed over Australia to win the World Cup at Lahore.

Author Roberts has some connection with Sri Lanka being educated at St. Aloysius College, Galle and obtaining first class honours at the University of Sri Lanka, Peradeniya and being elected a Rhodes scholar for Sri Lanka in 1962. He has published a number of scholarly works on Sri Lankan society and culture.

James is a university administrator and author of three cricket tour books and another work on averages and results of Australian first-class cricket from 1850-51 to 1957-58.