Tuesday, April 16, 2002 Les Carlyon, the brilliant Australian journalist, does not often write about cricket these days, but when he does it is worth stopping whatever you are doing and breathing in the words. The other day he concocted a gorgeous line about the great Australian cricket writer Peter McFarline. "Peter," wrote Les, "could make stories seem like happy accidents, something he'd just dashed off." It was a line any writer would love to have written; a line any writer would love to see written about him.

It is Angus Fraser's turn to learn that there is more to a good line than landing a cricket ball on a spot two centimetres outside off stump. It was fitting, in a perverse kind of way, that rumours about Fraser trading life as a cricket player for life as a cricket writer appeared in the British press on the same day the news filtered through that McFarline had died of a heart attack aged 57. As one era entered a new phase - three out of Britain's four quality newspapers now boast former into-the-wind seam bowlers as cricket correspondents - another era came to an end. For there will never be another McFarline.

It is often assumed that Australian cricket writers lack the literary lustre of their English counterparts. And there is some truth in it; match reports in Australian newspapers too often tell the reader too little about the actual game, sacrificing a sense of narrative for a stream of meaningless stats and pre-packaged quotes.

But if that is so, it is equally true that Australia's best are better than anyone else's. The finest Australian cricket journalists write with a frankness, a spareness and an observational breadth lacking in the cliché-tarred cynicism of Fleet Street, where the identity of the wordsmith is considered more significant than the words he writes.

There is nothing new in this. Nor is there anything inherently bad in it. In theory, the opinions of former Test players should be more educated than those of humble hacks who know more about a bottle of Scotch than they do about the bottle required to face Glenn McGrath. In theory, former Test players should be able to write lucid and original sentences. In practice, they don't.

Think of the world's best cricket writers of today and you think of Matthew Engel, Tim de Lisle and John Woodcock (still punching at 75) in England; Gideon Haigh, Peter Roebuck and Greg Baum in Australia; Harsha Bhogle in India and Tony Cozier in the West Indies. Of those, only Roebuck played cricket at a distinguished level - and even then, with his specs and floppy sunhat, he looked more like a journalist than a cricketer.

Yet the English infatuation with player-writers deepens with each passing season, despite the fact that it has failed to produce prose any more sparkling than CB Fry's offerings in the Daily Express precisely a century ago. During last year's Ashes series tens of thousands of words were written by, or ghost-written for, past and present players. Almost all were instantly forgettable. The last former player to win The Cricket Society's book of the year prize, awarded last week to the romanticist Stephen Chalke, was Mike Brearley in 1985. Seventeen years later Brearley remains far and away the best of those who have swapped the bat for the biro.

Even those former England cricketers who now count writing as their day job - Mike Selvey, Derek Pringle and Vic Marks - are frequently outwritten by their non-playing understudies. The same goes for The Times's Christopher Martin-Jenkins, not a star player but unquestionably a star, who now finds himself the last non-playing cricket correspondent of an English broadsheet.

Fraser, as the new man at The Independent, joins Selvey and Pringle in the seamers-turned-squealers brigade. He was by far the best bowler of the three, and he might eventually prove the best writer too, for he is thoughtful, diligent and does not try to show the reader how clever he is.

Australia does not have the same obsession with player-writers, perhaps because we breed ex-fast bowlers rather than former medium-pacers. Although Adam Gilchrist and Steve Waugh both write unliterary and generally uninformative columns for the Murdoch press, it is not assumed that a humdrum statement-of-the-obvious is newsworthy just because it comes out of Jeff Thomson's mouth.

However, Australia is no more likely to produce another Peter McFarline than Angus Fraser is to become one. That is not because McFarline was a tenacious breaker of stories, a trenchant critic and an old-fashioned allrounder who was at home whether writing about cricket, horse racing or Australian Rules football. It is not because he remained all those things throughout the final stanza of his life, even when he could not eat, drink, write or move a muscle below his neck.

No, the remarkable thing about McFarline is that he had a wife, Dell, who sat by his bedside, listening and taking notes, as he mouthed words to her for the next morning's paper about something so daft as a cricket match. It is hard to imagine a woman of the 21st century doing the same thing; reason enough to suppose that we will never see his like again, and proof that the one thing more precious than a good line is a good woman. Gus, take note.

Chris Ryan is a former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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