Sometimes I Forgot to Laugh

4 ideas

1. The 1986 Somerset split over Richards

   In 1986, with Roebuck as captain, Somerset's committee declined to renew the contracts of Viv Richards and Joel Garner and signed New Zealander Martin Crowe instead; Ian Botham left the club in protest. A special general meeting of members at Shepton Mallet upheld the decision. Roebuck, who backed it, was cast as the villain who broke up the county's most successful team, and the book is his account of how a selection judgment became a war over loyalty, celebrity and ownership of a club.

2. Batting as solitary, failure-dominated work

   Roebuck argues that the professional batsman is isolated inside a team: one mistake ends his day, his worth is reduced to a public average, and teammates cannot share the failure. The result is chronic anxiety and self-absorption that can crowd out enjoyment, the forgetting to laugh in the title, even for someone succeeding by outside measures.

3. Difficulty as the price of standards

   Roebuck examines his own prickliness, aloofness and intolerance and presents it partly as the cost of refusing to compromise on how things should be done. Read critically, the book shows the limit of this view: a person can explain his abrasiveness as integrity while it still damages colleagues and leaves him friendless in a crisis.

4. The 2001 caning conviction, told by him

   In 2001 Roebuck pleaded guilty to three counts of common assault for caning three teenage South African cricketers who were living in his house under his supervision, and received a suspended sentence. In the book he presents this as a misjudged use of old-fashioned discipline.

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