Fascinating days cricket at the Oval yesterday saw England, after an apparently shaky start, demolish the Australians for 160 leaving them in a commanding position and set fair to win the ashes.
According to this report of the second day's play, the uncertainty and the twists and turns of the day's play bore more than a passing resemblance to the spy novels of a certain British author. See the third paragraph.
In the blurb to the paperback edition of Funeral in Berlin in 1966, Len Deighton is pseudo-biographically described thus:
Experience - After working as a translator for the BBC Welsh service, clerk in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and manager of a chain of boutiques in Leeds, he became the Manchester stringer for The Times. He was unable to find a publisher for his first book which was lavishly praised by Kingsley Amis. Likes: being under the bonnet of a vintage motor car, public bars, ballroom dancing and cricket.
That's the end of the tenuous cricket-spy novelist connections.
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