It seems ironic that the day I finished reading Jack Serong’s The Rules of Backyard Cricket, the Australian men’s Test captain, Tim Paine, resigned from his position, bidding a tearful farewell in what could have been a scene lifted directly from this novel.

In Serong’s brilliant book, all the cricket clichés we know and love are here, and the sport, which is regarded as a “gentleman’s game”, is shown as anything but with its sledging and corruption and bad-boy behaviour.

Its heroes, which are lauded in Australia and turned into holier-than-thou celebrities (even if it’s just to sell vitamins on TV!), are skewered beautifully in this wildly compelling and entertaining story about two talented brothers from Melbourne’s working-class western suburbs who grow up to represent their country in international cricket.

One brother is bad, another is good — and it’s this tension between the two that powers the story along faster than anything Dennis Lillee could ever deliver!

When the book opens we meet the narrator, Darren Keefe, who is locked in the boot of a car, bound and gagged, with gunshot wounds to his legs. The car is belting down a road somewhere, but we don’t know who is behind the wheel or what Darren has done to get into this precarious position.

The story then spools back to Darren’s childhood in suburban Melbourne in the 1980s, and from his position in the boot of the car, he tells his warts-and-all story, from talented child cricketer to white-ball superstar before falling from grace and reinventing himself as a TV commentator and after-dinner events speaker.

His older brother, Wally, is more successful than him, rising to become captain of the Australian men’s Test team. He’s the more responsible sibling; he’s more level-headed, logical and steady, whereas Darren is a trouble-maker, a likable larrikin who enjoys women and drink and gambling and drugs too much to take anything too seriously.

The one guiding force in their life is their determined and gutsy single mother, who recognises their talent when they are young boys, creating a perfect pitch for them in the backyard and working long shifts in the pub to pay for the best kit she can buy them.

It’s pretty clear from the outset that Darren has a wild streak in him that can’t be tamed.

But his talent with the bat means he rises through the ranks quickly — as a 12-year-old he’s playing in the seniors, by 20 he’s in the state squad and the leading run-scorer in Victorian district cricket — and before he knows it he’s playing white-ball cricket for Australia. He gets married but doesn’t really settle down — he likes partying too much.

It doesn’t help that his best friend has gangster connections (and may or may not be working for them), so there’s always plenty of drugs, mainly cocaine around, and with that comes violence and reputational crises to sort out. And then, when he’s offered a bribe to help “throw” a game, well…

The Rules of Backyard Cricket is one of those rip-roaring tales that take you in unexpected directions. I loved following the antics of these two brothers and their wonderful mother (who later succumbs to Alzheimer’s) and seeing how their careers unfold over two decades or so.

It’s a literary coming-of-age tale, but it’s also a crime story because how Darren ends up in the boot of a car is the consequence of corruption that he becomes entangled in. Every new chapter begins with a reminder that Darren is in the boot against his will, and it’s these glimpses of his confusion and anger and pain during these moments that helps build the suspense, making the novel a page-turner because you want to find out why he’s there and whether he will ever escape.

But the story is also a kind of loose satire about cricket because there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek swipes at how Australia treats its sports stars and how sports stars use the media and their celebrity to build their profiles and career. It’s set in the latter half of the 20th century, before social media and the internet took over everything, just at the point when cricket became properly professionalised, but much of what is written here still resonates today.

There’s a lot here to unpick about morality and ethics in sport, about sibling rivalry and the lengths parents will go to to help their children succeed, but most of all The Rules of Backyard Cricket is just a great big enjoyable romp.

I suspect Jock Serong had a lot of fun writing this; I certainly had a lot of fun reading it. This one will be in my Top 10 reads of the year for sure.

This beautifully written and acutely observed novel had me hooked from the first page. It opens much like any thriller or crime novel but it soon becomes apparent that it is much more than that, and I was gripped all the way through. It’s the story of two brothers growing up in suburban Australia. They play intense and competitive games of cricket in their backyard, and it soon becomes evident that they both have a special talent for the sport, a talent that their single mother is determined to support in any way she can. They both go on to be professional cricketers but approach their careers in very different ways, ways that keep them locked in a powerful but often antagonistic sibling relationship. You don’t have to be interested in cricket or in sport in general to enjoy this book, because it is above all a human story, a story of ambition, commitment and responsibility, of how celebrity and wealth can sometimes be too much to handle, of the sacrifices that have to be made along the way and the price of theses sacrifices. The novel is excellently paced and the denouement caught me by surprise. The crime element is perhaps a little over-the-top but in the overall narrative trajectory doesn’t feel out of place. As a study of the dark side of professional sport and the toll it can take, the book is second to none. I don’t feel that it is as widely known in the UK as it deserves to be, presumably because it’s Australian, but it is a novel I for one recommend wholeheartedly

Taut and suspenseful. I found it well worth the reading!

I have to confess that I hadn’t heard of the author before. I requested it because I was curious, I liked the cover/title and I had a friend at Uni who had the same surname.

The plotting of ‘Backyard Cricket’ is intricate – it opens with the narrator Darren, bound and gagged in the boot of a car, with a bullet wound. He knows he’s in trouble and is desperately searching for a way to escape. He’s also looking back trying to work out how it came to this.

It’s the story of two brothers growing up in the suburbs with a Mum who struggles to support them on a barmaid’s wage. Darren takes us back to his childhood and the intricate rules of backyard cricket he and his elder brother Wally devised. Both boys are fiercely competitive and go on to play at the highest levels with varying personal and professional success. Darren seems to attract trouble and the wrong sort of friends. Wally is the golden boy.

I’m not much of a cricket fan and I ‘switched off’ from the Underbelly franchise a long time ago, but ‘Backyard Cricket’ was compelling reading. There’s a lot of cricket, including the seamier side of match fixing and gambling. Think Peter Temple. But it’s also a great story about family dynamics – I liked the notion of the good son and the bad son. Darren thinks he’s the bad son, but is he? How much did he really know about his Mum, or his absent father for that matter? Or Wally?

To borrow a line from Molly - ‘Do yourself a favour’ and read ‘The Rules of Backyard Cricket’.

Ps Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to discover a great Aussie author. And my ma apologies - I read 'Rules' in October and hadn't realised the upload of my review hadn't worked!.

Original, and fun to read. Learned something about a sport you don't see in USA very often, and could not put it down, read in one sitting! More on amazon.com

4.5★
“Sport goes to the heart of everything. If you can reach inside it and f**k with its innards, 'you’re actually messing with society' . . . Bigger than drugs. Bigger than hookers and porn, because people shy away, they can smell the desperation. But the same people will go on consuming sport long after they know it’s rotten to the core. They’re insatiable.”

It could be any sport, but this is Melbourne and this is cricket. You've probably heard, when someone cheats, “But that’s not cricket!” meaning that’s not honourable. Cricket is supposed to have high standards. And I’m sure cricket tragics (die-hard fans) like to think it still does.

I enjoyed it in spite of all the cricket. You can skim the hit-by-hit details because Serong is such an accomplished writer and story-teller that anything important to the story is made clear. I’ve sat through enough televised cricket (while I read) that I have some understanding, but the sports story is universal. The lugging of equipment, the time spent away from home, the patience or otherwise of family and friends. The perks, the downsides.

As kids, Wally and Darren Keefe were typical rough-and-tumble brothers, close in age and passionate about cricket. They spent every waking hour practicing in the backyard until they could try out for the local clubs.

Darren narrates the story, beginning from the boot of a car where he’s battered, bound, and gagged, on his way to certain doom. He’s obviously crossed somebody big-time.

“To my sad surprise, whether you’re crawling home from Christmas with the aunts, or waiting to be shot dead and incinerated by gangsters, the Geelong Road turns out to be just as boring.”

While trying to extract himself (shot kneecap and all) from the cable ties and tape, he fills us in, with chapters alternating between the family back story and the current crime victim horror.

He and his brother are like a psychotic Shane Warne split in two – Wally, the dedicated, first-rate professional and Darren, the talented but hard-partying larrikin whose media coverage spills out of the sports pages and into the gossip columns.

“One columnist says he’d pay to watch Darren Keefe because something amazing might happen, but he’d bet the house on Wally Keefe, because the necessary will happen. Journalists love the potential clichés we suggest: Cain and Abel, Jekyll and Hyde, Noel and Liam. They know intuitively that we represent something latent on every suburban lawn where a newspaper lands. We are the inseparable siblings every parent worries for: good boy, bad boy. Total connection and fratricidal rage.”

Mum raised them single-handedly and was loyal to a fault. When Darren was in trouble later: “Mum adores me regardless, loves us both, in fact. She won’t hear a bad word—said to Wally after the charges were laid that I’d just fallen in with a bad crowd. Bless her—I was the bad crowd.”

But, she was right, which is how he ended up in the boot of the car. It’s often said that Aussies will bet on two flies on a wall, but I suspect that’s universal. So that leaves plenty of room for all kinds of funny business. Darren tells us that behind the scenes of broadcasts

“. . . commentators would routinely check with the players in advance about tactics; that we’d report back to the network with batting orders and bowling changes so they could tailor their advertising to the appearances of the big names.”

I enjoyed Serong’s writing style, his characters – the good, bad, and ugly – and the family dynamics. He’s captured that terrible awkwardness between competitive siblings who drift apart but still have to appear together in public and at family events. And he shows that what happens on the road can certainly come back to bite you. Of course, fame excuses a lot, and he shows us that too.

I can see this as a mini-series, and I could see it adapted for a number of sports – US baseball, Canadian hockey, soccer/football just about anywhere!

Excellent! And even better if you’re a cricket tragic! Thanks to NetGalley and Text Publishing for the review copy from which I’ve quoted.