5 cricket books to read while you are in quarantine

#3 Steve Smith's Men by Geoff Lemon

Steve Smith's Men, titled ingeniously and ironically, in the hands of its very author (Picture courtesy: Geoff Lemon Sport via Twitter)

You've already watched "the new era for Australia's team", courtesy of Amazon Prime. But that was only half the story. That was only the aftermath of the biggest scandal of Australian sport.

What prompted David Warner to charge into Quinton de Kock, what prompted Steve Smith to condone an act of unconscionable cheating, what prompted Cameron Bancroft to shove the evidence down his underpants, or why Darren Lehmann told his boys to lie at the press conference that night? All you know is that the impact of all of it was too much, and handed Australia an innings defeat in the next match. From the outside, the entire fiasco is dumpster fire to you.

Welcome to Steve Smith's Men, the tale of Australia's mammoth fall from the highs of a home Ashes win in December 2017 to the lows of Cape Town in February next year. You will meet an incomprehensible David, a powerless and submissive Steve, a rookie Cameron trying to establish himself in a side, and the coach Darren who cried at his last press conference. The book is brutal, and will leave you frowning, thinking, hours after you're done with it. Read the chapter 'David' with care, because it is arguably among the greatest pieces of cricket literature ever written, as this excerpt reveals:

Australia's most controversial modern player (Warner) is not two sides of a coin. He's more like a handful of twelve-sided dice. Any combination of facets could be true. Any of it could change in an instant. All of those possibilities are simultaneous. He probably knows as little about them as anyone.