Daniel Harris > Quotes

“Viv Richards, a man who put the ire into fire, the ow into power and the fucking fury into fucking fury.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“There is perhaps no examination in sport more exacting than opening the batting in Test cricket, certainly none more extensive and probing. The Tour de France might be harder, but is repetitive and principally a suffering competition, most of those involved simply trying to finish. Fighting is more obviously dangerous, but lasts a maximum of 33 minutes, tennis more physically arduous, but without the variety of opponents and frisson of harm. Opening the batting, on the other hand, demands from every faculty, physical and mental, that a sportsman can possibly be forced to employ: speed, skill, strength, bravery, application, instinct, intellect and improvisation.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“Dominating and consistent victories are one thing, seemingly impossible victories something else entirely, and the preserve of the very finest; a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecy that endures even when in all apparent terms, the ability that first created it has expired.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“The vast majority of sportsmen are left with little choice as regards how to play, serfs to their talent, but the very best are able to do so as they want, impressing personality upon ability.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings

“The notion that international competition – the battle between one arbitrary, bordered landmass and another – is not political, is a fatuous notion. But even in that context, cricket is different, its fierceness of a different order to that in almost every other sport. The story of the game is the story of civilisation, its old rivalries based on more than simple you and me, us and them dichotomies, its various antipathies rooted not in sport but actual, real things, a narrative with a genuine moral dimension.”
― Daniel Harris, Masterly Batting: 100 Great Test Innings