Rain Men by Marcus Berkmann

You know that man? The one who wakes up, doesn't want to go to work, but has to go to work because of the paycheck. Wandering about doing daily, mundane tasks, cheerful but meaningless. But at the back of his head, there is always one question: "What is the score?"

Rain Men is a very funny book about such men. A few men who start their own cricket team (the Captain Scott Invitation XI), under hopes of being very good, and are in reality very bad. Men who are more interested in touring other village cricket teams for the lunch and high tea than playing. A team that has a "Tom Cairns Award" for the worst bowler of the year, named after Tom Cairns who had a bowling average of 102 in the first year of the club!

You might find it to not be a book about cricket, but rather a book about human nature. About a bunch of guys getting together but not getting along. However, at the end, it is a book about cricket. See, for example, the types of bowlers:
1) The perennially angry fast bowler - Remember Andre Nel?
2) The short-arse - The short, but really really quick bowler.
3) The colonial cousin - The general feeling that any tall West Indian bowler will be fast... dangerously fast.
4) The ex-fast bowler - They just refuse to retire.
5) The loose popgun - Could be a hatrick, could be 3 wides.
6) The sensitive flower - Can bowl well only if not being attacked
7) Mr Corridor of Uncertainty.
8) The donkey-dipper - Full tosses, over pitched deliveries. As described, "the arc is magnificent, so is the violence with which the batsman customarily greets it."
9) The unlucky bowler
10) The useless stranger - Remember Noel David?
11) Mr. Try Everything Once
12) The Enigma

As the Times Literary Supplement says
"If you have ever gone in number eight on a hatrick and doubled your team's score with a streaky boundary first ball... then there is only one cricket book for you, and Marcus Berkmann has written it."

Go, and buy it!