More and more cricket players are turning to commentary and journalism. Jonathan Agnew has been there, done that. Charles Hutchinson reads up on Aggers

THE progression from cricket green to purple prose, from dressing room to press box, is in danger of becoming a stampede. Where once John Arlott and Neville Cardus, EW Swanton and Terry Brindle were the doyens, now former England bowlers Derek Pringle and Angus Fraser hold the cricket correspondent posts at the Daily Telegraph and the Independent respectively.

Michael Henderson, erstwhile Telegraph correspondent, has fulminated on this very theme in The Spectator. I have nothing against the sterling Fraser, who had only a column and radio punditry behind him. However, leaving the Middlesex captaincy one month into the season to become a senior member of the "Beastie Boys" - the cricket press pack - was an order as tall as Curtly Ambrose.

Jonathan Agnew had been there, done that, feeling the cold breath of ornery hack jealousy and suspicion in 1990 when the England and Leicestershire pace bowler joined the Today newspaper, and he is admirably candid in his newly updated memoirs when recalling his fledgling journalistic career on England's Australian tour that winter.

He floundered. "I looked through the cuttings for the early part of the tour and hardly recognised a word of what had been printed in the newspaper," he says of an experience not dissimilar to a lead singer's vocals being dubbed.

It takes time to settle in, to provide the writer's equivalent of the wicket-taking delivery rather than yeoman line and length, and while there have been exceptions, such as Mike Brearley, Peter Roebuck and latterly Michael Atherton in the Sunday Telegraph, they are columnists, not correspondents.

Unlike William Boot, The Beast's nature correspondent sent by mistake to cover growing African unrest in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, Agnew knew his subject but nevertheless he was happy to move from the "tabloid world of angry headlines and punchy prose" to the BBC.

After equipment-fumbling cub reporting days in Leicester, then analysis for the Test Match Special team, he graduated to the correspondent's role and has remained true to his own voice: bright, honest, natural and perky, quietly informed, undemonstrative and schoolboy-humoured but with a sting when necessary, most famously when calling for the England captain's head in the Atherton dirt-in-the-pocket affair.

The new chapter on match-fixer Hansie Cronje - written before the disgraced South African captain's death in a plane crash - confirms that Agnew now writes as well as he broadcasts. Indeed his thoughts on cricket politics and touring India and Pakistan suggest that, unlike the hapless countryman Boot, this son of a farmer could be a correspondent on foreign affairs and not just cricket (the sport whose overseas tours can be wars with bats for guns).

Over To You, Aggers, by Jonathan Agnew, published by Orion Books in hardback, £16.99.

Updated: 09:11 Wednesday, June 26, 2002