Bearders: My Life In Cricket by Bill Frindall

Listeners to BBC Radio's ball-by-ball cricket commentary will be familiar with the dry interjections of Bill Frindall, who this summer celebrates his 40th season as the Test Match Special team's scorer and statistician. Brian Johnston (the TMS stalwart who gave Frindall his enduring nickname "Bearders") would regularly request unusual statistical analyses. "The Bearded Wonder" would rarely disappoint, and his book is packed full of odd records casually plucked from his depth of knowledge.

In the commentary box, this arcana is secondary to the awesome complexity of Frindall's personalised match-scoring system. This bears scant resemblance to the basic tablet of bowlers' and batsmen's names familiar to all village cricketers. Frindall uses three different sheets simultaneously: 17 bespoke codes gloss the scorecard with further information on the type of delivery and shot (or attempted shot), but Frindall also records the stroke's direction and notes on the fielding. This enables him to come up with a precise breakdown of, say, how often Andrew Flintoff has been dropped at third slip when mowing a Glenn McGrath bouncer towards cow corner.

Wickets cause pressure points, when about a dozen entries have to be made in two minutes. "The secret is to keep calm and establish an order of action," Frindall confides. "Scoring relies on rhythm."

As an exercise in data capture, his rhythm method is remarkable; but there's much more to "Bearders" than statistics. Frindall gazettes the schoolboy humour of the TMS commentaries and gives eulogies to two very different colleagues: "Johnners" and John Arlott, whom Frindall considered a surrogate father.

Arlott would often work through a couple of bottles of claret during his commentary, and the importance of "falling-over water" soon becomes apparent. When Ian Botham drafted Frindall to assist with his charity walk, his duties included wheeling a barrow of champagne around London.

Frindall's clipped, economical delivery keeps the occasionally over-exhaustive statistics in check, while rattling pleasurably through his RAF days ("training in advanced shirking"), speaking engagements, publications and a host of tours as player or scorer. He comes across as jovial fellow, carrying lightly his encyclopaedic knowledge. A self-deprecating humour gives his book an appeal far beyond the minutiae of his astonishing feats of scoring.