Curtly Ambrose never used to say very much when he was a cricketer. It is why he has called his new autobiography Time To Talk, and the early impressions are that not much has changed.

“I’m not a big talker,” he says, a trifle forebodingly, at the start of our interview. “Some guys like to be in the media every day, all the time, talking about themselves. I wasn’t one of those players. Plus, I always preferred to let the ball do the talking for me.”

A tally of 405 Test wickets testifies that cricket balls in the hands of Ambrose did not talk; they shouted. But, as it turns out, Ambrose certainly can talk when the mood takes him, and what animates him most is not talking about the past, but about the present. He sees unresponsive pitches all over the world, the rise of Twenty20, increasingly restrictive regulations on bowlers. And he concludes that cricket is a game becoming dangerously rigged in favour of the batsman.

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