Love Quote by Thomas Keneally

Keneally’s charm move here is the stutter-step of qualification: “never any good,” “though I love it,” “as a, as a sort of mystery.” The sentence performs what it professes. It doesn’t arrive in a clean arc; it wanders, doubles back, corrects itself mid-flight. That’s not verbal clumsiness so much as an honest sketch of how many people actually relate to cricket: devotion without mastery, affection without full comprehension. For a novelist, that’s a rich posture. Loving a game “as a mystery” frames sport not as a test of competence but as a narrative engine - a field where meaning emerges from uncertainty, patience, and long stretches where nothing “happens” until it suddenly does.

The subtext is quietly anti-macho. Keneally refuses the familiar cultural script that fandom must be earned through expertise. Instead he claims a softer authority: the right to be enthralled by what exceeds you. Cricket, especially in its longer forms, rewards exactly that temperament. It’s famously resistant to instant legibility; its time-scale and rulebook feel like a private language, even for those inside the culture. Calling it a mystery nods to cricket as a Commonwealth inheritance too - part ritual, part social code, often understood as much through atmosphere as through scoring.

Contextually, it’s also a writer’s self-portrait. Keneally is signaling where his imagination lives: not in technical precision, but in the thick of ambiguity, where spectatorship becomes interpretation and not knowing becomes a kind of loyalty.