There is a particular kind of cricket audiobook that people describe as the cricket bible, and this is the one they mean. *Playing It My Way* is Sachin Tendulkar‘s own account of a career that reshaped the record books, and it is the book most fans in this country end up listening to eventually.
What follows is not a fan letter. It is what the audiobook actually is, how it is produced, who reads it, how long it runs, where it is worth pausing, and the other cricket audiobooks that hold up next to it.
The facts
| Audiobook | Who it is for | Length | Read by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Playing It My Way Sachin Tendulkar | Fans who want the definitive player autobiography in cricket | Sartaj Garewal | |
| Hitting Against the Spin Nathan Leamon with Ben Jones | Readers who want to understand how the game actually works | Nathan Leamon | |
| Sunny Days Sunil Gavaskar | The Indian reader who wants a second career in the same era | Avinash Kumar Singh | |
| The Dhoni Touch Bharat Sundaresan | Readers who want the modern Indian captaincy in one voice | Akshay Ghildiyal |
What each one covers
Playing It My Way — Sachin Tendulkar
This is the book every cricket autobiography is measured against, and the production is unusual: it is read by the actor Sartaj Garewal, with Tendulkar himself appearing on the recording. That combination works better than it sounds, because the performance gives it pace and the author gives it the parts nobody else could write.
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What you get is a career told from the inside, including the years before India became the side everybody remembers and the parts of the innings that went wrong. The passages on training, on being dropped and on reading a bowler are the ones worth the time on their own.
Read by Sartaj Garewal · Hodder & Stoughton. Listen on Audible
Hitting Against the Spin — Nathan Leamon with Ben Jones
Written by a journalist who spent years watching the professional game closely and then explained it for people who had never followed it, this is the shortest route into understanding why cricket works the way it does.
It is the companion piece to the autobiography: the memoir tells you what it felt like, and this explains why the game was set up to produce those moments.
Read by Nathan Leamon · Little, Brown Book Group. Listen on Audible
Sunny Days — Sunil Gavaskar
Gavaskar’s account of a career in a different era, and a useful corrective to the assumption that the game only changed once.
Read together with Tendulkar’s, the two accounts make a case about how much of modern cricket was inherited rather than invented.
Read by Avinash Kumar Singh · Audible Studios. Listen on Audible
The Dhoni Touch — Bharat Sundaresan
A journalist’s biography of the captain who changed how the side played, and a good example of cricket writing that is about decisions rather than results.
It is the third kind of cricket book worth having on the shelf: not a memoir, not a manual, but a careful account of how decisions get made under pressure.
Read by Akshay Ghildiyal · Random House Audio. Listen on Audible
Who it is for, and who it is not
**Buy it if** you have never listened to a player autobiography, or if you want the version of the story you already half-know.
**Give it a fortnight** before you judge it. It is a long listen, and the middle stretch — the years of being left out and the technique work nobody sees — is where it earns the time it takes.
**Skip it if** you want tactical detail. This is a life, not a coaching manual; if you want to understand why a bowler does what he does, the analysis books are the better buy.
How to get the most from it
Listen on the commute rather than in fragments. Autobiographies reward continuity, and this one is full of set-ups that pay off fifty pages later.
The narration is a performance, so let it play. Reading and listening at the same time tends to blunt the thing that makes this production work.
If you are short on time, the early chapters on training are the most transferable; the tournament accounts are the most fun.
Common questions
Is the Tendulkar audiobook worth it? Yes, if you have never heard a player autobiography. It is the most complete account of a great career available in audio, and the narration is excellent.
How long is Playing It My Way? It runs a little over fourteen hours, so treat it as a project rather than a single sitting.
Does Sachin Tendulkar read it himself? No – it is read by the actor Sartaj Garewal, with Tendulkar appearing on the recording himself.
Who should start with a cricket autobiography? This one. It is the easiest entry point because it explains itself as it goes and never assumes you already follow the game.
What else should I listen to alongside it? Hitting Against the Spin for how the game works, and The Dhoni Touch for the modern captaincy angle.
Written by the CricketGearGuru editorial team. Links above are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you buy through them. It does not change the price, and it does not change the opinion.
