Updated On: 30 September, 2018 03:16 PM IST | | Mihir Bose
Journalist and author Mihir Bose on collaborating with England all-rounder Moeen Ali for his autobiography in which he claimed that he was called Osama by an Australian cricketer in 2015

England all-rounder Moeen Ali in Southampton last month. Pic/Getty Images
I generally do not like writing ghosted books. I have written more than 30 books but only two ghosted books, one a labour of love as it was the story of the chairman of my beloved football club, Tottenham Hotspur.
But writing Moeen Ali's book was both a pleasure and a discovery of a world which is fascinating. I had interviewed Moeen some years earlier at an Asian awards ceremony where he was being honoured. I was struck by the way Moeen spoke about how much he missed his father not being there. He was so emotional that the compere, another Asian, got the impression that Moeen's father was dead. In fact what Moeen meant to say was that he could not come down from Birmingham, where Moeen and he live, to London. During the writing of this book I was to discover that his father Munir hates coming to London. He gets lost and finds parking difficult.