for cricket fans - best cricket books


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thought this might be of interest. so many to choose from. 

it is a bit anglophile but i think it came from wisden or the guardian. 

i'd be inclined to add 'the greatest test of all' by jack fingleton - on the tied test. fabulous. sent the list to an old family friend who played test cricket back in the 50s. he had some interesting thoughts but i loved this - "Cardus could write. He just didn’t know much about cricket. He was actually the Manchester Guardian’s Classical Music critic.". 

by chance, one of the most famous of all, John Arlott, was also a wine writer. wrote the book on Krug - never been able to find a copy. i'm told payment was five cases a year for his life. these days, that would be worth a bucketload! 

 

 

It is often claimed that cricket has the richest literature of any sport. Possibly an exaggeration – baseball also has strong claims – but undeniably it is rich. And almost certainly I am not the only cricket-minded person who, getting older, derives as much pleasure from reading about the game as actually watching it.

Why so rich? Because it takes place (in its longer form, anyway) over days, not hours; because its fundamental simplicity (bowl – hit – run – field) masks considerable tactical and even strategic subtlety; because of its traditional white-on-green aesthetic appeal; because of its often hugely telling social history (gender and ethnicity as well as class); because it is a game so much played in the mind; because of its almost unfailing ability to reveal character; and for many other reasons.

What unites the writers here is that, deep down, they all know the two essential things: that cricket really matters; and that cricket really doesn’t matter at all.

1. Days in the Sun by Neville Cardus
Modern cricket writing begins with Cardus, the working-class Mancunian autodidact who in the 1920s found fame reporting cricket matches for the Manchester Guardian. It was he, more than anyone before or, arguably, since, who exploited the possibilities of imaginatively turning the leading cricketers of the day into three-dimensional, almost novelistic characters. He also appreciated how the rhythm and feel of a day’s play depends as much on the interaction between players and crowd as it does on the events in the middle. Cardus’s reputation has waned in recent years (too many factual inaccuracies, note the pedants), but he remains the foundation stone.

2. Australia 55 by Alan Ross
Cricket tours in the old days were leisurely affairs, starting with the long voyage out, and this account of the epic Ashes-winning tour under the determined if sometimes overly pessimistic captaincy of Len Hutton stands as a classic of the tour-book genre. In his day job a renowned literary editor and accomplished poet, Ross here provides a seductive double narrative: the cricketing dramas and heroics, yes, but also a shrewd, lyrical snapshot of a country still finding its modern identity.

3. Beyond a Boundary by CLR James
”What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” famously asks the West Indian writer and political activist. Regularly placed at or near the top of lists of “best cricket books ever”, this is a compelling mixture of memoir, history, polemic and technical analysis, all knitted together with a sense of deep personal engagement. Cricket’s natural escapist appeal often keeps its literature firmly within the boundary ropes; but even more than Ross – and writing on the cusp of the postcolonial moment – James is exhilaratingly different.

4. The Art of Captaincy by Mike Brearley
Cricket’s philosopher-king – and arguably England’s most successful captain – explains all … In the process, his lucid treatise not only guides the reader through the many tricks, traps and pitfalls of being a captain, but reveals just how complex, psychologically as much as tactically, the game is. Ian Botham once described him as having “a degree in people”, and with characteristic sensitivity Brearley explores how playing cricket can produce at least as many lows as highs – a fact that far from every captain, whether on village green or Test arena, understands.

 

 Humane … John Arlott in the commentary box during his final Test match commentary in 1980. Photograph: Adrian Murrell/Getty Images

5. Concerning Cricket by John Arlott
Arlott was a published poet before, in the postwar years, turning himself into a top-flight cricket writer and legendary, Hampshire-burred radio commentator. This collection of relatively early essays, inspired in part by William Hazlitt (one of his heroes), ranges from a near-rhapsodic evocation of two days of county cricket at Bath to a close socioeconomic analysis of the conditions of the professional cricketer. Altogether it is Arlott at his humane, penetrating best.

6. Beyond Bat and Ball by David Foot
Based in the West Country, and a fount of gentle wisdom, Foot is one of the Guardian’s most cherishable cricket writers. His forte, exemplified here, is getting behind the facade and sympathetically revealing difficult, even tormented lives, with most of his subjects martyrs, to a greater or lesser extent, to a game that can exact a heavy toll. The 11 profiles end with Tom Richardson: Surrey and England’s great paceman of the 1890s, a cricketer of unrivalled heart and pluck, he found it hard (as so many professional sportsmen do) to handle retirement, dying in France in 1912 in dark, uncertain circumstances.

7. The Cricket War by Gideon Haigh
One event above all stands out in cricket’s last half-century: Kerry Packer’s boldly entrepreneurial coup in 1977 that split the cricket world and directly led to the game’s capture by television, along with such innovations as floodlights, white balls and coloured clothing. Almost everything since – including the recent controversial “100 Balls” announcement by the English authorities – has flowed from that bitterly contested demarche. Haigh, leading cricket historian and writer of broad sympathies, delivers the definitive account. This is not cricket literature as therapy, but sometimes harsh reality is unavoidable.

8. One More Run by Stephen Chalke
Surprisingly few cricket books have focused on a single match, but this gem is one of them. Largely through the memories of “Bomber” Wells, off-spinner and raconteur, Chalke lovingly recreates the three-day encounter at Cheltenham in 1957 between Gloucestershire and Yorkshire. The contest itself reads compellingly enough, but what is left in the reader’s mind is the microcosm of a now long-gone ecology: players and spectators imbued alike with strongly local affinities; respectful appreciation of craftsmanlike qualities; and the whole occasion a world away from the coarse and mercenary biff-bang of T20, or worse.

9. A Corner of a Foreign Field by Ramachandra Guha
India was for so long one of the Cinderellas of world cricket: Don Bradman never went there, nor did many leading English players. That has now utterly changed, as the IPL formula (exuberant crowds, huge TV audiences, mega-bucks, brash and noisy spectacle, sixes all the way) continues to exercise a bewitching influence. In his groundbreaking, elegantly written history of Indian cricket, Guha gives us the long-run narrative, going back to the days of the British empire; and in so doing he, befitting Gandhi’s finest biographer, illuminates the making of modern India itself.

10. Cricket: The Game of Life by Scyld Berry
The most recent of the 10 books, this would have been recognised as a modern classic if more rigorously edited. But it is still a wonderfully enjoyable and insightful potpourri as it strides confidently across cricket’s epochs and geographies. Writers who genuinely and fearlessly think for themselves are rarer than one might think, but Berry is one of them, never more so than in his chapter on “Numbers”, unpicking cricket’s obsession with statistics – that obsession which over the years has drawn so many to the game. People may let one down, but batting averages never do.

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