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    Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
    I have just bought 'Sins of Omission: The Story of the Test Selectors, 1899-1990' by Alan Synge (1990) and 'Ashes to Ashes' by Marcus Berkmann. Cricket reading is one of my refuges in times of stress.
    Me too. Went through my Gideon Haigh back catalogue during lockdown#1. Moved on to the rather more prosaic but still enjoyable Scyld Berry in the last week.

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      Not sure if it's been mentioned upthread but Harry Pearson's 'Slipless in Settle', his book about northern league cricket, is wonderful.

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        Originally posted by Tony C View Post
        Not sure if it's been mentioned upthread but Harry Pearson's 'Slipless in Settle', his book about northern league cricket, is wonderful.
        Just finished it, after being on my 'to read' pile for a couple of years. A great book. I read it with an ordnance survey atlas of the UK by my side, to look up the various places he visited.

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          Levin did you find A Corner of A Foreign Field as an ebook? Could you ping me a link? I just bought his most recent book, The Commonwealth of Cricket

          ​​​​​​https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...owerful-memoir

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            Originally posted by gt3 View Post
            Levin did you find A Corner of A Foreign Field as an ebook? Could you ping me a link? I just bought his most recent book, The Commonwealth of Cricket

            ​​​​​​https://www.theguardian.com/sport/20...owerful-memoir
            I got it from Blackwells but they seem to have taken it off their shelf. Link.

            I've got to assume it was there in error as nowhere else had it. Sorry gt3

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              Harry Pearson's biography of Learie Constantine is lovely. Only $3.99 on Kindle.

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                Shout out for The Unforgiven: Missionaries or Mercenaries? The Untold Story of the Rebel West Indian Cricketers who toured South Africa. I'm guessing this was recommended on here but can't find any reference to it. Anyway, Ashley Gray has spent a long time in tracking down the cricketers who made either or both of the Apartheid South Africa tours in the early 80's. Each of those involved has a dedicated chapter to them and while there is a degree of repetition, it's still a very engaging and well researched read.

                I'll not wish to spoil this, although some of the higher profile players stories are fairly well known, but some of those, at least to me, were a complete revelation. To be frank, some of those players who suffered most in their later lives would have probably already done so as their drink/drug consumption was already prodigious at the height of their careers, but others suffered through no real fault of their own. An engaging and interesting read. Recommended.

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                  Just finished David Townsend's Do They Play Cricket in Ireland? and sadly, I'd struggle to recommend it. "Written in diary format, in a chatty, humorous style" notes the blurb (or should that perhaps be warns). The diary format, while at first working OK, once you've ploughed a fair way into the book becomes a little hard to follow as you jump from date to date and place to place (which confusingly sometimes seems to be given as where the writer is, but at others is where the team is playing while he's watching on TV or following by some other means). That informal style also means the use of nicknames, and given that the book is covering 25 years worth of players, officials and associated others, you soon feel completely overwhelmed with the avalanche of diminutives and related scores and stats.

                  The bigger problem for me was the tone. Townsend is obviously a journalist of some pedigree, but he certainly lets his personality shine through here and that most definitely won't be to everyone's taste. Confronted by a Scottish football fan who was laughing at England's defeat to Argentina at France 98, he responds "So you were cheering for the same lot who were shooting your soldiers a few years back, were you?" Yet strangely, on discussing a couple of Ireland players who were from "...a family that wouldn't have been too keen on the English, either. There was some good banter." This nagging sense of hypocrisy extends to other areas too - on the world's most populous cricket-loving nation? "Incredible India, my arse... Why do things so differently to everywhere else in the world?" but then later we're chiding some comedy podcasters for their cultural ignorance for doing an Irish accent from the wrong part of the island. We hear how Kenya legend "Steve Tikolo was still there, but starting to show his age, whatever it was". The tragic death of Bob Woolmer at the 2007 World Cup is similarly sensitively handled: "An overweight Englishman in his late 50s, under pressure, it made sense", followed by the opinion that he must have known to some extent about the match fixing of players and teams he'd been involved with.

                  Recurring themes include the author's reluctance to play the games of bureaucrats (i.e. apply for the correct accreditation - "Call me old-fashioned, but there was no way I was going to go grovelling for a media pass to some government department") and then his surprise when he is told off for being places he doesn't have permission to be or ask people inappropriate questions at inappropriate times (such as asking an umpire who he thinks will win at the mid-point of an ODI). Also making apparent light of anti-apartheid campaigning (he used to check where oranges were from before buying them), and aww shucks not really wanting to mention events involving the Ireland team or players he may have had something of an influence over (but he's damn well going to keep mentioning them) - although his relationship with the team isn't always rosy: after one of his articles is badly received in the camp, it perhaps says a lot that he doesn't at first even realise he's being ignored. Then there's the tedious phrase "alcohol was consumed", which keeps coming round like a piece of busted luggage that nobody wants to claim on an airport carousel.

                  The book comes to a juddering, bizarrely abrupt halt in the middle of the test match at Lords that the book's 25-year, 350-page span has all been building towards. Perhaps a fittingly strange end to what feels a confused and confusing book.

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                    Mike Gatting's ghost-writer eh?

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                      Makes sense - Gatt does get a few mentions.

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                        My sister messaged me earlier to ask if I owned the 1971 edition of Wisden. I don't - it was one of several editions around that time that had low print runs and consequently are quite pricey these days. Anyway she'd bought it for me at a car boot sale this morning. I did a bit of digging around and found one of the Wisden sales sites had sold a copy last week for £78 and even modest quality copies can go for £40 plus.

                        In a fine example of a seller not knowing what they were selling, she paid 10p for it.

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                          Result

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                            That's an important Wisden too as it would document the Rest Of The World side that was the strongest team ever assembled at that point.

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                              That's a really good find. Tubby was always after those 70s ones wasn't he?

                              I need to fill in the gaps between my father dying and me getting back into cricket. It's only ones from this millennium but the longer I leave it the harder it will get.

                              I'm reading The Cricket War and it is very good. I'm getting more an more annoyed that they aren't regarded as 1st class and List A games. Although, how do you treat the country matches of the second strings? I can see both side to them being regarded as ODIs and Tests.

                              The brief mention of the Cavaliers who prompted the Sunday League was interesting. Is there a book about that? Is there enough for a book?

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                                I have a vague recollection of their being a Cavalier discussion on one of the previous incarnations of the board.

                                I don't think that there is a book, though the Wiki cites this (which doesn't look very serious to be honest)

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                                  I took possession of the aforementioned 1971 Wisden a couple of weeks ago and have been working my way through it. The book itself is in excellent condition, I'm not sure if it's ever been read. The contents are a bit different to nowadays, very Anglo-centric, adverts for sports nets and weird looking Gilette razors, all written in a more formal style than today. At one point we are told Lancashire cricket "now vibrantly throbs". The obvious "wouldn't happen now" incident comes when the umpire Syd Buller dies in the pavilion during a rain stoppage at Warwickshire v Nottinghamshire and the players come back out to complete the match (Warwickshire won by five wickets). There's a tribute to Buller written by his umpiring colleague Frank Lee which devotes a lot of space justifying Buller's decision to no ball Geoff Griffin for throwing in a beer match at Lords in 1960. (Three and an half decades later Wisden called this "a heavy handed action" in Griffin's obit)

                                  Women's cricket gets a page and a bit, double the space allocated to the scorecard of Rugby v Marlborough, and the main event is Rachel Heyhoe captaining a tour of Jamaica financed by Mr Jack Hayward. The entirety of overseas cricket is covered in 129 pages. There was no England winter tour in 1969-70, and more surprisingly there were no home Tests in Australia, they toured India and Ceylon before Christmas followed by the famous South Africa visit.

                                  Wisden hasn't aged well over the whole South African matter (there's loads of comments in eighties editions along the lines of "black people play cricket there, let them back in") and this contains the infamous article on "The South African Tour Dispute" by Irving Rosenwater. He's very much of the belief the tour should have happened, politics and sport shouldn't mix ever again, protesters were violent on the rugger tour etc. The book is a little sketchier than you might expect on whether the Rest of the World matches should be classed as Test matches. One thing that surprised me was a line about poor crowds at these matches (Trent Bridge had a total attendance of 16k for the only match England won) and this is variously blamed on uncertainty on the tour happening, the General Election, the World Cup Tournament in Mexico and the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. At one stage Basil d'Oliveira is described as "the central figure in the apartheid controversy".

                                  The funniest bit was in the MCC review where they announce the death of one of their most distinguished Honorary Life Members, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. A casual reader wanting to learn more about the general will be disappointed as he isn't in the obituary section, which is a pity as he'd appear directly before French, Lieut.-Colonel The Hon. Edward Gerald Fleming. There's a lot of obituary references to public school performances and Blues and everyone gets their military titles which include a Surgeon Rear Admiral and, joy of joys, a Wing Commander.

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                                    That would have been the first edition of the last decade of Norman Preston's editorship, which began in 1952

                                    Norman succeeded his father as editor and was born in 1903, so the tone is unsurprising

                                    One really gets a more complete view of the "sensibilities" of the English cricket establishment from any single complete volume of that era than from the compilations edited by Benny Green and others (which are invaluable nonetheless).

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                                      Barbed Wire and Cucumber Sandwiches: The Controversial South African Tour of 1970 by Colin Schindler covers those attitudes pretty well. I've often wondered if the tour would have gone ahead had the Tories been in office.

                                      Wisden Cricket Monthly was still publishing racist junk in 1995, of course, the author of which received letters of support from Trevor Bailey et al.
                                      Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 15-08-2021, 18:00.

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                                        Ooh, I should look for that

                                        My guess is that it would have

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                                          In a not dissimilar vein of Hot Takes, I'm currently grimly trudging through Michael Henderson's That Will Be England Gone, which basically seems to be not so much a ramble around an English cricketing summer, per the premise, rather a ramble around the inner workings of the brain of a tediously grumpy old man who believes nothing Modern, or done/enjoyed by 'the young', is any good. I perhaps should have just abandonned it after coming across the line the Prelude (yes, Prelude - not for our Michael, a preface or introduction) celebrating 'small-c conservatives', but on we go as the subjects meander around a lot of music discussion (hence Prelude, I suppose), history, society, the education system, and for some reason Muslim grooming gangs.

                                          Henderson clearly desperately wants to be Neville Cardus, but isn't. He does have a nice turn of phrase, and the actual descriptions of cricketing scenes are admittedly very evocative. But when he distracts himself off down another inexplicable path of opinionating it becomes barely readable. The arrogance and pomposity drip from these passages, as he shows his complete disdain for anything he deems to be new-fangled, such as players doing proper warm-ups, fielders shouting encouragement at each other, 'ethically sourced coffee' and 'multi-culturalism'. To steal a line from a reivewer on GoodReads, 'If this is the England that will be gone, I won't mourn it.'

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                                            Was it Henderson that basically wrote that English players born outside the country weren't properly motivated to play for England. Though it wasn't clear whether that just applied to the likes of Malcolm, Small and de Freitas or if it also applied to Pringle, Lamb etc.

                                            (edit, I've just checked and it was Robert Henderson who wrote that piece of overt racism
                                            Last edited by Etienne; 30-08-2021, 13:04.

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                                              Emma John reviewed Henderson's book in this year's Wisden and clearly didn't think much of it. "If Henderson wants to mount an argument of how public school privilege benefits us all, that's his own hill to die on" being a sample quote.

                                              Henderson sure as hell can write, but he largely devotes his time to being a grumpy arse in the right wing press. He was cricket correspondent at the Telegraph for a brief spell around the turn of the (21st) century before he committed the sin of dissing EW Swanton in the pages of Wisden Cricket Monthly, and the Telegraph moved him on after that.

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                                                Originally posted by longeared View Post
                                                Henderson sure as hell can write, but he largely devotes his time to being a grumpy arse in the right wing press. He was cricket correspondent at the Telegraph for a brief spell around the turn of the (21st) century before he committed the sin of dissing EW Swanton in the pages of Wisden Cricket Monthly, and the Telegraph moved him on after that.
                                                I've no idea why that would be a sin because I've never heard of EW Swanton, but it sounds like a very cricket thing to happen. You can just imagine his fate being discussed via low murmurs in the MCC clubhouse.

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                                                  Swanton was the Telegraph's cricket correspondent from just after the war until the mid 70s and a frequent presence on Test Matxh Special, as well as being editor of The Cricketer.

                                                  He was the kind of journalist who decried the demise of Gentlemen v. Players and wintered in Barbados.

                                                  Could write a bit, nevertheless.

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                                                    Originally posted by longeared View Post
                                                    My sister messaged me earlier to ask if I owned the 1971 edition of Wisden. I don't - it was one of several editions around that time that had low print runs and consequently are quite pricey these days. Anyway she'd bought it for me at a car boot sale this morning. I did a bit of digging around and found one of the Wisden sales sites had sold a copy last week for £78 and even modest quality copies can go for £40 plus.

                                                    In a fine example of a seller not knowing what they were selling, she paid 10p for it.
                                                    Beautiful.

                                                    [Thanks also to ursus for the Swanton bio. He was probably one of the first cricket writers I ever read, without knowing it - my Dad, a lifelong social democrat, is also - inexplicably - a lifelong Telegraph reader. "For the sport and the sudokus. Got to know what the enemy's thinking etc. etc." Whenever I used to hand him The Guardian he'd declare it boring and pass it back to me after a desultory perusal that never lasted more than two minutes.]

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