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    Arlott Swanton & Soul English Cricket by the historian David Kynaston and the journalist Stephen Fay, reviewed here by Richard Williams:

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/bl...d-cricket-soul

    I loved it especially for the fact that it's structured around extracts from their writing but is always comparing them. It's not half a book on Arlott and half on Swanton, and it's not strictly a dual biography but very much a critical analysis from a social history perspective, with Fay's insights as a journalist adding to Kynaston's historical framework.

    https://www.amazon.com/Arlott-Swanto.../dp/1408895374

    Williams nails it here:

    It would be easy to fall for the caricatures of the chippy liberal and the pompous snob. But Kynaston and Fay look deeper, recognising that if Swanton imagined himself to be, in the words of one exasperated England tour manager, the Lord Protector of English Cricket, while Arlott’s radio audience saw him as a poet laureate of the eternal game, they shared a devotion to its welfare which expressed itself not in a defensive conservatism but in a commitment to changes that both saw as inevitable.
    Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 01-09-2021, 10:40.

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      Originally posted by imp View Post
      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."
      I can actually understand his reasoning, tbh.

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        It requires a certain mindset and constitution.

        My cardiologist forbade me from reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

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          I'm 30 pages into Anyone but England and so far it seems remarkably current. Except maybe how central the men's team was to English life, getting the full tabloid treatment and questions on the house.

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            The chapter on England's cosiness with apartheid is still the best I have read on that topic.

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              Originally posted by Levin View Post
              I'm 30 pages into Anyone but England and so far it seems remarkably current. Except maybe how central the men's team was to English life, getting the full tabloid treatment and questions on the house.
              Which book is this? Is that the chapter title?

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                Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
                The chapter on England's cosiness with apartheid is still the best I have read on that topic.
                The Scrum V rugby podcast did 4 episodes on the 74 Lions Tour, it's a decent listen.

                Rugby has a very dodgy past in their coziness with dodgy regimes.

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                  Anyone But England is the book title. Mike Marqusee. A very important book.

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                    Thanks, I've just bought the Kindle version based on the recommendations.

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                      You will definitely find it worthwhile.

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                        Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                        You will definitely find it worthwhile.
                        If I can ever get around to reading it.

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                          There is a lot of 'the more things change.. ' but then the book hits a run of stuff that is unlikely to happen now because the tabloids don't care about cricket any more. The more contemporary account of the spinwash series is interesting given the documentary series on YouTube.

                          But I'm posting because I've just got to a section on Yorkshire releasing a delayed report into racism that doesn't address issues originally raised. Jesus.

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                            Just finished All on a Summer's Day by Margaret Hughes, published in 1953. It's a quite fascinating book, not least for being, as Neville Cardus says in the first line of his introduction, "the first book on first-class cricket not written by a man". The love and passion Hughes feels for the game is truly infectious and heartwarming, but beyond that her analysis and reading of the game are insightful and really interesting, even down to her inclusion of hand-drawn wagon wheels of innings she has been particularly impressed by. Some of her takes could have come from any time up to the present day and perhaps are rather prescient, such as: "Faster wickets and new laws will not alter cricket, neither will big hitting. We must have more cricketers with personality, who play the game not as a dreary duty but because they enjoy every minute they are on the field. If we are going to turn out cricketers like sausages, who bat, bowl and look alike, then the game will become dull. The general standard may improve but competency on its own is not enough."

                            Beyond the cricket, the first half of the book in particular contains a fair bit of memoir documenting her upbringing in a family of sporty boys, living through the Second World War, and navigating the search for fulfilling employment, which as a woman at the time perhaps wouldn't have been straightforward.

                            As is perhaps to be expected given when it was written, there are a couple of lines of physical description in the chapter on the West Indies tour of 1950 that will make you wince a little, but they absolutely come from a place of love and are not intended with any malice whatsoever - indeed, her praise and enthusiasm as regards the Windies team and some of their individuals' abilities is pretty much the most gushing anywhere in the book. You do also feel at a couple of points that she's perhaps slightly doing down her own sex in something of a bid to fit in with the establishment, which is understandable if obviously sad, but that's pretty minor as well.

                            It's a fascinating work both for the way it evocatively captures life in a very different time, both in society and in cricket. After the couple of horrors in terms of cricket books that I've read this year, as documented up-thread, this I have to say is one of the most enjoyable cricket books I've read for a long time.

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                              Ta for that

                              Will see if I can get a library copy

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                                Derek Pringle's memoir is enjoyable and fairly frank; he is a Gooch partisan so doesn't pull any punches about Gower's failings. He gives due praise to his opponents (Viv, Malcolm Marshall, Abdul Qadir, Javed Miandad*) but is (probably justifiably) sore about the 1992 final (two plumb LBWs against Javed Miandad turned down by Bucknor). He's probably even more pissed off now that England have won a first World Cup, the achievement that should have been his.

                                The book made me laugh a few times and I was amazed at the drinking culture in the Test side, even in the middle of matches. Imagine facing the West Indies attack with a hangover.

                                No spoilers but the anecdotes on dressing room incidents are fantastic.

                                *Both he and Gooch have highly praised a Javed innings v Essex.

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                                  Speaking of drinking at cricket, I was once part of an unruly mob of modern language students heckling Pringle and Pringle only at a Warwickshire v Essex John Player's League match at Edgbaston one lush and carefree summer's Sunday afternoon in either 1984 or 1985. Do we get a mention?

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                                    Don't think so but the Essex chapters are rather dull (to me).

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                                      This looks more interesting than the usual

                                      https://repeaterbooks.com/product/di...glish-cricket/

                                      Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket


                                      by: Duncan Stone
                                      £7.99 – £12.99

                                      In 1963, the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James posed the deceptively benign question: “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?”

                                      A challenge to the public to re-consider cricket and its meaning, James was, all too subtly, attempting to counter the game’s elitist orthodoxy. Regrettably, he failed, and the history of cricket in England remains as it did a century ago — until now.

                                      In examining recreational rather than professional (first-class) cricket, Different Class does not merely challenge the orthodoxy of English cricket, it demonstrates how the values and belief systems at its heart were developed in order to divide the English at every level of the game.

                                      Indeed, be it the discrete cricket cultures of the “urban” North and the “rural” South of England, gender, social class or race; the history of recreational cricket tells us more about the (un)changing nature of English society — and how it works — than any study of the first-class game ever could.

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                                        The author was featured on one of Jarrod Kimber's podcasts and there is a brief discussion in one of the other cricket threads.

                                        It sounded definitely worthwhile.

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                                          This is the podcast:

                                          https://anchor.fm/redinker/episodes/...-Stone-e1backs

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                                            ta all

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                                              'Winning Ways' by Dermot Reeve (1996). This has the infamous passage where Illingworth uses the term n**-n** while watching Devon Malcolm bowl, in the manner of 'Love Thy Neighbour', but Reeve (or ghostwriter Pat Murphy) oddly suggests it may just have been a reflex rather than something Illy consciously knew he was saying.

                                              Much less reported at the time but perhaps as significant is that Reeve depicts Atherton in very unkind terms as ineffectual and incapable of motivating the team, as well as tactically limited. He has a legitimate point that Atherton shouldn't have been captaining the World Cup side because his batting was too slow. Time would vindicate him on that because nobody would pick an Atherton-style opener for white-ball cricket today.

                                              Reeve surprisingly defends Pakistan's 1992 win in the final he played in. He says they were the better side and he saw no evidence of ball tampering.

                                              Reeve also foresaw a midsummer white-ball format of 20 overs a side.

                                              Finally, he accuses Curtley Ambrose and Winston Benjamin of deliberately bowling him beamers. But there's no context: what kinds of cuntery was Reeve up to that would have got them that riled?

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                                                The Indian team behind the 81 All Out podcast have begun publishing classics that have gone out of print

                                                Their first two offerings are both absolute crackers




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                                                  Just finished 'The Wicket Men' by Tony Hannan, a journalist and author known primarily for his writings on rugby league. He wrote a book on a year in the life of Batley and he does something similar here, where he chronicles a year in the life of Cumberland, in the Minor Counties Championship. Quite long (over 400 pages) leading to a high level of granularity so I don't think this will attract many casual readers which is a shame as it's written really well and opened up the world of minor counties cricket really successfully to me,in the same way that Harry Pearson's Slipless in Settle did with club cricket in the north of England.

                                                  Although it only came out a couple of years ago, things have changed quite a bit at this level. Cumberland have now changed their name to Cumbria and they now play in the National Counties Championship, instead of the Minor Cricket Counties Championship. However, they are still skippered by Gary Pratt - yes, the Gary Pratt who ran out Ricky Ponting in 2005.

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                                                    Just finished Mike Brearley's Spirit of Cricket, which is a very thorough and readable examination of what that phrase actually means. Of course, it means what you want it to mean, but Brearly's esoteric, anecdote-strewn approach to the subject means that you don't mind him rambling on at times. He senses this at one point and hands over the final chapter to a variety of people across the game to give their take. As someone who's permanently fascinated by the concept of sporting values and what it means to play sport (and watch it, and arbitrate it), this was right up my wicket.

                                                    It reminded me that I had a stint at umpiring youth games in my teens, and that I really enjoyed it. Never occurred to me to stick at it once I left school. In fact the number of cricket games I played after leaving school could be counted on both hands, and they were mostly when I was back home during the summer holidays. The last game I played was in 1995 was as a ringer for the British Embassy versus Frankfurt Cricket Club. I think being in a cricket club requires a much greater commitment than most other sports thanks to the length of the games and the culture of inclusion - you're either in or you're not, there's no such thing as casually being available every fourth weekend.

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