Cricket: A Modern Anthology review – perfect for when rain stops play

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/13/cricket-modern-anthology-review-jonathan-agnew

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As I write, I can hear cars driving through the rain. There is a chill in the air, and I'm contemplating turning the central heating on. It is the second week of May, and the cricket season has started. Cricket is a game that, even when it is not rained off, has enough longueurs to allow some reading time. Ideal for our purposes, then, is the anthology: and here is as solid an anthology as you could wish for.

You could take issue with the word "Modern", though. It might be a joke, seeing as the book takes as its starting point the Bodyline series of 1932-33. It also has a typeface whose size is friendly to the eyesight of the middle-aged (although this results in a physical object that will not be friendly to their incipient arthritis), and is illustrated by ancient cricket cartoons from Punch, some of which are actually quite funny. There is a foreword by "John Major KG CH", which reads pretty much as you'd imagine.

But cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew has good reason to start with Bodyline: it's cricket's first modern moment, not because it was its first great occasion of bad sportsmanship (sharp practice in the game has been around ever since one shepherd tried to knock the head off another standing at the wicket-gate, crook in hand), but because it was filmed. It was also the first cricket series that came to signify or impact on something far wider than the game itself, though Agnew doesn't make much of this point. But his introduction is very upfront about the colonial origins of the game: much is made of British imperial oppression, to the point where you start to suspect that John Major KG CH might have felt a little uneasy reading it.

Not that all the uneasy stuff can be laid at Britain's door. Agnew also tells the story of the Indian cricketer Palwankar Baloo, an Untouchable who, although the best cricketer at his club, was only allowed to bowl, never to bat, and had to eat lunch alone outside the pavilion, away from the other players. When Baloo toured with an India team in 1911 he took 114 wickets at 19 each, which are hugely respectable figures especially for a spinner, but he never progressed beyond the rank of vice-captain. His captain, a Brahmin, would deliberately leave the field when he felt that the decision-making process was better left to his subordinate.

And so on: you could fillet from this book's 500 pages a history of rancour and controversy in the game, but there is also plenty that shows great decency and humour. There is the story of someone asking Richie Benaud, then Australian captain, if he would sign a copy of his cricket book for a friend in hospital; Benaud sent the book back with the signatures of the whole team and a get well card, to boot. This rather unmanned me; it wouldn't happen now.

There are only five chapter headings in the anthology, and the extracts tend to be lengthy, but an enormous amount of ground is covered, from life on the professional circuit to that of amateurs (generous chunks from Marcus Berkmann's Rain Men and Zimmer Men, two of the funniest books about the village game ever written) and commentators. The book ends with a short piece by the late Christopher Martin-Jenkins, about Test Match Special, which, now that you have to pay Rupert Murdoch an obscene amount of money if you want to watch the sport on TV, has re-established itself as the beating heart of the game in this country.

I should point out, though, that there is a specific demographic for this book, into which I fall squarely. It is (mostly, but by no means exclusively) men aged 45 or above who think it entirely fitting that the centre of this collection, both literally and figuratively, is a generous chunk of Mike Brearley's book on captaincy, about winning the 1981 Ashes series. If you do not fall into this demographic, forgive me. But you probably know someone who does. They would like this.