And God Created Cricket: An Irreverent History of the English Game and How Other People (like Australians) Got Annoyingly Good at it
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Simon Hughes has written an entertaining and irreverent analysis of the history of cricket, taking us beyond the sporting myths of the game to some of its lesser known, more colourful stories and to the heart of what it really means to be English. From the Hardcover edition. Read more
Publisher : Black Swan
Publication date : May 10, 2010
Language : English
Print length : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 0552775061
ISBN-13 : 69
Item Weight : 11.3 ounces
Dimensions : 5.12 x 1.12 x 7.81 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,809,316 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #154 in Cricket (Books)
#154 in Cricket (Books):
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Format: Paperback
"And God Created Cricket" bills itself as "An Irreverent History of the English Game and How Other People (like Australians) Got Annoyingly Good at it", and traces the history of English cricket from its mediaeval beginnings on the forests and downlands of south-east England right up to Andrew Strauss and Kevin Pietersen. The key word in this description is "irreverent", which in this case is not simply a synonym for "humorous" or "light-hearted". Hughes shows a marked lack of reverence for anything or anyone which might be regarded as part of the Establishment, especially the cricketing Establishment. Much of the book is dedicated to airing his various grievances against cricket's powers-that-be. It is said that the definition of a well-balanced man is one with a chip on both shoulders. If that is so, Hughes must be an exceptionally well-balanced individual, as he appears to have not one, but several, chips on both shoulders. Grievance Number One is what might be called his inverted snobbery, his obvious dislike of the upper-class amateurs who dominated cricket for so long, a dominance dating back to the aristocratic patrons who formed their own cricket sides in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Certainly, the amateur/professional distinction had its ridiculous side, such as the fact that professionals were obliged to use a different gate when walking out to the wicket and that their initials followed rather than preceded their surnames on the scorecards. Many so-called "amateurs" were able to get away with suspiciously generous expenses claims; the professional Jim Laker was only half joking when he said that he could make a better living from the game if he turned amateur. Hughes does, however, sometimes exaggerate the aristocratic hold on the game. Writing about J W H T Douglas, he says "it was illegal for anyone to captain England unless they had at least three initials and owned 20,000 acres of the finest grouse moor in Scotland". In fact Douglas, an East Ender, was far from an aristocrat and did not own a single acre of grouse moor. Hughes, however, never points out that the cult of the amateur was never confined to cricket or to Britain; it was widespread in many sports throughout the world. Those "Gentlemen versus Players" matches of the fifties which he derides so mercilessly seem less of a ridiculous anachronism when one remembers that during that decade professionals were not permitted to compete at Wimbledon, or in the Olympics, or in rugby union at any level, and that West Germany won the 1954 football World Cup with an all-amateur side. Moreover, without its aristocratic patrons cricket might never have become a major sport, remaining, like stoolball or bat and trap, a pastime played on a few South Country village greens of a summer evening. Hughes' second grievance is his equally obvious dislike of the county-based system around which English cricket is organised and which he sees as a relic of aristocratic patronage. Yet he never discusses in any great detail what might replace the current system and never succeeded in persuading me that his alternative of city-based teams would amount to any more than a rebranding of Warwickshire as Birmingham, Yorkshire as Leeds or Middlesex and Surrey as North and South London. At one point he regrets that in the late nineteenth century the opportunity was not taken to create a football-type league of town and city clubs playing on Saturday afternoons, along the lines of the Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues. Such a development, however, even if it had been feasible, would have resulted in English cricket developing along entirely different lines to those prevailing in the rest of the cricket-playing world, where the first-class game is organised on the basis of state or provincial divisions (e.g. New South Wales v Victoria rather than Sydney v Melbourne). If professional cricket in England were to be run on basis of something like Haslingden v Ramsbottom writ large, I would not fancy the chances of our Test team against Bangladesh or Zimbabwe, let alone Australia or the West Indies. Hughes' third obsession is his dislike of batsmen; he refers several times to his thesis that throughout the history of the game cricket's powers-that-be (generally amateurs) have continually rewritten the rules to make it more difficult for bowlers (generally professionals) to take wickets. I have some sympathy with this viewpoint; during Hughes' own playing career in the eighties and nineties the TCCB seemed to insist that every playing surface should be so lifeless that it was impossible to complete a game within three days without the use of contrived declarations. Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that the book would have read very differently had it been written by a batsman rather than a bowler, and the bat has not always predominated over the ball to the extent which Hughes suggests. He suggests, for example, that cricket's "Golden Age" (roughly 1890-1914) was a batsman-dominated era, but statistics tell a different story. Of the ten batsmen with the highest career Test averages, not one played before the First World War; Victor Trumper, generally regarded as the greatest batsman of that period, finished his Test career with an average of 39.62, which today would be regarded as nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, when Hughes does manage to be fair-minded about an issue, I suspect that this is a case of two of his prejudices cancelling one another out. His account of the "Bodyline" series, for example, is much more even-handed than many I have read, probably because Douglas Jardine was just the sort of arrogant patrician whom Hughes the inverted snob loves to hate, whereas Hughes the former fast bowler loves the idea of Bradman, the ultimate run-machine, being put in his place by Larwood and Voce. The book's most entertaining feature is Hughes' store of anecdotes about the great and the good of the game, especially players of his own era whom he knew personally. I liked his account of Jimmy Ormond's retort to Steve Waugh's piece of sledging (although according to some accounts Ormond's remark was directed at Steve's brother Mark). I also liked some of his barbed comments on some players, such as his description of the famously self-absorbed Geoff Boycott as "not just an island but an atoll in the middle of a vast ocean, the sort of place where they do nuclear testing". Nevertheless, not all of Hughes' attempts at wit come off, and all too often his supposed "irreverence" reads more like puerile humour or bilious sarcasm. Despite my fascination with cricket, this was not a book I really enjoyed reading. Too often I could hear in the background the noise of axes being ground.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2010 by J C E Hitchcock