![]() ![]() ![]() Cardus’s reputation has waned in recent years (too many factual inaccuracies, note the pedants), but he remains the foundation stone.Ĭricket 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. 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. 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. Modern cricket writing begins with Cardus, the working-class Mancunian autodidact who in the 1920s found fame reporting cricket matches for the Manchester Guardian. 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. ![]()
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