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And God Created Cricket

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Reviews

Cricket history with a sense of humor
Review date: 2010-06-02 Rating: 10 out of 10

Great book by cricket pundit (and former bowler) Simon Hughes. If you like your histories mixed with humor and plenty of British pop culture references, this is the book for you (even if you are Australian).

Very enjoyable - eventually
Review date: 2010-04-21 Rating: 8 out of 10

I eventually enjoyed this book very much. I have a lot of respect for Simon Hughes's knowledge of the game and have enjoyed his previous books. He can write very well, and when he does he is interesting, insightful and amusing - as he is pretty consistently in the latter two thirds of this book

The problem came for me in the first hundred or so pages which are liberally sprinkled (in fact I would say seriously infested) with silliness which isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is. Here's a random sample of an interesting little nugget, ruined for me by the subsequent "joke" complete with exclamation mark: "C. B. Fry also developed a fascination with the Nazis and once spent an hour chatting to Hitler, trying, and failing, to persuade him to form a cricket team. He spent so long explaining the lbw law it drove Germany into invading Poland. The Second World War was all C. B. Fry's fault!" There's a limit to how much of this I can take, but there was enough good stuff to keep me going - shortly after this, for example, there are several really fine, insightful and flippancy-free paragraphs on Frank Woolley, his possible similarity to David Gower and what it was like bowling to Gower.

Fortunately, the tom-foolery peters out as Hughes begins to talk about things he really knows and cares about (from about the 1920s onward) and the final 200 pages or so are full of insight, analysis and really interesting and amusing anecdotes. His accounts of the Bodyline and D'Oliviera affairs are simply excellent, for example, and he draws brilliant portraits of some of the greats of the game.

Overall, a very good book and well worth reading for anyone interested in cricket - just be prepared to negotiate a wayward opening spell.

Several Chips on Both Shoulders
Review date: 2010-02-08 Rating: 4 out of 10

"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 I found myself in agreement with the previous reviewer who complained about his weak schoolboy humour. Much of his supposed "irreverence" reads more like 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.

He's a commentator, not a writer
Review date: 2009-10-18 Rating: 2 out of 10

I love Simon the Analyst, but he should stick to that. Shame, as he's obviously put a lot of research into this, but it comes out as weak schoolboy humour. So bad, I had it send it back.

Product Details/Specifications

Authors:
Simon Hughes

Recording label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
EAN: 9780385614993
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 0385614993
Number of pages: 352
Publication date: 2009-06-05
Language: English (Unknown)
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: English (Published)

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