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A Social History of English Cricket
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Reviews
The best cricket book I've read so far
Review date: 2005-03-06 Rating: 10 out of 10
Well-researched, this book starts at the very beginnings of English cricket 500 years ago and takes it all the way up to the end of the 20th century. It connects what's happening in the real social world with developments in cricket (which always lagged behind). My understanding of non-cricketing English social history has improved at the same time. An excellent read.
Wonderful Read!
Review date: 2004-09-20 Rating: 10 out of 10
A fantastic book. As a cricket addict I can read about it all day but this book stands out. The author's chatty and lyrical style make it easy to read but the research and quantity of facts in the book is staggering. It's great to read about the non-cricketing side to personalities I've heard of and seen pictures of, but know little more. On the face if it this book should be a bit dry and hard work but believe me, it's not. It's refreshing to read a book that is not afraid to critise some of the legends of the game and bust a few myths particularly the roles of gentlemen and players.
A left-wing assault on cricket's history
Review date: 2001-08-26 Rating: 4 out of 10
It may be unfashionable to say so but I'm afraid I derived little enjoyment from this book, or from the very similar "The Willow Wand" by the same author. As a social history putting cricket into context it is certainly useful and readable but the author continually betrays his socialist bias which, I suppose, is only to be expected from an academic.
Much of it reminds me of the current fashion for television documentaries which tell us how unreasonable our leaders were in that war or that crisis and how they ought not to have behaved the way they did. Yes, perhaps it's a pity the game wasn't run on a democratic basis but that's the way society was at the time and I'm not convinced that everything is so much better now it's in the hands of the professionals.
The amateurs weren't all bad, as Birley implies. Some of them did make more money from expenses than the professionals did from wages and some failed to uphold the standards expected of "gentlemen". But others played just for the fun of it, without financial reward, and were worth their place in the side. Some of the businessmen and gentry enabled counties to avoid bankruptcy; many current observers (including some who owe their current jobs to county cricket) would say, "Pity!" but, to many people, county cricket has given more pleasure than international cricket.
Birley is so biassed about amateurs that he fails to acknowledge that even a professional might have three initials: what about CWL Parker, HTW Hardinge, HAW Bowell, WRD Payton or even JEBBPQC Dwyer, from the period before the First World War?
In fact, he rarely has a good word for anybody. He describes George Emmett, who replaced Len Hutton in one of the 1948 Tests, as "very ordinary" in one book and "wholly inadequate" in the other. This is not the impression one gains from other writers such as David Foot (who wrote the glowing foreword) or Stephen Chalke and, in an interview shown on television recently, Tom Graveney evidently thought he was better than that. Birley is so dismissive of county cricket that I don't believe he can have seen much of it.
Invaluable for student and enthusiast
Review date: 2001-03-28 Rating: 10 out of 10
This book is quite breathtaking in ambition and scope - and more remarkably still, it succeeds admirably. Taking the developments in cricket and intertwining them with the ongoing changes in political, economic and social history (esp. the "old empire"), Mr Birley has produced a book that deservedly won Sports Book Of The Year in 1999. I read this book in four days, and still go back to it every now and again. Never dry, always interesting, often very funny - indispensable.
Product Details/Specifications
Authors:
Derek Birley
Recording label: Aurum Press Ltd
Manufacturer: Aurum Press Ltd
EAN: 9781854109415
Binding: Paperback
Dewey decimal number: 796.3580942
ISBN: 1854109413
Number of pages: 400
Publication date: 2003-07-11
Language: English (Unknown)
Language: English (Original Language)
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