When Cricket was Cricket

By a long way the most disappointing book I’ve read recently is a pictorial review of the game of cricket, entitled When Cricket was Cricket, with the appealing sub-title A Nostalgic Look at a Century of the Greatest Game.

True, there are some stunning and fascinating photographs in the book – the very upper-class crowds perambulating the outfield at Lord’s during an interval of the University match in 1914, Don Bradman strolling with the King at Balmoral, cricket on Blackpool beach in 1946 and plenty more covering most aspects of the game in the last 100 years or so.

The problem lies not with the photographs but with the commentary and captions that accompany them.  These are the work of Adam Powley.  The clue is to be found in the biographical end-paper.   Powley is a journalist and author who has previously written mainly about football.  Presumably, his publishers, Haynes Publishing, thought that a book on cricket would be a good follow-up to Powley’s When Football was Football.

Unfortunately, Powley doesn’t seem to know a massive amount about the game, so cricketing solecisms abound.  Frederick Toone not only becomes C. Toone but is made manager of the 1947 England team, which would have been tricky since he died in 1930.  Warwickshire groundsman Bernard Flack is bizarrely translated into a scientist from the University of Wales; and it is arguable whether Don Bradman was “by common consent the greatest cricketer of all time” – the greatest batsman, maybe but a better overall cricketer than, say, W.G. Grace or Garfield Sobers?

 My favourite inept comment concerns Jack Hobbs who, according to the hapless Powley, “would have scored many more centuries had he not surrendered his wicket so often once he passed three figures.”  Oh, really?!

It is not just the lack of cricketing knowledge that spoils the book.  It’s also the shoddy way in which the background to many of the photographs has not been properly researched.  Why was a match being played at Richmond in 1908 in top hats?  There must be story there, but it remains untold, as does the tale behind the touching picture of children on crutches playing cricket, watched by other children in what appear to be hospital beds.  Possibly it relates to the outbreaks of polio in the 1950s but Mr. Powley for sure isn’t sufficiently curious to find out, so we are left to wonder.

All in all, then, an opportunity missed.  It is, I suppose, an OK book to buy if you are content just to look at the photographs and make up your own stories behind them.  Otherwise, best to save your money for one of the many well-researched books about the summer game.

Jack Hobbs - England's Greatest Cricketer

One of the current mysteries of cricket is how Sachin Tendulkar, the Little Master who for 20 years has scored centuries almost at will has struggled to go from 99 to 100 international hundreds.  Is it bad luck, nerves, some hidden character flaw or a combination of all of these factors that have made that last 100 so elusive? 

A look into the past may be instructive.  The man known in the period after the First World War simply as The Master suffered a similar agony.  By mid-1925, Jack Hobbs needed just one more century to equal W. G. Grace's record of 126 first-class hundreds.  Then the runs dried up.  The newspaper stories strayed from the back to the front pages.  Photographers –and even a film crew - followed him everywhere.  Crowds flocked to matches with the sole purpose of seeing him reach the elusive three figures.  “I felt that every eye in England was focused on me, and I began to get harassed,” Hobbs later recalled.  The pressure overwhelmed him. Half-centuries produced headlines declaring that "Hobbs Fails Again".  Finally, after many failures and near-successes, he equalled and then exceeded the record with a century in each innings at Taunton in August.  And, as no doubt will happen with Tendulkar, the runs then flowed freely again.

All of this and much more comes to life in the pages of a new and definitive biography of Hobbs by Leo McKinstry who has  previously written a "warts and all" life of Geoff Boycott as well as books on Sir Alf Ramsey and the Charlton brothers.  Aside from all that, he writes regularly for the Daily Express and has been described by a fellow blogger as "a nasty, intolerant man who gets paid to churn out deeply unpleasant, utterly charmless and endlessly repetitive rants on the Express op-ed page twice a week".

Those not deterred by such a negative endorsement will find that McKinstry has belied this reputation by writing a well-researched book of considerable charm.  He clearly has a great fondness for his subject, who comes across as a thoroughly decent human being.  He was also a model professional cricketer, the mainstay of England's batting for over 20 years either side of the First World War. ending his career with a tally of 197 first-class hundreds.

Even when, as with the Boycott book, McKinstry  is describing the warts, he is inclined to excuse them.  Thus, Hobbs was a reluctant warrior in the First World War, preferring to work in a munitions factory and be paid for playing Bradford League cricket.  But, as McKinstry points out, he was a married man with four young children; and at the beginning of the War, no-one really understood what the conflict was really going to be like.  Nevertheless, his failure to join the forces until he was conscripted in 1916 caused family ill-feeling and disputes when others had already served their King and country for two years.

Similarly, McKinstry describes how Hobbs failed to blow the whistle on the Bodyline tactics when, shortly after his retirement from Test cricket, he was the one figure of any stature in the English cricketing world reporting on the 1932/3 series in Australia.  But he quickly rushes to Hobbs's defence. Yes, his reports were lily-livered and bland but he was an inexperienced journalist, known to be naturally diffident and, in any event, how could he criticise Douglas Jardine, who was his county captain at Surrey?

The majority of the book’s 400 pages tell the story of a successful career and a largely happy life.  McKinstry has done his homework, bringing to life both his  subject and the era in which he lived.  Mistakes are hard to find.  South African googly bowler Ernie Vogler several times becomes Ernie Volger; and the photo of Hobbs driving into Lord's in 1930 suggests either that he had a left-hand drive vehicle or, more likely, that the image is reversed.

Overall, however, this is a book strongly recommended to anyone who doesn’t believe that cricket history began in 1981 with Botham’s Ashes.  Readable, well-researched, wide-ranging in its scope, it is one of the best biographies of its kind.