A Field of Tents and Waving Colours: Neville Cardus Writing on Cricket

Description

‘The perfect read on a summer’s afternoon in the garden, or, better still, on the boundary’, The Cricketer Before Neville Cardus, there was no such thing as cricket writing. As John Arlott said, the game was merely reported. With Cardus, ‘it was for the first time appreciated, felt, and imaginatively described’. With The Great Romantic, Duncan Hamilton’s acclaimed biography, the 2019 William Hill Sports Book of the Year, what better introduction to the greatest cricket writer of all than all his most evocative, most memorable writing in one volume? Here, then, is Cardus on Don Bradman, Victor Trumper, Denis Compton and Richie Benaud, at Roses matches and the arcadian cricket festival at Dover beneath Shakespeare Cliff, seeing the Australians defeated at Eastbourne – and of course at the home of cricket, Lord’s. ‘Thoughtfully arranged, and covering a span from the honeymoon 1920s to the often grumpy-old-man 60s and 70s, it includes many of Cardus’s greatest hits’, David Kynaston, Guardian ‘A handsome introduction to Cardus… In the years ahead, when our cricket is given increasingly to the T20 thrash and something called The Hundred, we shall revisit Cardus to restore our spirits, and very possibly to revive our souls’, Michael Henderson, The Critic