da bet nacional： This collection of the best writing benefits from Swanton’s wisdom but suffers from too many reporters and not enough writers
da dobrowin： Matthew Engel27-Jan-2008The Daily Telegraph Book of Cricket Edited by Nick Hoult
(Aurum, 411pp) £18.99
Forgive me if I start on a personal note, but there are only two subjects on which I can claim, incontrovertibly, to be the world’s leading expert. One is the Laws of Reverse Cricket, a game I invented myself. The other is Producing a Newspaper Anthology of Cricket at Precisely the Wrong Moment. I will happily share the secrets of reverse cricket with Nick Hoult if he’s interested. I fear he may soon learn about the second subject himself.
Twenty years ago I edited . I’m rather proud of it actually. Unfortunately, it came out in the very week a new national paper, , launched in 1986. was an instant success and no one wanted to know about . This phase didn’t last long, but long enough to sink my book.The problem is less acute, but more chronic. All newspapers are in trouble these days as they try to map a course in a webby world they don’t understand, and the is thrashing around more than most. Its sports section now looks a shadow of its confident old self, and its cricket has suffered badly.It seems to me the paper lost its cricketing soul (and its USP) the day Christopher Martin-Jenkins defected to in 1999, not because his successors are inferior journalists but because he took with him the old commitment to full coverage. Without him there to chivvy the desk-wallahs, routine county reports were whittled down to meaninglessness, and substantial numbers of cricket-minded readers walked away.The became the paper of choice for the cricketing village partly because it had EW Swanton, but more significantly because it had depth. Behind him in the line-up were some very good and very wise cricket reporters. But that’s not quite the same as having cricket writers. And in any case, they weren’t allowed to write.Into the 1980s the man at a county match would be forced to file the middle portion of his report at tea with just a “top and tail” at the end. That ensured they would write a bland, factual report. Just the facts, ma’am, that was the way. It was pretty hard to read such a piece with pleasure. It is even harder to anthologise.So Hoult has had an uphill task, and one senses he hasn’t always relished it. The was founded in 1855, and he gallops through the first two-thirds of the paper’s history (just 95 of the 411 pages) like a horseman through blasted countryside. With some reason. In the 1930s, for instance, the had self-conscious phrasemaking from the minor poet Thomas Moult and the broadcaster Howard Marshall, plus tosh about Bodyline from Percy Fender; the at the time had Neville Cardus and CLR James.The became the paper of choice for the cricketing village partly because it had EW Swanton, but more significantly because it had depth. Behind him in the line-up were some very good and very wise cricket reporters. But that’s not quite the same as having cricket writersAfter the war, Swanton comes to the rescue, just as he rescued the paper’s cricket. And in 1961 came the less hidebound , which at once offered less stuffy coverage. So there are lots of diamonds in here. Swanton veers deliciously between the antediluvian (on the abolition of amateurs in 1962: “the change strikes me as not only unnecessary but deplorable”) and the near- Bolshevist (1957: “There have been suggestions, I see, that there is something indecorous in this West Indian enthusiasm. Personally I find it enlivening”).There is another fascinating but more prescient piece from 1962, by Ron Roberts, who died terribly young, on cricket’s race problem.There is much else to enjoy: Lewis on the aluminium bat, Parky on Barnsley, CMJ on Arlott, Nicholas on Gower, Martin Johnson being lugubrious … The Michael Hendersons included are, alas, not choleric enough. (Traditional readers may be pleased to know that all ghosted columnists were barred, so no Boycott.) My favourite phrase in the book remains Swantonian: “None could call Lord Constantine a modest man.”Personally, I would have junked the chronological ordering to get in a better balance of light and shade. And Aurum, a zestful and imaginative publishing house, didn’t shine on the design front this time. The book seems awfully grey, like the old itself. Perhaps this was a misguided attempt at authenticity.