Cricket's final summer

Duncan Hamilton – One Long and Beautiful Summer: A Short Elegy for Red-Ball Cricket (riverrun, £16.99)

Michael Henderson – That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer of Cricket (Constable, £20)

Perversely, our barren cricketing summer has been a boon for cricket writers. Deprived of the real thing – and I do not accept that “Test” matches in empty, bio-secure sporting bowls is the real thing – cricket enthusiasts will instead be turning to two wistful love letters to the game by middle-aged blokes who learned to love it in the 1960s and early 70s, and have no time for the modern obsession with turning cricket into baseball: short, intense, containable in the two-and-a-half-hour window preferred by television schedulers.

Duncan Hamilton spent 2019 touring grounds in England and Wales to mark what he believed would be “cricket’s final summer before the revolution”. Ironically, because of the pandemic, the revolution – the introduction of “The Hundred” – has been postponed until 2021. But Hamilton’s elegy-cum-polemic has appeared anyway to warn us of the horrors ahead.

If you follow cricket, you will know what The Hundred is and probably loathe it. If you don’t, you are precisely the person the cricket authorities – tired of being marginalised by football and eager to embrace populism – want to attract. The Hundred is a whizz-bang 100-balls-a-side match which will feature eight men’s and women’s teams based not on the traditional county structure that has existed since the late 19th century but on new city franchises: Northern Superchargers, Oval Invincibles, Welsh Fire and so on. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) www.ecb.co.uk is ploughing a fortune into a concept that will produce uninteresting, one-dimensional cricket for a TV audience that it thinks can’t be bothered with a four-day county game, a five-day Test match or even a 50-over-a-side (that’s 300 deliveries each) match that can take seven hours to complete.

Hamilton, a self-declared “raving sentimentalist”, does not spare the marketers who he reckons are intent on destroying the sport. “The strategy is to bastardise aspects of the game specifically to appeal to people who don’t like cricket,” he writes. “The people who do like it, and those of us who are particularly fond of the Championship, seem to be immaterial to them. We are treated like irritants at best and idiots at worst.”

Hence his journey, which starts at Welbeck Colliery Cricket Club in Sookholme near Mansfield, where Nottinghamshire are playing Hampshire on a lovely little ground “where everything is up close and personal, you are on top of the play and almost become a participant in it”, and ends at Taunton with Somerset vainly trying to wrest the championship away from Essex. Belying the title of the book, it often rains, not least in that final anti-climactic (and all too climatic) match. En route from Sookholme to Taunton, Hamilton visits Hove and Scarborough, watches Yorkshire play in York for the first time in more than a century, luxuriates in village cricket and sees Ben Stokes play an epic innings to steer England to victory against Australia in a match that is one of the greatest ever played.

It is all very diverting, if a little indulgent, though as a three-time winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, Hamilton has gained the right to indulge himself. The problem is that he wrote a similarly lyrical evocation of the game a decade ago, A Last English Summer. His publisher doesn’t see this as a drawback, calling One Long and Beautiful Summer a “companion volume”. But the premise of the previous book was that traditional cricket was dying, the county system was “directionless and obsolete”, Twenty20 (the forerunner of The Hundred) was undermining long-form cricket, the game was no longer part of mainstream culture because the ECB had sold its soul to Sky TV, kids no longer played in the park. Hamilton’s new book is more polemical, more disturbed by the revolution threatening the sport he loves, but you do wonder how many more Last Posts there will be before the funeral is finally over?

Michael Henderson’s That Will Be England Gone is ostensibly a book about cricket but, like the author himself, is really unclassifiable. Henderson, a maverick journalist and former cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, shares many of Hamilton’s preoccupations with a sport that he believes is repudiating its history, and the book is also grounded in visits to matches in the summer of 2019, but there the resemblance ends. Really it is an extended essay celebrating (or perhaps memorialising) what Henderson sees as a vanishing England – polite, understated, ironic, generous, rooted in a shared identity.

Like Hamilton, Henderson was born in 1958. He grew up in a monochrome age and can’t quite cope with Technicolor. “I am not the kind of person likely to be attracted to The Hundred,” he writes at the outset. “I buy hardback books, think of Wigmore Hall as a second home, and take my holidays in European cities that have great art galleries. I have no interest in social media, have never bought a lottery ticket, and wouldn’t watch a ‘reality’ show on television if I were granted the keys to the Exchequer.”

The title comes from Philip Larkin’s poem “Going, Going”, another lament for a country that is being brutalised, and some will be tempted to write Henderson off as a prematurely aged fuddy-duddy with his love of real ale in country pubs, the music of Elgar and a rural England that barely existed even when he was born. His loathing of buzzwords such as diversity and accessibility will not endear him to a Guardian audience, and his idealisation of a certain type of Englishness can end in murky waters. I blanched at his argument that “All peoples share a blood memory, rooted in places and events, which helps to establish a national mythology.” That dangerous phrase blood memory!

So, Little Englander as well as old fogey. Except that he isn’t. Part of the book is a love letter to Vienna, a city he adores for its music, art and timeless cafés. Music, indeed, is more important to him than cricket – he really does live at the Wigmore Hall as well as the Philharmonie in Berlin – and the book is at heart a memoir of a curious life devoted to Art, including cricket, which he echoes John Arlott in believing is the sporting endeavour which comes closest to art.

In other hands, the book would be a ragbag. But if you can stomach the cultural politics, Henderson writes so beautifully and spikily, and his mind is so well-stocked, that the book is a delight. He is less polemical than Hamilton, and less polemical than Larkin too. His pet hates do surface from time to time – sportsmen who wear baseball caps back to front, pre-match huddles, Little and Large, Twitter, blogging, phone-ins, talent shows, “the ghastly Frankie Vaughan” (singled out for no particular reason”), Katie Derham, craft beer, smashed avocado, “artisanal” cake, ethically sourced coffee, populism, relativism and the modern desire to “reach out” – but the tone, despite these harrumphings, is mellow. The England he knew and the commitment to high art he relished are disappearing, and he is intent on writing a requiem.

One of the composers he extols is Schubert. “There may be greater composers – Bach and Beethoven,” he writes, “but not one explores more deeply the crooked timber of humanity.” It’s a lovely phrase in a book of lovely phrases, and explains the appeal of Henderson’s writing, infused as it is with a longing for rootedness and a sense of loss. You will at times be infuriated – not least by his tendency to namedrop (the cast list includes Harold Pinter, Stephen Sondheim, Simon Rattle and Ken Dodd) – but you will also be entertained, diverted and provoked.

There is, though, a caveat, which applies to both these books – indeed, all three if one counts Hamilton’s earlier encomium. Cricket writing has always been dominated by men of a certain age hymning the innocence of a golden age or a mistily remembered childhood populated by imperishable giants. “As the run stealers flicker to and fro,/ To and fro:/ O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!” wrote Francis Thompson in his much-loved poem At Lord’s, summoning up the ghosts of his adolescent heroes. “I saw Len Hutton in his prime/ Another time, another time,” wrote the cricket-obsessed Harold Pinter 80 years later.

Pinter accorded cricket an almost sacramental quality. He ran his own team, the Gaieties, and at the end of each season, with the shadows lengthening on a September evening, would gather his players together to read Thompson’s poem, which was also read at his funeral. But cricket is changing and probably needs to. All sports are locked in a Darwinian struggle for attention, coverage, money, survival. Hailing from the same generation as Hamilton and Henderson, I also bemoan the marginalisation of long-form cricket, but our day is almost done. Who comes next, and what do they want?

Women, who do not feature as players in either book, are becoming more visible in the sport; the younger generation seem to lack the attention span required for a five-day game; maybe huddles and baseball caps worn back-to-front are here to stay. W G Grace was an iconoclast once. The financial centre of gravity in cricket has shifted from England to India; it may now be time for the English literary sensibility to loosen its stranglehold on the game. When will we get the first great book on the Indian Premier League; the first lyrical ode to The Hundred? That will be England – and cricket – reinvented. For good or ill.

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