So much cricket writing is pure pastoral. It locates the game in that sepia-tinted pre-lapsarian Golden Age when a third of the world referred to a country most would never see as Home, the summers seemed eternal, the crowds spilled over the boundary rope and, according to John Arlott's poem that opens this anthology, "the bar stayed open all day".
Ramachandra Guha, environmental historian and India's leading cricket writer, has attempted to get away from that understandably Anglo-centric vision of the game. His anthology is underpinned by its editor's apparent conviction that cricket has shifted over the past 50 years from being the acceptable face of imperialism to an expression of national independence.
Guha has also attempted to shift emphasis away from Neville Cardus, son of a Manchester prostitute and unspecified father, and the pioneer of cricket writing as we know it. The case against the Cardus version of pastoral has swelled recently, most notably in Dick Birley's witty attack (not included here) on his "aesthetic fallacy". Guha claims Cardus had little influence outside England, and includes many brilliant examples of the dirty Aussie realism of Ray Robinson and Jack Fingleton.
And yet Cardus is the most represented writer here. His style, adumbrating Beauty and Art and peppered with quotes from duff 19th-century rhymesters, is still preferable to the meat-and-two-veg prose of ex-players who turn their superannuated hands to journalism. His account of the Lord's test of 1930, in which 1601 runs were scored in four days, remains a classic.
The bulk of The Picador Book Of Cricket is taken up with portraits of the game's greats, starting with the father of modern batsmanship, W.G. Grace, and culminating with two paeans to the contemporary master, Sachin Tendulkar. Not surprisingly, Guha has eschewed the usual reverence, and includes several pieces that are faintly iconoclastic.
Grace, for example, is seen also as the father of modern gamesmanship, the batsman who screamed "Miss it!" at fielders poised for a catch. Frank Keating's marvellous double-edged appreciation of Lilley, Chappell and Marsh, written on the occasion of their mutual retirement, remembers those three Australians as much for the poverty of their sportsmanship as the brilliance of their play.
Nor does Don Bradman, unarguably cricket's greatest, walk away unscathed. Even Cardus describes the Don's batting as "beautiful and yet somehow cruel in its excessive mastery". Elsewhere, Arlott suggests that Bradman "missed something of cricket that less gifted and less memorable men have gained".
"Little Heroes" is easily the most riveting section, and bears out Arlott's belief. As with great writers, there is something ultimately dull about descriptions of the greatness of great cricketers. Far more moving and amusing are these pieces on players who missed their 15 minutes due to bad breaks or coming from the wrong place at the wrong time: a black South African all-rounder in the 1960's; a Fijian Botham; an Irish priest considered the best cricketer in India in the 1930's.
Matthew Engel recalls his adolescent hero, Colin Milburn, who changed the course of four of his nine tests, lost favour because of his unfashionable county and 18 stone, and an eye in a car accident. By turns nostalgic and bitter, Engel's piece is the best of the less familiar in the book.
The anthology wraps up with accounts of great matches, and sundries that belong to no obvious category. Again, several of these are a little too familiar, except for Ralph Barker's extraordinary ball-by-ball micro-history of the closing moments of the Oval test of 1882. And B.C. Pires's bewildered howl at the decline of contemporary West Indian cricket and television programming is especially funny: "The television commentary just switched from BBC1 to BBC2 and Dujon disappeared in the changeover. He was batting on BBC1... Dujon must be out. But how did he get there?"
Grumbles? Guha's suggestion that Cardus was "a fair player himself" is surely mistaken. Fingleton remembered seeing Cardus bowl only one ball, and that landed in an adjacent net. Hugh MacIlvanny, a fine writer on other sports, captures nothing of the terrifying aura of Viv Richards out in the middle.
And when Guha writes "At home, in England...", assume he does so with a large pinch of post-colonial salt. His own plural and hugely enjoyable anthology is proof enough that cricket is now equally at home on the damp fields of Co Dublin or the backstreets of Bombay, if not more so.
Conor O'Callaghan is a poet. His essay on cricket in Ireland appears in Playing the Field (New Island Books)