Our Washington bureau chief recommends five books on the game
OR AT LEAST two centuries, America’s closest thing to a national pastime was cricket. The game was played up and down the east coast throughout the 18centuries. George Washington played it at Valley Forge. The first international fixture in any sport was a cricket match between America and Canada, in Manhattan in 1844. On the first day an estimated 20,000 people watched it. Few Americans know this history.
It is getting harder for Americans to maintain such nonsense. In July their improving national men’s cricket side, dominated by the sons of South Asian migrants, narrowly missed out on qualifying for the 2022 World Cup in T20 cricket—a three-hour format that is more action-packed than most baseball games. In 2024, America will co-host the biennial T20 tournament, for which its side is therefore guaranteed qualification.
While mid-century English cricket writing was mired in romanticism, England’s great cricketing rival, Australia, launched a more hard-nosed, realistic literary tradition. It was led by Ray Robinson and Jack Fingleton, who played 18 Test matches for Australia, then turned out to be even better at writing than he was at cricket. Their literary inheritor is Gideon Haigh, the best living cricket writer.
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