Cricket, it has often been said, is more than a game. To many it evokes a golden age of gentlemanly conduct and sunlit afternoons on the village green. This book celebrates cricket as a sport, and as a social phenomenon that has grown over the centuries to encompass the professionalism of the Test Match as well as the enduring tradition of amateur tournaments.Very few sports have produced the abundance of literature associated with cricket at every level of the game. In both verse and prose writers have recorded their love of cricket with unequalled passion and enthusiasm and this collection draws on the widest possible range of material - historical documents, anecdotes, reportage, fictional set-pleces and celebratory verse - to create a fascinating literary history. Over 200 years of cricketing heroes and villains, classic matches, notorious controversies, famous players, equally famous writers - names to conjure with like W. G. Grace, Garfield Sobers, Neville Cardus, Frank Keating, John Arlott - are all crowded into these pages, together with lesser-known gems from out-of-the-way county records and local newspapers. Christopher Lee, once described by E. W. Swanton as 'a scholar-cricketer of the old school' has cast his net wide to produce an anthology that will be cherished wherever cricket is played today. Read Less