Village Cricket

UK: David & Charles. Very Good/Very Good. 1980. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0715377272 Dust jacket complete. Green cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. Numerous photographs and illustrations. 160 pages clean and tight. The village cricket match retains a timeless pastoral charm. The `blacksmith and braces' image has gone, and standards may equal those of cricket at higher levels; but the nearby church stands solid, the pub claims antiquity and the passing generations turn up to watch. This handsome book vividly evokes the story - and the continuity - of village cricket round the country: its origins, its customs, its eccentricities and its seriousness. Gerald Howat talks to officials and spectators, describes remarkable matches and individual performances of the past, unearths interesting club records - scores, club expenses, disciplines imposed on players - and looks to the future. Over 2,000 villages in Britain play cricket, and it began as a village game - first under aristocratic patronage, then under squire or parson. Recently some commercial patronage, such as that of John Haig and Co Ltd and The Cricketer, has come to village teams. Ground, transport, food and finance have remained the real and eternal problems; the joys have been such that these have often been overcome. As John Arlott points out in his Foreword, the author has taken on a task no one has tackled before: he has looked at the phases of change in village cricket alongside the changes in village life. With many pictures and a racy, informative text packed with anecdotes and examples, this is a delightful book. .