Rain never stopped play – cricketing feats of Victorian Britain
From our UK edition
Drawing on contemporary newspaper reports, this splendid book recreates cricket’s watershed year, 1864. At the time, Kit Harris explains, football was still in its infancy and ‘there was almost no other sport to occupy a man’s time’. So cricket was played in winter, too. The smooth surfaces of frozen ponds and lakes made for prodigious scoring: ‘The ball, once struck, found no obstruction before reaching the banks.’ Boundaries didn’t exist, so batsmen ran until a fielder returned the ball. Later that year, playing for United England against All England, William Mortlock ‘hit one ball past square leg, through the gateway, out of the ground, across the road and into a garden wall opposite’. The stroke brought seven runs.
