Test matches

There’s a fascinating thought that the authors of Full Circle pursue for just a couple of pages, then leave hanging: ‘Association football offers an alternative history by which to consider the course cricket might have taken.’ In fact, the book demonstrates that cricket has followed football’s course, albeit about a century late. In cricket, too, professionals ousted amateurs, embraced the market, saw economic power shift east and chose a short format that allowed games to be played in an evening. Like it or loathe it, cricket has effectively become football. Reading this serious and competent work, you wonder at times why the journalists Richard Heller and Peter Oborne bothered to write it. There are already countless cricket histories.

Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all probably being John Major’s weighty tome, which said everything you knew it would say as drearily as you feared. So Tim Wigmore, a young shaver who writes on cricket for the Daily Telegraph, has entered hazardous territory. Speaking as a proud cricket badger, who even has a book by Merv Hughes on his shelf (Dear Merv, 2001), I will admit that I have read rather too many cricket histories, and I swore that it would be a cold day in hell (or possibly at the county ground in Derby) before I would willingly start another. But Wigmore has written a splendid, comprehensive book full of good stories and droll asides.