Moorhouse - The best loved game: one summer of English cricket

T here are plenty of books I wish I had written, but know I never could: TessoftheDUrbervilles,DavidCopperfield,Ecclesiastes if, that is, you could find a publisher for any of that lot these days. We liked it, Mr Dickens, I can hear them say, but could you cut it back a bit? All this stuff about the great-aunt

I would like to have written TheBestLovedGame too, and I know I never could; not just because Geoffrey Moorhouse is an exceptionally fine writer, though he is that as anyone reading this book will discover. There is a more specialised reason. For the past twelve years I have been on and off, mostly on, a professional cricket writer. The cricket grounds of England and, latterly, the world have become my office. That is my great good fortune for which I am forever grateful. But I have become an inhabitant, not an outsider. I have learned a lot, but I no longer notice the pot plant on the window-ledge, the dust on the mantelpiece, the funny ways of the neighbours: nor do the other residents. Someone more objective has to notice all that.

A regular cricket writer or cricketer might arrive on a ground and notice something deeply obscure and technical about the state of the pitch; a Martian or an American might just notice a group of men standing around in white not doing very much. Somewhere between the two you get the perceptions of a high-class writer with a keen but sympathetic eye; a love of the game undimmed by over-repetition; an outsider with an understanding of the ways of the insiders. That is TheBestLovedGame, and I think it is one of the best cricket books ever written.

Before turning to cricket, Geoffrey Moorhouse had written about such shrouded worlds as India (extensively), the Sahara (which he tried to cross on a camel), a monastery and the Foreign Office. He had written about cricket occasionally as feature writer on the ManchesterGuardian (as was), but only occasionally. So when he decided to spend a summer watching and studying the game, he arrived fresh.

He wisely decided not to spend every day watching, either; but he was there on enough days, in enough different places, to convey the feeling of an English summer and its most characteristic manifestation. He sits in the Mound Stand at Lords (a place for which he has a surprising amount of enthusiasm, for a Lancastrian) and the West Stand at Northampton (moaning capital of the world). Both have now been demolished. He sits on benches at Bacup (Lanes) and Aston Rowant (Oxon) it could have been any year since the world was young.

But it wasnt just any year. It was 1978, one of the drabbest, wettest cricket seasons of recent memory; almost every chapter it is either raining, or about to rain, or has just rained. Good. There is no point in conveying the flavour of English cricket in some one-off idyllic heatwave year. Had the book been written two years earlier (the long, hot summer of 76 which, through mad foolishness, I spent cooped up in an office), it might have had more curiosity value but would have meant less.

Cricket was then also in the midst of the schism caused by Kerry Packer, a figure who is heard growling offstage throughout the book. If there ever have been worse times for cricket, one can only hope we never live through them again. But it was also the best of times, for Moorhouses purposes. If cricket could go on through all the drizzle, through all the torment, then perhaps the game and its verities could survive anything.

It was also a transitional season which in many respects paved the way for the game we have come to know in the mid-1980s. In the early part of the season Moorhouses traditionalist instincts are horrified by the sight of Mike Brearleys skullcap. By midsummer Brearley and many other players had gone much further nothing less than the crash helmet American footballers wear. And if we have subsequently learned to tolerate that legacy of 1978 then most of us would share, even now, Moorhouses righteous indignation.