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A Social History of English Cricket
Winner of the William Hil Sports Book of the Year and acclaimed as a magesterial, classic work, A Social History of English Cricket is an encyclopaedic survey of the game, from its humble origins all the way to modern floodlit finishes.
But, it is also the story of English culture, mirrored in a sport that has always been a complex repository of our manners, hierarchies and politics. Sir Derek Birley's survey of the impact on cricket of two world wars, Empire and 'the English caste system', will, contends Ian Woolridge, 'teach an intelligent child of twelve more about their heritage than he or she will ever pick up at school'.
Superbly witty and humorous, peopled by larger-than-life characters from Denis Compton to Ian Botham, and wholly forswearing nostalgia, A Social History of English Cricket is a tour-de-force by one of the great writers on cricket.
But, it is also the story of English culture, mirrored in a sport that has always been a complex repository of our manners, hierarchies and politics. Sir Derek Birley's survey of the impact on cricket of two world wars, Empire and 'the English caste system', will, contends Ian Woolridge, 'teach an intelligent child of twelve more about their heritage than he or she will ever pick up at school'.
Superbly witty and humorous, peopled by larger-than-life characters from Denis Compton to Ian Botham, and wholly forswearing nostalgia, A Social History of English Cricket is a tour-de-force by one of the great writers on cricket.
400 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1999
10 people are currently reading
283 people want to read
About the author
Derek Birley
15 books1 followerSir Derek Birley was an English educator and writer who had a strong interest in sport, especially cricket.
He was educated at grammar school in Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, and at Queens' College, Cambridge University.
He was educated at grammar school in Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, and at Queens' College, Cambridge University.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 2, 2012
Reads like watching watching Chris Tavare bat
see http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/...
As the song goes "I don't like Cricket, I love it!" and I have done for nigh on 40 years, since the days when 'The Windies' ruled the World. In that time I've watched a succession of England and Warwickshire greats like R.G.D .Willis and his mile long run up, Botham's British Beef, Derek Randall's Sublime fielding, Jack Russell's Artistic eccentricity, the pace stamina and sheer brilliance of Alan Donald or Brian Lara not to mention World greats like Viv Richards, Abdul Qadir, Sunhil Gavaskar, Glen McGrath...etc. etc...
Okay you get the point...
I also like history and seeing as this book is about both, then it should be right up my street.
It wasn't.
I found each chapter akin to eating a Jacobs Cracker whilst running a sub Saharan marathon
Man, this book is hard work!
There's some interesting stuff to be gleaned from between the minutiae of some 200 years of cricket but having batted on stoically for 6 chapters I decided to up stumps and abandon play for lack of interest.
Pity!
This book won awards, so it's a personal thing,
but hey, in my humble opinion, life's too short for books like this or maybe I should revisit it when I retire.
May 19, 2025
Interesting overall, and well regarded research and writing/prose. But very dry in sections and while I feel I learned a lot about cricket and County Championship history, I don’t feel as if I learned much about the sport of cricket and its arch into the 21st century version, nor did I learn much about the “social” aspect of the sport vis-a-vis societal developments. That is, this could have had a base of English football or golf and it would have had a similar rhythm; professionals were second class citizens to gentleman and then eventually professionals overcame obstacles to be the well-paid and respected leaders of their industry.
Would recommend to an English cricket fan, but perhaps not a general fan or someone new to the sport. As a historical work, though, it is excellent.
Would recommend to an English cricket fan, but perhaps not a general fan or someone new to the sport. As a historical work, though, it is excellent.
September 10, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads # Cricket
This is one of those rare works in cricket literature that succeeds in being both history and mirror, a book that does not just recount the sport’s events but shows us how cricket is woven into the fabric of English society itself. This book arrives at the end of the 20th century like a summing-up, a cool, sardonic voice cutting through the mist of nostalgia that so often surrounds cricket writing. It is not a book written to flatter lovers of the game, nor one to join in the elegiac chorus that cricket seems to summon so easily.
Instead, Birley offers a sober, witty, sometimes barbed exploration of how cricket was created, shaped, and perpetuated by social forces, until the story of the game becomes indistinguishable from the story of England’s class structure, its industrialization, its empire, and its uncertain place in a changing modern world.
What immediately strikes a reader of Birley is the tone. This is not Neville Cardus in lyrical flight, not John Arlott with his radio warmth, not even Rowland Bowen in his eccentric fury. Birley writes with a historian’s detachment, but laced with irony. His sentences often carry the sting of satire, exposing hypocrisies in the amateur–professional divide, mocking the pretensions of public school headmasters who turned cricket into a moral crusade, and laying bare the contradictions of a game that prided itself on gentlemanly values while perpetuating some of the most rigid social hierarchies. This irony is not bitterness; it is the sharpened tool of someone who knows that nostalgia has too long obscured the realities of cricket’s past.
Birley begins at the origins, not in mythical pastoral idylls but in the hard soil of 18th-century England, where cricket emerges as a pastime of rural communities and quickly becomes entangled with gambling and the patronage of the aristocracy. He dismisses the idea of cricket as somehow inherently noble or moral; it was, from its beginnings, a site of contestation, of wagers, of physicality.
The village green is less a poetic scene than a space of rough-and-tumble competition, often violent, always watched closely by those with money on the outcome. From these roots, cricket grew not as an abstract ideal but as a material practice, shaped by who controlled land, leisure, and labour.
When Birley turns to the 19th century, his historian’s scalpel cuts most deeply. The Industrial Revolution transforms English life, and with it, cricket itself. This is the period where the amateur–professional divide takes its most grotesque forms, with “gentlemen” of means playing alongside but never quite with the “players” who earned their bread from the game. Birley’s chapters on this subject are among the most compelling in the book.
He shows how cricket became an instrument of class distinction: amateurs arrived in blazers, professionals in working garb; amateurs were excused for failures with the bat, professionals scorned for even the smallest lapse.
The notorious practice of having professionals enter through a separate gate, or not being allowed to dine at the same table, is recounted not with melodrama but with the crisp indignation of fact. These were not minor quirks; they were the staging of class inequality in every match. The crowd watching at Lord’s or The Oval was not just seeing cricket; it was seeing England’s class system performed in whites.
Birley is especially good at puncturing the inflated claims of cricket’s moral mission. Public schools, he notes, seized on cricket in the Victorian era as a way of producing disciplined, obedient, empire-building young men. The so-called “Muscular Christianity” of Thomas Arnold and others was not merely about health or camaraderie; it was about moulding character for imperial service.
Cricket became a training ground for ruling, for command, for endurance in the face of adversity. Birley does not ridicule this outright, but he does show its absurdity: the game that began as a rural diversion was now turned into an ideology, a code of empire. The ball and bat became tools of pedagogy, the cricket field a rehearsal for governance in far-off colonies.
This is where Birley’s eye for irony is most delightful. He lingers on the paradoxes: amateurs who preached fair play but hired professionals to secure victories; schools that taught cricket as a moral code but also as a mechanism of exclusion; a game that declared itself universal but was carefully policed to maintain hierarchy. The image of cricket as the embodiment of English decency dissolves under his scrutiny, replaced with the image of cricket as an arena of negotiation between classes, institutions, and ambitions.
The 20th century brings new challenges, and Birley charts them with equal acuity. The rise of working-class clubs, the emergence of cricket as industrial recreation, and the increasing prominence of county cricket all signal shifts in who plays and who controls the game.
The two World Wars, in Birley’s narrative, act as seismic interruptions: cricket is both disrupted by them and used to restore a sense of continuity afterward. Yet even here, the divisions remain. Professionals still toil, amateurs still claim authority, and cricket continues to reflect, in microcosm, England’s uneasy balance of class.
Birley’s treatment of post-war cricket is perhaps the most poignant part of the book, though his voice remains unsentimental. He shows how cricket, once a symbol of English confidence and empire, gradually finds itself adrift in a world where those certainties have vanished. The decline of the empire, the rise of new leisure activities, and the slow crumbling of the amateur–professional divide (finally abolished in 1962), all reshape the sport. Birley does not indulge in lament; instead, he analyses the decline with the same coolness with which he analysed the rise.
Cricket was always a product of social conditions, he reminds us, and as those conditions changed, so too did the meaning and place of cricket. If the game seems diminished in the late twentieth century, it is because the world that once sustained its centrality has altered irreversibly.
One of the most admirable aspects of A Social History of English Cricket is its refusal to romanticize. Where so many cricket writers fall into nostalgia for lost summers, golden ages, and mythical gentlemen, Birley insists on history. He does not deny that cricket has inspired affection, but he places that affection within context: the affection of the ruling classes for a sport that reaffirmed their authority, the affection of workers for a rare space of community, the affection of empire-builders for a game that symbolized their supposed civilizing mission. Cricket is not “timeless” for Birley; it is time-bound, every era shaping its own version of the game.
His prose style carries this argument as much as the facts do. Witty, sharp, never indulgent, Birley’s writing is a tonic in a genre that too often drowns in sentiment. He can compress decades of change into a few lucid paragraphs, and he can also linger on an anecdote to expose an entire structure of inequality. His portraits of players are brisk and never fawning; he is more interested in what their careers reveal about the society around them than in mythologizing their personal greatness.
By the time Birley reaches the late 20th century, with cricket struggling to find its place in a media-saturated age and with football ascendant, his narrative carries a note of inevitability. Cricket, he suggests, cannot be what it once was, because England is no longer what it once was. The decline is not a tragedy but a transformation, and one must see it clearly rather than pine for impossible returns.
Reading Birley is an education not only in cricket but also in England itself. The book functions as a social history with cricket as its thread, but in following that thread, we are led through the loom of English society: aristocracy, industrialization, class struggle, education, empire, war, and decline. Few sports can bear such weight, but cricket can, and Birley shows us how.
His accomplishment is to keep the game visible while always pointing to what lies behind it, the structures that sustain it, the changes that reshape it.
For anyone seeking to understand cricket beyond the boundary — not in CLR James’s Caribbean sense, but in the sense of cricket as a social institution in England — Birley’s book remains indispensable. It does not offer comfort, it does not offer lyricism, but it offers clarity, and in that clarity, one sees both the beauty and the ugliness of the game’s place in history.
To finish the book is to have one’s sense of cricket altered: no longer can one watch a match without remembering the centuries of class distinction enacted on those fields, the ideologies smuggled into the game, the way leisure and labour were divided and policed.
And yet, paradoxically, this does not kill the love of cricket. If anything, it deepens it. For to love cricket honestly, Birley seems to say, one must love it with eyes open, aware of its contradictions, its complicities, its entanglements with power. Only then can the game be appreciated not as myth but as history, not as illusion but as practice.
Birley’s A Social History of English Cricket stands, then, as a kind of corrective in cricket literature. It reminds us that behind every cover drive there is a context, behind every county fixture a class struggle, behind every Test match an ideology.
The book is not an elegy but a dissection, and in the sharpness of that dissection lies its enduring value. More than two decades after its publication, it still reads as fresh, still cuts through the fog of nostalgia that gathers around cricket, and still compels readers to see the game not only as a pastime but also as a social text.
If other books give us cricket’s poetry, Birley gives us its sociology. If others offer comfort, Birley offers truth. It may not be the truth we always want to hear, but it is the truth that lingers after the last page is turned, reshaping forever the way we think about the sound of leather on willow echoing across the English summer.
This is one of those rare works in cricket literature that succeeds in being both history and mirror, a book that does not just recount the sport’s events but shows us how cricket is woven into the fabric of English society itself. This book arrives at the end of the 20th century like a summing-up, a cool, sardonic voice cutting through the mist of nostalgia that so often surrounds cricket writing. It is not a book written to flatter lovers of the game, nor one to join in the elegiac chorus that cricket seems to summon so easily.
Instead, Birley offers a sober, witty, sometimes barbed exploration of how cricket was created, shaped, and perpetuated by social forces, until the story of the game becomes indistinguishable from the story of England’s class structure, its industrialization, its empire, and its uncertain place in a changing modern world.
What immediately strikes a reader of Birley is the tone. This is not Neville Cardus in lyrical flight, not John Arlott with his radio warmth, not even Rowland Bowen in his eccentric fury. Birley writes with a historian’s detachment, but laced with irony. His sentences often carry the sting of satire, exposing hypocrisies in the amateur–professional divide, mocking the pretensions of public school headmasters who turned cricket into a moral crusade, and laying bare the contradictions of a game that prided itself on gentlemanly values while perpetuating some of the most rigid social hierarchies. This irony is not bitterness; it is the sharpened tool of someone who knows that nostalgia has too long obscured the realities of cricket’s past.
Birley begins at the origins, not in mythical pastoral idylls but in the hard soil of 18th-century England, where cricket emerges as a pastime of rural communities and quickly becomes entangled with gambling and the patronage of the aristocracy. He dismisses the idea of cricket as somehow inherently noble or moral; it was, from its beginnings, a site of contestation, of wagers, of physicality.
The village green is less a poetic scene than a space of rough-and-tumble competition, often violent, always watched closely by those with money on the outcome. From these roots, cricket grew not as an abstract ideal but as a material practice, shaped by who controlled land, leisure, and labour.
When Birley turns to the 19th century, his historian’s scalpel cuts most deeply. The Industrial Revolution transforms English life, and with it, cricket itself. This is the period where the amateur–professional divide takes its most grotesque forms, with “gentlemen” of means playing alongside but never quite with the “players” who earned their bread from the game. Birley’s chapters on this subject are among the most compelling in the book.
He shows how cricket became an instrument of class distinction: amateurs arrived in blazers, professionals in working garb; amateurs were excused for failures with the bat, professionals scorned for even the smallest lapse.
The notorious practice of having professionals enter through a separate gate, or not being allowed to dine at the same table, is recounted not with melodrama but with the crisp indignation of fact. These were not minor quirks; they were the staging of class inequality in every match. The crowd watching at Lord’s or The Oval was not just seeing cricket; it was seeing England’s class system performed in whites.
Birley is especially good at puncturing the inflated claims of cricket’s moral mission. Public schools, he notes, seized on cricket in the Victorian era as a way of producing disciplined, obedient, empire-building young men. The so-called “Muscular Christianity” of Thomas Arnold and others was not merely about health or camaraderie; it was about moulding character for imperial service.
Cricket became a training ground for ruling, for command, for endurance in the face of adversity. Birley does not ridicule this outright, but he does show its absurdity: the game that began as a rural diversion was now turned into an ideology, a code of empire. The ball and bat became tools of pedagogy, the cricket field a rehearsal for governance in far-off colonies.
This is where Birley’s eye for irony is most delightful. He lingers on the paradoxes: amateurs who preached fair play but hired professionals to secure victories; schools that taught cricket as a moral code but also as a mechanism of exclusion; a game that declared itself universal but was carefully policed to maintain hierarchy. The image of cricket as the embodiment of English decency dissolves under his scrutiny, replaced with the image of cricket as an arena of negotiation between classes, institutions, and ambitions.
The 20th century brings new challenges, and Birley charts them with equal acuity. The rise of working-class clubs, the emergence of cricket as industrial recreation, and the increasing prominence of county cricket all signal shifts in who plays and who controls the game.
The two World Wars, in Birley’s narrative, act as seismic interruptions: cricket is both disrupted by them and used to restore a sense of continuity afterward. Yet even here, the divisions remain. Professionals still toil, amateurs still claim authority, and cricket continues to reflect, in microcosm, England’s uneasy balance of class.
Birley’s treatment of post-war cricket is perhaps the most poignant part of the book, though his voice remains unsentimental. He shows how cricket, once a symbol of English confidence and empire, gradually finds itself adrift in a world where those certainties have vanished. The decline of the empire, the rise of new leisure activities, and the slow crumbling of the amateur–professional divide (finally abolished in 1962), all reshape the sport. Birley does not indulge in lament; instead, he analyses the decline with the same coolness with which he analysed the rise.
Cricket was always a product of social conditions, he reminds us, and as those conditions changed, so too did the meaning and place of cricket. If the game seems diminished in the late twentieth century, it is because the world that once sustained its centrality has altered irreversibly.
One of the most admirable aspects of A Social History of English Cricket is its refusal to romanticize. Where so many cricket writers fall into nostalgia for lost summers, golden ages, and mythical gentlemen, Birley insists on history. He does not deny that cricket has inspired affection, but he places that affection within context: the affection of the ruling classes for a sport that reaffirmed their authority, the affection of workers for a rare space of community, the affection of empire-builders for a game that symbolized their supposed civilizing mission. Cricket is not “timeless” for Birley; it is time-bound, every era shaping its own version of the game.
His prose style carries this argument as much as the facts do. Witty, sharp, never indulgent, Birley’s writing is a tonic in a genre that too often drowns in sentiment. He can compress decades of change into a few lucid paragraphs, and he can also linger on an anecdote to expose an entire structure of inequality. His portraits of players are brisk and never fawning; he is more interested in what their careers reveal about the society around them than in mythologizing their personal greatness.
By the time Birley reaches the late 20th century, with cricket struggling to find its place in a media-saturated age and with football ascendant, his narrative carries a note of inevitability. Cricket, he suggests, cannot be what it once was, because England is no longer what it once was. The decline is not a tragedy but a transformation, and one must see it clearly rather than pine for impossible returns.
Reading Birley is an education not only in cricket but also in England itself. The book functions as a social history with cricket as its thread, but in following that thread, we are led through the loom of English society: aristocracy, industrialization, class struggle, education, empire, war, and decline. Few sports can bear such weight, but cricket can, and Birley shows us how.
His accomplishment is to keep the game visible while always pointing to what lies behind it, the structures that sustain it, the changes that reshape it.
For anyone seeking to understand cricket beyond the boundary — not in CLR James’s Caribbean sense, but in the sense of cricket as a social institution in England — Birley’s book remains indispensable. It does not offer comfort, it does not offer lyricism, but it offers clarity, and in that clarity, one sees both the beauty and the ugliness of the game’s place in history.
To finish the book is to have one’s sense of cricket altered: no longer can one watch a match without remembering the centuries of class distinction enacted on those fields, the ideologies smuggled into the game, the way leisure and labour were divided and policed.
And yet, paradoxically, this does not kill the love of cricket. If anything, it deepens it. For to love cricket honestly, Birley seems to say, one must love it with eyes open, aware of its contradictions, its complicities, its entanglements with power. Only then can the game be appreciated not as myth but as history, not as illusion but as practice.
Birley’s A Social History of English Cricket stands, then, as a kind of corrective in cricket literature. It reminds us that behind every cover drive there is a context, behind every county fixture a class struggle, behind every Test match an ideology.
The book is not an elegy but a dissection, and in the sharpness of that dissection lies its enduring value. More than two decades after its publication, it still reads as fresh, still cuts through the fog of nostalgia that gathers around cricket, and still compels readers to see the game not only as a pastime but also as a social text.
If other books give us cricket’s poetry, Birley gives us its sociology. If others offer comfort, Birley offers truth. It may not be the truth we always want to hear, but it is the truth that lingers after the last page is turned, reshaping forever the way we think about the sound of leather on willow echoing across the English summer.
April 15, 2025
This is much lauded book, but I found it a tough read. From my perspective, it wasn’t a true social history. The first few chapters dealt with the development of the sport within the wider context of the emergence of leisure time and sports in the 1700s, but the bulk of the book could be classified as more of a narrative history of the county championship. Each section started with an overview of the social, political and economic landscape of the period of history, but these were often not well contextualised.
However there were some interesting nuggets and Birley had a healthy level of irrelevance to the institutions and class systems of English society throughout the centuries, which provided useful insight. Unusually the writing oscillates between being convoluted and impenetrable, with witty, pithy quips. Here were some of my favourites.
‘To say that the MCC showed a lack of leadership is to mouth a truism that could have been uttered at any time in cricket history’. – early 1800s
‘Mitford is also interesting as an early exponent of the xenophobic (and sometimes racist streak) that characterises much English cricket writing’.
‘[Prince Albert] was a firm believer in progress through science, free trade, and similar serious subjects, which inevitably made him seem both comic and sinister to the cheerfully disorganised and xenophobic British.’
‘Since … the decline in gambling MCC did not take cricket as seriously as before, showing more interest in the purely social side of things.’
‘The tourists shocked their Australian hosts by their rapacity – selling equipment, buying up cheap gold and jewellery, soliciting gifts and making pigs of themselves at welcoming functions.’ – 1863 Parr’s England tour of Australia.
On double cricket and football internationals in the Victorian era ‘the very number of these raises the question as to whether technically standards were quite so high as they subsequently became’.
Plum Warner writing under a thinly veiled pen name in The Times about a ‘faultless’ hundred that he had scored himself 20 years before.
Warner again on the fact that captaincy carried off-field responsibilities ‘these were better shouldered by an amateur than a professional’.
‘It was all very reassuring that democracy was evolving without getting too far out of hand.’ On two day matches at Lords between top public schools and the national schools competition winners in the 1950s.
‘Boycott, a by-word for self-centered dedication to the cause of trying to make himself into the world’s greatest batsman’.
The Pakistan batsman Asif Iqbal, ‘scathing about the peculiar English attitude, bred in public schools, that regarded protective headgear as somehow effeminate’.
However there were some interesting nuggets and Birley had a healthy level of irrelevance to the institutions and class systems of English society throughout the centuries, which provided useful insight. Unusually the writing oscillates between being convoluted and impenetrable, with witty, pithy quips. Here were some of my favourites.
‘To say that the MCC showed a lack of leadership is to mouth a truism that could have been uttered at any time in cricket history’. – early 1800s
‘Mitford is also interesting as an early exponent of the xenophobic (and sometimes racist streak) that characterises much English cricket writing’.
‘[Prince Albert] was a firm believer in progress through science, free trade, and similar serious subjects, which inevitably made him seem both comic and sinister to the cheerfully disorganised and xenophobic British.’
‘Since … the decline in gambling MCC did not take cricket as seriously as before, showing more interest in the purely social side of things.’
‘The tourists shocked their Australian hosts by their rapacity – selling equipment, buying up cheap gold and jewellery, soliciting gifts and making pigs of themselves at welcoming functions.’ – 1863 Parr’s England tour of Australia.
On double cricket and football internationals in the Victorian era ‘the very number of these raises the question as to whether technically standards were quite so high as they subsequently became’.
Plum Warner writing under a thinly veiled pen name in The Times about a ‘faultless’ hundred that he had scored himself 20 years before.
Warner again on the fact that captaincy carried off-field responsibilities ‘these were better shouldered by an amateur than a professional’.
‘It was all very reassuring that democracy was evolving without getting too far out of hand.’ On two day matches at Lords between top public schools and the national schools competition winners in the 1950s.
‘Boycott, a by-word for self-centered dedication to the cause of trying to make himself into the world’s greatest batsman’.
The Pakistan batsman Asif Iqbal, ‘scathing about the peculiar English attitude, bred in public schools, that regarded protective headgear as somehow effeminate’.
August 29, 2023
This regularly tops lists of the best ever cricket books, and it was comprehensive, well-researched and stayed on topic. The general comments about the book suggested it wasn't dry at all; in cricket parlance, I found there was just a bit of moisture in places, and I certainly didn't find it a rollicking read, but rather a bearable set text.
The history in the title is about both the administration and players and the social and political changes in the sport, with little about the results and statistics unless it provided the context to events. As usual for me, the older the history the less interesting I found it - the sources are less reliable, the characters are unfamiliar and the sport itself bears little resemblance to the modern evolution of it. As a result, the first part was more difficult to get through even if it didn't dwell too long on specifics, but it definitely felt like the long book it was.
There was personality in the writing at times, with disdain for the MCC and their 'repositioning of the deckchairs befitting such an institution' and an anti-establishment position throughout. There was more source material from newspaper columns and autobiographies in more modern times that allowed personalities to come through rather than relying on apochryphal stories about 'characters' of old. However it was first and foremost a serious history with a personal take, and wasn't about the writing.
Nonetheless there was a lot to take from it - the financially perilous state of county cricket being an issue since the 'golden age' of cricket before WWI, the inate conservatism and snobbery of those who watch and write about cricket, and the perennial issues about playing styles and the spirit of cricket.
In one sense it did what it set out to do excellently and there was no real fault to find in it. And yet I would struggle to recommend it to anyone as it did feel too much like research, and it does take a lot of time to read, even if there is a lot to take from it. It just about merits 4 stars as Birley did nothing to annoy me, but it could easily have been a 3.
The history in the title is about both the administration and players and the social and political changes in the sport, with little about the results and statistics unless it provided the context to events. As usual for me, the older the history the less interesting I found it - the sources are less reliable, the characters are unfamiliar and the sport itself bears little resemblance to the modern evolution of it. As a result, the first part was more difficult to get through even if it didn't dwell too long on specifics, but it definitely felt like the long book it was.
There was personality in the writing at times, with disdain for the MCC and their 'repositioning of the deckchairs befitting such an institution' and an anti-establishment position throughout. There was more source material from newspaper columns and autobiographies in more modern times that allowed personalities to come through rather than relying on apochryphal stories about 'characters' of old. However it was first and foremost a serious history with a personal take, and wasn't about the writing.
Nonetheless there was a lot to take from it - the financially perilous state of county cricket being an issue since the 'golden age' of cricket before WWI, the inate conservatism and snobbery of those who watch and write about cricket, and the perennial issues about playing styles and the spirit of cricket.
In one sense it did what it set out to do excellently and there was no real fault to find in it. And yet I would struggle to recommend it to anyone as it did feel too much like research, and it does take a lot of time to read, even if there is a lot to take from it. It just about merits 4 stars as Birley did nothing to annoy me, but it could easily have been a 3.
April 2, 2025
An excellent mixture of Sport, and other histories. I didn't realise cricket's foundations were built on so much arrogance and amateurism. It survived though and is today probably stronger for it.
April 24, 2016
This is one only for cricket-lovers, but for them it is an excellent journey through the ways in which cricket has reflected the english society in which it was played and how the game has and has not reacted to the changes in that society.
The book was published in 1999, and it is a shame Derek Birley is no longer with us, as the changes wrought by T20 cricket continue some of the themes of the book, specifically the snobbishness with which too many react to attempts to make the game more accessible to modern spectators,
The book was published in 1999, and it is a shame Derek Birley is no longer with us, as the changes wrought by T20 cricket continue some of the themes of the book, specifically the snobbishness with which too many react to attempts to make the game more accessible to modern spectators,
November 15, 2016
I'm not sure this was in fact a "social" history of cricket. It was very good but concerned itself with the great powers in the early cricketing world rather than the changing face of society in relation to the leather and willow.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews