That Will Be England Gone: The Last Summer Of Cricket
Michael Henderson Constable £20 ★★★★★
Michael Henderson is one of the most knowledgeable writers there is about the summer game. In this vibrant chronicle of the 2019 cricket season, he travels around England taking the temperature of the sport he loves. The result is pure gold.
The mainspring for his trip is (or was, until Covid-19 ripped up the sporting calendar) the much-hyped ‘Hundred’ competition that had been due to start this summer. This gimmicky tournament, described by the author as ‘a three-course dinner for dogs’, will pit teams such as ‘Welsh Fire’ against the likes of ‘Super Northern Chargers’. Henderson thinks it could disfigure the sport for ever.
The beating heart of cricket resides far beyond the glitzy showpiece events colonised by big money and corporate hospitality, and thus Henderson visits not only Lord’s and the Oval but returns to the grounds and games that shaped and nourished his own passion, including festival cricket at Cheltenham and Scarborough, a match at his old school, Repton, and bucolic venues such as Chesterfield and Taunton.
He travels to Ramsbottom for an afternoon of Lancashire League cricket (‘We’ve three supermarkets now but no shoe shop,’ a female spectator laments to him during play) and spends a day at Old Trafford, where his Uncle Harry served on the committee, and where ‘a meat and potato pie can release early memories as sweetly as any tea-soaked madeleine’.
The book is also a love poem to an England fast disappearing, and there are some memorable perorations on the glories of Philip Larkin (a line from his Going, Going provides the title of the book), brass bands, traditional pubs, classical music, and the English landscape. Above all, Henderson deprecates what he sees as the dumbing down of popular culture, in which instant gratification is all that counts, and where ‘everything has to be immediately understood by everybody otherwise it’s an assault on democracy’.
For those who fear the worst for the sport they love, this is like cool, clear water for a man dying of thirst. It’s barnstorming, coruscating stuff, and as fine a book about the game as you’ll read for years.