Yes, cricket had a history before the rise of T20!

The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events

If you were new to the game and wanted a history of cricket, where would you go? You can find things on the internet, but might prefer a “properly written” book. A quick search of secondhand book sites will show you that many books have “history” and “cricket” in the title.

Some are to be avoided, like Simon Hughes’ recent And God Created Cricket, which is simply a “humorous” rehash of other work.

Assuming that you want a broad spread from the 18th-century to the modern day, the first serious attempt was by Harry Altham with History Of Cricket in 1926.

This was updated by EW Swanton in 1947, and is a solid attempt at an overall history though it gives more space than one might expect today to amateur cricket at Oxford and Cambridge and the Public Schools.

But then all histories are likely to display the prejudices of their time, and it focuses very strongly on England against Australia and county cricket, very understandable in 1926 though rather backward looking by 1947.

Probably the next one that is still readable today is Rowland Bowen’s Cricket: A History Of Its Growth And Development Throughout The World, published in 1970.

Bowen was notoriously eccentric, inclined to favour a French origin for the game, and famously suggested in his afterword that by the end of this century cricket will still be found, fairly worldwide, but played as a game for pleasure (ie not professionally).

It is an interesting book but not always accurate and Bowen is inclined to ride his hobby-horses.

Benny Green’s A History Of Cricket

Ais probably the best read of all – as a read. He is at pains to point out that he has called it “a” and not “the” history.

It is important to say at this point that far more work has been done on the early periods of the game in recent years, some of it academic but most of it done by the hard work of amateur historians digging into local newspapers in county record offices up and down the country, many, but not all, members of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians.

Many of them were consulted by John Major when he wrote More Than A Game, published in 2007. It is a history of cricket’s early years, and ends at 1914, but it is well researched and probably the best introductory text on the early years.

Eric Midwinter, as befits someone who is much more than a cricket writer, is good on the social contexts of the game, and also on “origin myths”. His The Cricketer’s Progress: Meadowland To Mumbai (2010) is once again an entertaining read which still tells you what you need to know.

One of the best starts, written by someone who really knows the history of the game, and copiously illustrated, is Peter Wynne-Thomas’s The History Of Cricket: From The Weald To The World (1997), which was published by the Stationery Office, as if it had some official seal of approval.

There are other illustrated histories – David Rayvern Allen’s Cricket – An Illustrated History from 1990, and even The Wisden Illustrated History Of Cricket, written by Vic Marks in 1989.

You pays your money (probably not very much for most of these) and you takes your choice, but it is good to know that the game had a history before T20.