Bedside Cricket

This book is for people who have got beyond the stage of seeing cricket as a gentle and chivalrous game conducted ritually in the sunshine in beautiful surroundings.The currency of this book is harder stuff altogether-beginning with pre-natal cricket and the eleventh-hour race to make sure the boy is born in the correct county. As the child becomes a man he meets the diabolical mysteries of club cricket,a world ruled by paunchy men with deceptive limps and yellowing sweaters.If he goes higher,he has to cope with the vagaries of the county game,perhaps reaching Test level..There it is his privilege to meet the greatest possible assortment of biased umpires abusive spectator,eccentric commentators and pressmen-all in some way attached to the caravan of flannelled fools who tirelessly cross the globe in the cause of a game that people like Christopher Martin-Jenkins happen to think is the best and most sophisticated yet devised by man.