The titans who shaped Test cricket

Spectator

a day ago

Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all probably being John Major's weighty tome, which said everything you knew it would say as drearily as you feared. So Tim Wigmore, a young shaver who writes on cricket for the Daily Telegraph, has entered hazardous territory. Speaking as a proud cricket badger, who even has a book by Merv Hughes on his shelf (Dear Merv, 2001), I will admit that I have read rather too many cricket histories, and I swore that it would be a cold day in hell (or possibly at the county ground in Derby) before I would willingly start another. But Wigmore has written a splendid, comprehensive book full of good stories and droll asides. It dips a little in the middle when Shoaib Mohammad starts batting, and keeps on batting, but what book of 578 pages does not? (Shoaib, who retired in 1995, is still batting in his dreams and my nightmares, and has just played an immaculate forward defensive down to silly mid-off.)
In fact Test Cricket is as sparkling and entertaining as any book this long has a right to be. Wigmore has taken as his subject the pinnacle of the game, possibly the pinnacle of any game in the world, the Test match – played over (once) three and (now) five days between no more than a dozen nations (or collections of nations) whose first-class structures justify their hallowed status. So there are no Test matches between Brazil and Argentina – nor are there likely to be until there are first-class stadiums in both countries where regional teams play two-innings matches in whites, with lunch at 1 p.m. and tea at 3.40 p.m. Pork pies would need to be sold locally and everyone would run indoors at the merest sniff of rain or bad light.
No, this book starts off with the old rivalry between England and Australia in the 1870s; adds South Africa a quarter of a century later; and then the West Indies and New Zealand on the same day in the 1930s. England fielded two separate XIs against these two teams for their first Tests – an experiment they have never been strong enough to repeat. (Australia often put out two teams in one-day internationals in the 1980s and 1990s, both of which would then beat England, which wasn't that hard at the time.)
Wigmore supplies a clean and focused narrative structure. 'Within the space constraints,' he writes, 'I have been led by a sense of Test cricket's overarching story, paying particular attention to players who helped shape the game.' This means a lot of pages are devoted to people such as Abdul Kardar and Tiger Pataudi, while 'titans in less successful or declining sides', like Graham Gooch and Shivarine Chanderpaul, get far fewer. I have no trouble with any of this, although the lack of mention of my own favourite cricketer, Derek Randall, who scored an epic 174 in the centenary Test match in 1977, is obviously shameful.
Wigmore has an eye for the telling detail. In a passage on the Australian batsman Victor Trumper, inspired by the photograph of him leaping out of his crease to drill a half-volley back over the bowler's head, we hear that in 1902 Trumper became the first batsman to score a century before lunch on the first morning of a Test match. This was something only five batsmen from any country have done since. I also didn't know that Trumper was the first man to popularise wearing the same national cap at every Test. 'The lore of the baggy green cap, then, is also the lore of Trumper.'
Between 1895 and 1904, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji scored 21,576 first-class runs at an average of 60.94. Then he became the Maharajah Jam Sahib of Nawanagar and had to stop batting for Sussex and England. In 1929, Ranji's nephew Duleepsinhji took part in one Test against South Africa, the only occasion in that country's first 172 Tests, until their readmittance to Test cricket in 1992, that they played against someone who didn't have white skin. South Africa, and their supporters in the MCC, don't come out too well from this book.
When an Australian Services XI played the first of five matches against an England XI at Lord's in 1945 tickets cost a flat one shilling (five new pence) anywhere in the ground. That's as opposed to the £160 a friend of mine paid recently for one of this summer's Tests.
At less than a fifth of the cost, this book represents a serious bargain. It's not quite as good as seeing Joe Root score 100 in the flesh, but it's not far off.