As a fully paid-up, old-school cricket tragic, I astound myself that I have read almost no Neville Cardus. How can that be? He was, in his lifetime, the doyen of cricket writers, mainly because he effectively invented the form. Before he started writing for the Manchester Guardian in 1919, cricket journalists reported the score and little else. And what little else, you could probably have done without. As Duncan Hamilton says in his biography:
Before Cardus, there were cricket writers who still called the ball ‘the crimson rambler’, referred to the wicketkeeper as ‘the custodian of the gauntlets’ and saw the ball speed ‘across the greensward’, as though the vocabulary of Merrie Olde England had never gone away.
Cardus swept all that aside. He was only marginally interested in the score, and statistics held no appeal for him at all. He wrote about the often deeply eccentric characters who played this weirdest of games, about the weather, about his surroundings, about all the things that, less than 100 years later, make Test Match Special special.
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