The great game

Some of the best writing about sport in recent years has been done by journalists who tend their soil, so to speak, in another parish. Peter Oborne’s biography of the Cape Town-born England cricketer Basil D’Oliveira was a deserved prize-winner, and another political scribe, Leo McKinstry, has done justice to Geoffrey Boycott, the Charlton brothers and Sir Alf Ramsey. Now he has turned his attention to a batsman whose career, measured in statistics, goes a long way to justifying the subtitle of this latest book, ‘England’s Greatest Cricketer’.

Born in a modest Cambridge home, admired by all who played with him for his decency as well as his skill at the crease, Hobbs was the first professional cricketer to be knighted. McKinstry quotes the journalist and broadcaster, John Arlott, who established the Master’s Club in his honour, saying that Hobbs ‘wore the knighthood with the dignity of a prince’. It is a world away from our age, when people take honours for granted.