A jaunty history

Simon Hughes, according to his blurb writer, has written "the real history of this most English of sports". I spent ages looking for the right adjective for Hughes' style.

Mock-humorous? "Later CB Fry also developed a fascination with the Nazis and once spent an hour chatting to Hitler, trying, and failing, to persuade him to form a cricket team. He spent so long explaining the lbw law that it drove Germany into invading Poland. The Second World War was all CB Fry's fault!" Well, perhaps not.

A flippant style, then? "All in all the turn of the century was an eventful period. Three weeks into it Queen Victoria died, aged 81 (probably of boredom from reading Ranji's book), the whole nation was in mourning after her 63 years' sitting on the throne (she must have had terrible constipation)... "

A bathetic style, let us say? "In the region of 750,000 British men lost their lives in the those four brutal years, and, naturally, the nation was a pretty sombre place for a time, although as there were now three females for every one male the blokes were on a pretty flat track." No, I decided, the word was jaunty.

And the problem with jauntiness, as any stand-up comedian will tell you, is that, like a sequence of fast yorkers, it cannot be indefinitely kept up. At least half-a-dozen times in And God Created Cricket - in its discussion of the Bodyline tour, say, or its analysis of Bradman's legacy to the game - you get the feeling that the whole thing is becoming a bit of a strain and that Hughes is only a paragraph or two away from some straightforward cricketing history. The moment soon passes, though, the wisecracking resumes and the reader grows habituated to the sight of anything remotely serious being brought, winded, to the ground with such chance hilarities as: "In early 1900 the Labour Party came into being, to flex the growing muscle of the unions, women were being liberated from housework to meet at Starbucks for a skinny latte... "

This is a pity, for when he touches on something that really interests him, Hughes in full flow can be a bracing experience. The bits about the cack-handedness of the cricketing establishment and the gentleman/player divide, and the pen-portraits of Tich Freeman and SF Barnes, who, once he was coaxed out of the Lancashire League, took wickets for England at an average of 16.43, could almost come from a different book. The comedy hoop-jumping is set aside for a moment and the reader sits up.

Hughes, who has provided a zealous update to include the recent Ashes series, is not the first with an eye for the selective quotation. No doubt the tyrannical Lord Hawke, one-time boss of both Yorkshire and England, deserves every brickbat thrown at him, and certainly he did remark, "Pray God no professional may ever captain England." But he added the qualification: "I love professionals, every one of them, but we have always had an amateur skipper." Curiously, the idea that the best teams were those in which gentlemanly nous was employed to sand down the professional grit was shared by many professionals. As Fred Trueman put it, "the independence of the amateur who was prepared to speak up for his team... was the best combination we ever had".

One day someone may very well write the "real history" of the game, but this, despite many a good story and a fair amount of lightly worn research, is not it.

And God Created Cricket
by Simon Hughes
Doubleday, 2009
312 pp, £20