Robert Chesshyre
The Whole 22 Yards
Jack Hobbs: England’s Greatest Cricketer
By Leo McKinstry
Yellow Jersey Press 401pp £20 order from our bookshop
Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers
By Amol Rajan
Yellow Jersey Press 379pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
It is almost impossible for a modern cricket follower to comprehend the impact that cricket and its star players had in England between the wars. The sport was an obsession, the one game that bound all classes together, and was played ubiquitously with the enthusiasm found now only in the subcontinent. As men and boys bat and bowl on every scrap of open ground from Sri Lanka to the Himalayas, so, then, English children chalked stumps on city lampposts and men rushed from work to read the county scores in their evening papers.
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