A FIELD OF TENTS AND WAVING COLOURS

Neville Cardus writing on Cricket

Introduction by Gideon Haigh

NEW PAPERBACK EDITION

WithThe Great Romantic, Duncan Hamilton’s acclaimed biography of the greatest cricket writer of all, winning the 2019 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, what better way to see for oneself why Neville Cardus deserves his life story to be told than by reading the only collection of all his best writing on cricket in one volume?.

Now in paperback, here is all his finest, most evocative, most memorable writing on the game; Cardus on Don Bradman, Victor Trumper, Denis Compton and Richie Benaud, at Roses matches and the arcadian cricket festival at Dover beneath Shakespeare Cliff, seeing the Australians defeated at Eastbourne – and of course at the home of cricket, Lord’s. Even if there may not be much actual cricket played this summer, here is the best way to place oneself, at least imaginatively, on a deckchair on the boundary.

Neville Cardus wrote about cricket for many years in the then Manchester Guardian, or which he was also chief music critic. His best-loved books include Good Days and Days in the Sun. He died in 1975.

Gideon Haigh has been described as ‘our greatest living cricket writer’. His books include Mystery Spinner and The Big Ship.

March 2021
ISBN 978 1 9160453 6 1
224pp
198 x 129 mm
paperback

‘Thoughtfully arranged, and covering a span from the honeymoon 1920s to the often grumpy-old-man 60s and 70s, it includes many of Cardus’s greatest hits… These and other pieces nicely complement Duncan Hamilton’s new biography of Cardus’, David Kynaston, Guardian

‘The perfect read on a summer’s afternoon in the garden, or, better still, on the boundary’, The Cricketer

‘A lovely companion [to Duncan Hamilton’s biography] in a charming jacket with an excellent introduction by Gideon Haigh,’ John Hotten, Wisden Cricket Monthly

‘A handsome introduction to Cardus… In the years ahead, when our cricket is given increasingly to the T20 thrash and something called The Hundred, we shall revisit Cardus to restore our spirits, and very possibly to revive our souls’, Michael Henderson, The Critic