Fields of dreams from the sky

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Whereas football is gradually selling its soul with clubs leaving their famous old homes and moving into purpose-built, well-appointed and usually utterly sterile new stadiums, many cricket grounds in England have, like the game itself, largely retained their slightly tatty look and feel.

Anyone who regularly attends first-class matches will know no two venues are remotely similar. They range from the state-of-the-art, such as Lord's, to the run-down charm of Hove. Pavilions, the heart of most venues, can be gloriously Victorian, but equally there are the appallingly functional. Seating can be a plastic bucket, a deckchair or even a grass bank. And even the areas outside can vary hugely, from open fields to housing estates.

It is because of the variety that this book works. At the heart are the photographs, taken by former police helicopter pilot Ian Hay, which are quite stunning. I found it fascinating to see grounds from an entirely unfamiliar perspective - it's remarkable what a wide variety of shapes and sizes the outfields are. I had always assumed them to be fairly round, but they turned out to be anything but.

The authors have wisely not limited their scope to the main county homes but have included some of the lesser-used outgrounds - a reminder that the roots of the first-class game are very much in club cricket, even if the number of out-matches is a fraction of what it once was.

Even the newly built venues, such as Riverside and the Rose Bowl, have their own charm. Possibly the exception to the rule is the redeveloped Sophia Gardens (or the Swalec Stadium as the marketing men would have you believe), which has all the appeal of a League-Two football ground.

There are well-written, concise histories of each venue, and each county has a short famous-profiles section. But what really makes the book are the anecdotes from the players, ranging from 98-year-old Cyril Perkins to the current England captain Andrew Strauss. Angus Fraser, now director of cricket at Middlesex, admits to being smuggled into the pavilion at Lord's on his first visit as a child, while Alec Bedser recalls the first match at The Oval after the war, in which the teams agreed not to appeal for lbws.

Geoffrey Boycott's excellent introduction concentrates on a ground that is no more - Sheffield's Bramall Lane - and for those who believe he is not that sentimental, he admits that when they closed the ground in 1973 he bought some of the turf and planted it in his mother's garden.

Progress, higher expectations from the public, and the need to cram in more corporate facilities means if this project is repeated in a generation's time then the major venues will undoubtedly have lost more chunks of their soul. You only have to see what the ICC did in the Caribbean ahead of the 2007 World Cup to realise how easily history can be jettisoned for profit. But for now, savour what is on offer.

Cricket Grounds From The Air
by Zaki Cooper and Daniel Lightman
Myraid, 2009
£20