A Somerset collection

When David Foot was growing up in cider country, his grandfather offered him some well-meaning but spectacularly bad advice, telling him to become a car mechanic. It is as well for those who have kept up with cricket in the West Country through his pen, to say nothing of his colleagues in the press box, that this did not come to pass. He and Ivan Ponting, who has provided the statistics and photographs, have compiled a delightful account of all the cricketers who have played for Somerset since the war, which amounts to a collection of great names, seasoned professionals and oddballs.

We know - not least thanks to Foot - much about Gimblett, Botham and Richards, so inevitably the eye is drawn to the son of the Manse, the schoolmaster who arrived at Taunton at the end of term and, not least, to "the cherished coterie of honest journeymen". Bertie Buse, whose benefit match at Bath was over in a day, was "prim and punctilious, as you would expect from someone who worked behind a ledger in a solicitor's office. There was rather too much posterior ... "

As befitting one who grew up watching his cricket at Yeovil and Weston-Super-Mare rather than the big city Test grounds, Foot empathises with men such as these. Who now remembers Horace Hazell? He was Foot's boyhood hero, a slow bowler who admitted, "I couldn't spin the bloody ball, my fingers weren't big enough," a man who passed the time of day in winter by not getting out of bed before noon.

Jake Seamer, son of a Somerset clergyman, "had a beaky ecclesiastical look" and, alas, could play only when on leave from the Sudan Political Service. There are telling vignettes from other exceptional west country cricket writers, Raymond Robertson-Glasgow and Alan Gibson, a foreword by Marcus Trescothick, whose affection for Taunton shines through, and the best XIs of their time selected by, among others, Ian Botham. This is not a county history, so the frictions of 1986, culminating in that momentous meeting at Shepton Mallet, are not dealt with to any great extent. That must wait for the day when Stephen Chalke, the publisher, persuades Foot to write a biography of Peter Roebuck. For the time being this provides an insight into those feckless years before the stars arrived, and their legacy.