Spirit of the game distilled by golden memories

Mike Atherton doesn't think cricket occupies a higher moral plane to other games. Nothing in its history suggests that it does. In his column in the Times, Atherton attempts to articulate what the game means to him, and begins by describing two images that first come to mind.

When Patrick Eagar was on a “booze cruise” during the tour to the West Indies in 1974, he passed Accra beach, Barbados, as the sun was setting and saw a game being played with, as it turned out, a young Gordon Greenidge.

The other image is of three urchins playing a game of street cricket in Mumps, Oldham, with a dustbin for the wicket and the narrow, cobbled street for a pitch. It suggests that cricket was once, more so than it is now, an essential part of the fabric of the British way of life.