The grand laureate

Among those who have written engagingly on the game are political firebrands, university lecturers, anthropologists, historians, poets, novelists, playwrights, prime ministers and Nobel laureates. Each of them is better known for his work outside of cricket, yet each has written about the game with a passion and knowledge that has enriched the canon.

The travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse has written two books on cricket that will outlive much written by professional hacks and players keen to spill the beans. The second of these, called simply Lord's, was published a quarter of a century ago. It is about a ground and a time, a people and their attitudes. It is about the small things like the amount of food and drinks consumed and the way crowds are managed. It bids to be about cricket itself, as the story moves outward in ever-widening circles.

By then Moorhouse, the first European to cross the Sahara solo on a camel and write about it, had already written about the Benedictine monks in their monastery, Calcutta, and the foreign service. Other cities and other journeys, and one other book on sport (a history of rugby league) lay in the future.

There was, too, a classic on cricket, The Best Loved Game, where Moorhouse's finely honed skill to go from the particular to the general found expression in a series of essays which rank as some of the best written. Moorhouse is the writer many consider to have inherited Cardus' mantle, but he is wider, better read, has travelled more, and his style has some of the best of the master without any of the worst, like the maudlin sentimentality or overblown descriptions.

The year was 1978; Kerry Packer threatened to change the face of the game. It was a game Moorhouse loved, and he thought it would be the last opportunity to paint it in colours he knew, capturing its richness and variety one last time before it changed forever.

"I went as a cricket watcher who can rarely find time to see more than a single day's play, not as a cricket reporter who covers games in full," says Moorhouse in his introduction to The Best Loved Game. What he does not say is that this is a book by a cricket writer, as opposed to one by a cricket reporter, and therefore the accent is on character, atmosphere, history and possibilities rather than on no-balls scored off or the season's averages.

It begins with the season opener at Lord's between MCC and Middlesex, winds its way through a University match, the Rose match, the England-Pakistan Test, a village championship, the minor counties fixture, Eton v Harrow, a Cup final, and so on, investing each encounter with a significance that is both historical and contemporary, and placing each in the context of the season as a whole. The portraits are a joy. Of Mike Brearley he writes, "He still conveys the eccentric under that strange, protective headgear of his, as though he had absent-mindedly put his cap on when already wearing something else."

Moorhouse is sharp enough to notice that Wisden did not carry an obituary of Paul Gibb, who died the previous year. When the young David Gower walks in to bat against Pakistan he describes him thus, "He is slim, he has a froth of curly blond hair that his mother must still adore, and I have a sneaking suspicion that he calls everyone else on the England side 'Sir'."

He recognises Keith Miller watching the Eton match from the Tavern, and sees no hint that anyone else has. "There is first-class cricket at The Oval, but the incomparable Miller has chosen to be at Lord's to watch a bunch of schoolboys play." Like the best writing, that says as much about the writer as about his subject.

The cricket watcher notices things, like elderly ladies at the ground warning Derek Randall to be careful about catching a cold; the cricket writer, as in Lord's, immerses himself in research. He tells us about the clay content in the wicket, about the number of meat pies, doughnuts and strawberries that will be eaten, or facilities in the Long Room. He does not shy from delineating Pelham Warner's role in Bodyline as an "outstanding example of that humbug which too often in the past coated the English cricketing establishment".

When you write just two books on the game, it helps if you love cricket enough to be both honest and passionate and pour that honesty and passion into your efforts. Moorhouse, born in 1931, has been called the "grand laureate of the game" by Frank Keating. It is appropriate.