Word: crickets
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Admiring the "good grammar" of a cricket player's batting, the Manchester Guardian's scholarly Neville Cardus once called the batsman, a Lancashireman named Watson, "the [Samuel] Johnson of cricket." Demanded outraged Cricketer Watson: "Who did this bloke Johnson play...
Players are often baffled by the allusions that Neville Cardus, who usually lugs a good book along to the cricket field, chips into his cameo-chiseled reports on Britain's national game. Slight, myopic Cardus is probably the world's only cricket critic who also doubles in brass and woodwinds as a music reviewer. For 30 years, in covering his "strange dichotomy," first for the Guardian and now for the Kemsley newspapers (the Sunday Times, the Sunday Chronicle), Cardus has played a deft prose symphony of his own that weaves through both his fields the tonal majesty...
Fresh Flavors. In one of the book's 45 essays, Cardus compares Dr. W. G. Grace, the bearded, burly Babe Ruth of cricket who scored 54,986 runs in 43 years, to Prime Minister Gladstone, Violinist Fritz Kreisler, Bach and Falstaff; he surmises that even the champion's name was foreordained ("Could Grace conceivably have [played like] Grace, known as W. G. Blenkinsop...
...Frank Woolley of Kent, another of the game's immortals, Cardus writes: "His cricket is compounded of soft airs and fresh flavors. The bloom of the year is on it [and] the very brevity of summer is in it ... Woolley, so the statisticians tell us, often plays a long innings. But time's a cheat . . . The brevity in Woolley's batting is a thing of pulse and spirit, not to be checked by clocks, but only to be apprehended by imagination. He is always about to lose his wicket; his runs are thin-spun ... An innings...
...Melbourne ... we play a game . . . which makes all the other football codes look as interesting and as fast as cricket appears to Americans. The game is known as Australian Rules Football ... In the city of Melbourne, an average of 130,000 people travel to league and association club matches every Saturday during the winter months . . . The game features the best attributes of soccer, rugby and gridiron football, and it eliminates the disadvantages of the latter in that it is only on rare occasions that anyone is hurt. Long kicks, high marks (catches) and accurate, speedy passing of the ball...