The cricket fiction of Sassoon and De Sélincourt isn’t in a ‘bucolic dreamworld’ | Sport and leisure books

Your leader (The Guardian view on sporting fair play: it was never quite cricket, 30 July) recycles the persistent caricature of Siegfried Sassoon’s, Hugh de Sélincourt’s and AG Macdonell’s cricket fiction as existing in a “bucolic dreamworld”.

Sassoon’s The Flower Show Match is set against the background of the Boer war, with recurring references to the relief of Ladysmith. The home umpire is also suspected of using his wooden leg to make dents in the pitch.

In De Sélincourt’s The Cricket Match, a war profiteer has felled the fir trees surrounding the Tillingford ground to have them sawn into pit props. The club is struggling to recover from the war, and there’s a feeling of “melancholy certainty that each season must surely be the last”. There are passing references to the Russian Revolution, and the hope expressed by the lady of the manor that village cricket will ease class antagonism is contradicted by the contempt the team’s fast bowler, a labourer, feels for her public-school son who also plays for Tillingford.

Macdonell’s England, Their England is pervaded with the after-effects of the first world war. Its Scottish protagonist who is inquiring into the vaunted English principle of “team spirit” said to characterise the national game is none the wiser after a day spent with a motley team of metropolitan writers and publishers playing away in a Kent village.
Rod Edmond
Author of Cricket, Fiction and Nation