John Arlott's Book of Cricketers

This is a personal book. The various essays represent the main pleasures of the cricket watching in one man’s lifetime. It is not a ranking of great players – though some of them are, or were, great – but a collection of the cricketers most enjoyed by one spectator.

In this book John Arlott has gathered together studies made over many years, describing and recording the play of twenty-five favourite cricketers. World players and county players, batsmen and bowlers, wicket-keepers and fields men, they make up a fine gallery which ranges from ‘The Master’, a cricket immortal, to a good-humoured player chosen as twelfth man time after time, from a great bowler whose triumph was cut short after only five years, to a batsman retiring full of honours at the close of a long career.

Some of these portraits are brand new, up to the minute: others go back a quarter century or more as John Arlott recalls the joy of matches before the war. Not confined to descriptions of talent and skill displayed on the field, they record also the friendships of the pavilion and the humour of the dressing room.

Here is a lifetime’s record of a game which has been the author’s study and unending source of pleasure. This is a book informed with long experience and remembered light.