Contents
Introduction
Fiction about cricket, more generally, fiction about sport, is not an overpopulated field. Perhaps it is the case that the public nature of professional sport removes any need for a fictional version, which will mostly serve only to reproduce dramas that actually happened. Of course there have been many attempts.
Frank Keating, late of the Guardian, considered Mike (actually two school stories, Mike at Wrykyn, Mike and Psmith) by P. G. Wodehouse, to the best of these. I recall reading a cricket-themed crime novel called Testkill co-written by former Test Captain and England Selector, Ted Dexter in 1976. In 2010, along came an outlier; Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, was a novel by Shehan Karunatilaka, about a Sri Lankan cricketer who developed an unplayable delivery but whose existence has been erased from history. This was hailed by reviewers as the first serious cricket novel ever, it won the Commonwealth Book Prize and was the only fictional work in Wisden’s 2019 listing of the best seven cricket books ever. Karunatilaka’s second novel won the 2022 Booker Prize.
Before Chinaman, though, the cricket novel that was most often considered to possess genuine literary merit was The Cricket Match by Hugh de Sélincourt written in 1924. I recently read that no less an authority than John Arlott considered it, along with Nyren’s Cricketers of My Time and CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary, to be one of the three finest cricket books. This book has been on my shelves for about fifty years, but when I read that, I decided the time had come actually engage with it. Having done so, these are my thoughts.
The Author
Hugh De Sélincourt was born in Hampstead, North London. His parents were Charles Alexandre De Sélincourt and Theodora Bruce Bendall. He was the youngest son of 11 children and studied at Dulwich College before going on to University College, Oxford. During the 1910s, he worked as a journalist, initially as drama critic of the Star and later as literary critic of the Observer. He continued to write book reviews for the Observer long after quitting his official post in 1914. He had also published a few light-hearted novels – the first of these, A Boy’s Marriage, came out in 1907.
He was a keen cricketer with his village club and this was to provide material for his most important writing. In 1924, The Cricket Match was published, located in the fictional village of Tillingfold and based on his own village of Storrington at the foot of the South Downs. It was this book that was to ensure his lasting fame in an otherwise pedestrian writing career.
Sequels to The Cricket Match, The Saturday Match (1937) and Gauvinier Takes to Bowls (1948) were among de Selincourt’s final books. He died in his home in Pulborough, Sussex at the age of 72. His widow Janet, died in 1955.
The text
The text is now out of copyright, so I am pleased to be able to present it in HTML version here.
If you would prefer to read, download or print a pdf version, you can do so from here.
Editions
The Cricket Match has rarely been out of print since publication.