It is now a cliché – perhaps always has been – to refer to cricket as a rich quarry for artistic achievement, even as mainstream coverage becomes less fixated on the written word and more concerned with the most digestible highlights packages. That it is a fecund field is not wrong, but anyone with aspirations to write about the game, to attempt to wash the feet of a Cardus or a CLR James, must endure the gauntlet laid down by such a platitude.
As an answer to the question of why cricket plays such a conducive role in creativity, Brendan Cooper’s Echoing Greens: How Cricket Shaped the English Imagination supplies a cogent origin story. In probing the aesthetics, values and patriotism behind the sport, it is an account that distils precisely how societal change in this country has manifested itself in cricket – and vice versa.
A diptych of sorts supplies the initial thrust of Cooper’s beliefs about how the English conceive of their cricket. WG Grace and Ian Botham’s recognisable, hulking figures still loom large over the sport in this country and the book, their shared capacity to embody intangible ‘Englishness’ a century or so apart as striking as the ‘antics’ involved in their respective mythologies. These are complicated characters, and their symbolic presence at the top of the order sets up what follows.
Do not let the Blakean title confuse you, then, with its inherent innocence – this is not necessarily a ‘green and pleasant land’, all sun-drenched, leafy grounds, children at play and dressed in immaculate whites. Cricket itself has a definitively seedy underbelly too, subversive motifs that crop up time and time again, including the sexual innuendoes hidden beneath the sport’s earliest poetic mentions, its role as a vehicle for gambling by dubious aristocratic patrons, and the perennial class struggles that played out on and off the pitch.
Beginning his thousand-year-long scrutiny, Cooper’s attention tends to focus primarily on the literature and art produced with cricket as its subject, flitting from its medieval origins through a period of unrivalled popularity during the 18th and 19th centuries to the globalised sport we know today. What is clear from the get-go is his mastery of the source material – from the examinations of pitchscapes, early photographs and paintings from the MCC collections through to the analysis of Romantic poets’ rural reveries and Dickens’ comic match report on Dingly Dell CC vs. All-Muggleton in The Pickwick Papers.
Cooper possesses an exquisite touch – he manages to engineer compelling links from the wellspring of cricket references to the talking points of today. For example, his ability to link the grotesque, padded-up figures and studies of Francis Bacon, produced in the early 1980s, to the isolating, psychological trauma that professional cricketers are often prone to is as affecting as it is compelling.
Perceptive insights such as those make it an arresting read. Though I profess no particular interest in the cue sport, Cooper’s debut Deep Pockets: Snooker and the Meaning of Life (2023) could be one solution to the long wait until the forthcoming Ball of the Century: How One Delivery Changed Cricket (one assumes a study of the late, great Shane Warne’s brilliance?!) is released next May.
Zeb Baker-Smith is a Classics teacher based in Malawi, a freelance journalist and Books Editor at Aspects of History.
